by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Ignore the Anglo-American propaganda now circulating from Kiev that Russia’s military  has suffered a grave  military defeat in the Sahara desert, when Tuareg (Touareg) forces destroyed a Russian Wagner unit and Malian government forces in five days of battle at Tinzaouaten, on the desert border between Algeria and Mali.

“Russia’s Wagner Group has suffered significant battleground losses in Mali,” the Financial Times, a Japanese-owned propaganda agency in London, claimed in reporting from Kiev and Lagos (Nigeria).  “Graphic videos posted on Russian Telegram channels showed a sandy landscape strewn with dozens of bodies, some wearing Russian Orthodox crosses, and multiple burnt-out vehicles…Some pro-Kremlin military commentators have blamed the failure of the Mali operation on the clean-up imposed on Wagner after Prigozhin led an uprising against the Russian defence ministry last year. He died with several other Wagner leaders in a plane crash believed to be a Kremlin-directed assassination.”

The Guardian reported the source for a similar story to be an official of the Ukrainian military intelligence service (GUR) in Kiev.  Videoclips of the battle published on the internet carry advertisements for the Ukraine regime and appeals for donations.  

This is what the US, French and British propaganda agencies and intelligence services want readers, especially African and Arab readers, to think.

What has really happened is a different story. This is already surfacing in the Moscow press because the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and intelligence services want it understood that the Wagner men lost their lives at Tinzaouaten last week following a series of military mistakes driven by a strategic miscalculation which flies in the face of years of Russian diplomatic effort in the region. In a word, don’t fight the Tuaregs on their ground – negotiate with them instead.  

“We are against any unilateral steps,” the Russian Foreign Ministry’s last official statement on armed conflicts in the Sahara had declared in 2021.  At the same time, the Ministry made the distinction between Islamic terrorism and anti-colonial national liberation movements. “We are assisting the G5 Sahel [Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger]…We are supplying these countries with the necessary armaments enabling them to strengthen their potential to eradicate the terrorist threat. We regularly train servicemen from those countries in the Russian Federation; we train peacekeepers and law enforcement officers at our Defence Ministry’s educational establishments…According to the available facts, our Western colleagues are not too enthusiastic about this.”

Tipping in favour of the Malian government like this has meant a negative Russian attitude towards the Tuaregs. Nonetheless, “the Tuaregs have lived there forever,” a Moscow reporter close to military intelligence reported this week. “Previous advances of the Wagner units in the liberation of Kidal and other areas of northern Mali do not cancel the fact that the Tuaregs are there in their thousands,  and this is their desert.”  

Marc Eichinger, a French expert on the region who has been based for seven years in neighbouring Niger, comments similarly: “You have Tuaregs from the same families on both sides and they hate the foreigners no matter who they are. They have a perfect knowledge of the landscape and it’s a big mistake to chase them in the desert. The French are happy not to be involved any more. You need much bigger means to fight them and if they feel at risk they just wait until the foreign army goes away.”  

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 31st, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

On Mount Olympus, the ancient Greek one, there was no god of Hypocrisy. That’s because all of the gods were, starting with Zeus himself, the king of the gods.

It is the same in Paris,  as the organiser of the state ceremony of the Olympic Games has claimed  the performance of a caricature of the Christian Last Supper was a “big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus…a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.”  

 In Moscow, the Russian government was represented by Maria Zakharova, spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, who telegrammed that what the French had done was “the LGBT mockery of the holy scene for Christians – the Last Supper — the last supper of Christ. The apostles were portrayed by transvestites. Apparently, Paris decided that since the Olympic rings are multicoloured, everything can be turned into one continuous gay parade.” It was not the end of the world, the state representative added,  but the end of French civilization — “the bottom of the river Seine.”  

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by Editor - Sunday, July 28th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Combat losses of the Ukrainian armed forces along the front have accelerated to a current average of almost two thousand men a day, according to the Russian Defense Ministry’s daily  briefing and bulletin. The damage or loss of weapons is also growing fast.  

In the first week of July a year ago, the average daily number of Ukrainians killed in action (KIA) was 716. In the corresponding period of this month, the KIA level has jumped to an average of 1,948 — an increase of almost threefold. In the same week of 2023, the destruction or damage of US-made M777 artillery pieces was 8; in the first week of this month, the M77 loss number was 17. These loss rates for men and weapons have remained steady through this week.

The Ukrainians must assemble and deliver more fresh men and materiel to stave off defeat. The troops, artillery, tanks and other vehicles, plus ammunition, are delivered by train to railway stations along the front line. The Russian General Staff, headed by General Valery Gerasimov, knows the precise schedule of these trains, monitoring their departures and their speed in transit. They then prepare for their arrival at the front-line train stations where they are hit by a combination of missiles and glide bombs (FAB, Fugasnaya AviaBomba).  

This is the reality of the Russian summer offensive and Ukrainian counter-offensive without the political hype and propaganda.

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by Editor - Thursday, July 25th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

One of Germany’s most notorious prosecutions of free speech has collapsed, as the Berlin prosecutor’s office has dropped a case designed to stop Germans discussing the war against Russia in the Ukraine.

Heinrich Buecher, (lead  image, left) owner of the COOP Anti-war Café on Rochstrasse, has been prosecuted in a Berlin district court and then in the higher regional court for statements he had made in a city  park on June 22, 2022. On the anniversary of the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Buecher had declared: “Never again may we as Germans get involved in a war against Russia in any form. We need to unite and join to oppose this madness together.”

In the court proceedings which followed, the judges refused to allow Buecher to speak in his own defence. Instead, he published on the website of his café  a re-statement of what he had been convicted of saying in June 2022.    “As an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, I expressly oppose the policy of regime change, against wars of intervention and against any Interference in the internal affairs of independent states. I call on the German government to adopt a policy in the interest of International peace, in the interests of international security and peaceful coexistence of all peoples. The principles of the Charter of the United Nations must be respected and international law must be defended.”

“I call for all arms deliveries and training programs for the Ukraine stop immediately. I demand diplomacy instead of weapons. I call for all efforts of our government to negotiate and allow opponents of war without preconditions. The sacrifice of the Ukraine for the geopolitical interests of the West, namely the strategic weakening of Russia, is a monstrous war crime and must have an end.”

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There have always been Russians in the Kremlin who for reasons of imperialist or Orthodox ideology considered themselves exceptionalist in politics. That’s to say, as exceptional or more exceptional than the Americans in the White House.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev ruled Russia forty years ago, there have also been Russian exceptionalists who have wanted, not to compete with the Americans for the power to rule the world, but instead to be loved by the Americans and to be loved by them in return, so that they might share rule of the world together as equals.

The Roman imperial tetrarchy was a system of that kind. So were the husband-and-wife or mother-and-son monarchies of England and Europe in the late medieval period.

After the US coup d’état of December 1991 installed Boris Yeltsin to dismantle the Soviet Union and destroy Communist ideology and its system of domestic rule, the American-loving exceptionalists have continued to hold out in the Kremlin and elsewhere in the Russian organs of government, including the media. Not loving America enough has been reason for stopping  rising Russian careerists and censoring their media.

The only holdout strong enough to survive the Gorbachev-Yeltsin putsches and purges has been the Russian military. Because of its success in defeating NATO weapons on the Ukraine battlefield and winning the war against the US, its public approval and voter trust are almost as high as President Vladimir Putin’s.  And so, in due course, it will be the Army and the generals whose personal conduct of the war has given them heroic stature, who will decide on the succession to Putin when his present term expires in 2030 (he will be 78); or when the constitutional term limit is reached in 2036 (84).

In the politics of the Kremlin succession, this Army red is the counterforce to the Trump red of the America lovers. Red on red is the fight for rule in Russia, and rule of the world for the exceptionalists on both sides.

This makes for colour blindness and other forms of partisanship in the way the official Russian media discuss American politics, especially now. To understand how this works in Moscow, read this newly published essay in the semi-official security analysis internet platform, Vzglyad.

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by Editor - Monday, July 22nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Captain Obvious is an American cartoon hero. In Poland, however, he’s now being set up for prosecution on charges of treason for saying the obvious. That, according to the new Polish government and the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Mark Brzezinski, must not be allowed to be said.

Instead, the Polish Captain O has said that Poland cannot defend itself from a combined Russian-Belarusian attack, and cannot count on the United States and other NATO allies to save it in time.  

Although the Polish General Staff knows this, and so do Poland’s presidency, prime ministry and Sejm (parliament), the Warsaw directorate aims to pay the US, NATO allies, and South Korea more than thirty billion dollars in protection money for Polish, US and NATO readiness in defence of the impossible. From time to time, one of the fantasies of Polish officials is to draw US nuclear weapons on to Polish territory for premium insurance against the Russian invasion risk. President Andrzej Duda last said as much three months ago.

That Poland won’t survive a US-fired nuclear weapon from the Redzikowo base, northwest of Warsaw, is also obvious. Not allowing this to be said is the script, not of Captain Obvious (Kapitan Oczywiste) but of Captain Oblivious (Kapitan Nieświadomy).  

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by Editor - Monday, July 22nd, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There have been many revolutions in the technology and the geography of global cargo transportation. The Portuguese design of caravels to cross the Atlantic and Indian Oceans from the 15^th century; the replacement of wind with coal-fired steam in the shipping of the British empire which followed;  and the invention of the petroleum engine for automobiles and aircraft to replace horse and bullock-drawn road carts – these are well known.

The time taken for each revolution from invention to full-capacity operation was not less than one generation.  

The geographic switch of Russia’s export and import trade from west to east, and also from north to south – this too is a revolution in cargo logistics; its scale, speed,  and money cost have not been rivaled before. In Russian terms, it is faster than Joseph Stalin’s Five-Year schemes of industrialization from 1928 to 1942, and has not required force for implementation nor inflicted Stalin’s human casualties. For speed over time, the current Russian logistics revolution will take  five years.

It remains to be seen whether in requiring vast state spending and direct management this new Russian revolution will turn out to be the second nail in the coffin of the oligarch system created by Boris Yeltsin and preserved by Vladimir Putin (lead image). The first nail has been the US and NATO sanctions: they have cut the Russian oligarchs off from the international flow of funds they had designed to move their capital out of Russia, and keep it offshore, untaxed.  

President Putin’s peacetime scheme of deoffshoreization not only failed in returning the oligarchs’ capital, as the archive demonstrates.  It was designed to fail by the legal loopholes which the Kremlin authorized,  and by the capital decontrols managed by Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina  and her patron Alexei Kudrin, Putin’s longtime appointees.   

The transportation revolution now under way was not intended by those oligarchs who have controlled parts of the transportation system, including sea ports, airports, cargo terminals, rail rolling stock and networks, pipelines, road construction, truck and car manufacture, and the like. The story of the failure of the oligarchs to capture state shipping, despite Putin’s encouragement, isn’t yet recognized for the bellwether it is today, after the sanctions war has intensified. Read the book.   

The big picture of Russian cargo shift is plain to view. Less obvious are the bottlenecks in the transportation network, such as the rail lines and ports, and the fierce competition for access to the means of loading, unloading, and movement of cargo across Russia from one market to another. For every cargo bottleneck, the state is now obliged to decide between competing interests and to plan, then produce, the increased carrying capacities required for the lines  moving east and south instead of west and north.

In this newly published analysis of the bottleneck of containers, InfraNews, a leading Russian publication on all forms of transportation, reports what is happening and what is needed to solve the problems of container supply and demand in the short and long term. Note the tone of optimism that solutions will be found shortly, and the lack of political or economic ideology – liberal, corporatist, statist, communist — on how this will be managed.

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by Editor - Thursday, July 18th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Jewish and Christian bibles got the idea down pat.

“For this thing is from Israel,” said one of the writers whose compilation of warnings against worship of idols and competing gods is called the book of Hosea. “A craftsman made it, and it is not God. It will be broken to pieces, that calf of Samaria. For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” That warning comes from the late 8^th or early 7^th century BC.

Almost eight hundred years later, when Paul of Tarsus (aka Saint Paul) was writing his letter to the Galatian community of Christians, he warned: “A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.”

The Russian reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is a combination –  idol, whirlwind, sin, destruction, God, payoff — plus deep suspicion that either President Joseph Biden or Trump’s organization, or both of them, had a hand in fabricating what happened, plus conviction that they are now capitalizing on the outcome for all they are worth.

The official line was given by the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman on sowing the whirlwind. The Kremlin spokesman followed with the calf of Samaria.

“Yesterday,” wrote Maria Zakharova of the Foreign Ministry on Telegram,  “one of the leaders of the Kiev regime, [Kirill] Budanov, openly admitted that Ukrainian intelligence was preparing attempts on the President of Russia. So this attempt was being prepared, again, for American money, without which there would have been no malicious activity of the GUR, the SBU and, in general, Bankova [the presidential office ]. With massive financing and uncontrolled supply of weapons, Washington has created a terrorist structure in Ukraine – the Kiev regime. It is a machine of murders, bombings, exterminations, and terrorist attacks against both political figures and civilians…TheUnited States of America should take stock of its policy of inciting hatred against political opponents, countries and people, and sponsoring terrorism. The bell is already ringing for Washington!”

Dmitry Peskov for President Vladimir Putin said there is “no plan” for the latter to telephone Trump. He then implied the Biden plot by making a qualified denial. “We do not think and do not believe that the attempt to eliminate the presidential candidate Trump was organized by the current authorities, but the atmosphere that was created by this administration in the course of the political struggle, the atmosphere around the candidate Trump, it was that which provoked what today faced with America.”  

Peskov then tipped the Kremlin in Trump’s direction: “After numerous attempts to eliminate the Trump candidate from the political arena using first legal tools, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was obvious for his life to be in danger.”

The state news agency RIA-Novosti tipped even further for Trump. “The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is surprising only because it happened on July 13, and not earlier — a year, three or eight years ago. The upstart, who challenged not only most of the American establishment, but also the ‘Washington swamp’ as such, has risked his head very much all these years… It is clear that now the ‘swamp denizens’ are biting their elbows because they did not think to kill Trump before November 2016:  they underestimated the threat, did not believe in the reality of his victory.”  

Tsargrad, an internet platform of Russian exceptionalism and Orthodoxy, treats Trump as a Russian ally in the war against Biden.    “A bullet in Trump’s head is a blow to Russia: What remains behind the scenes of the assassination attempt on the ex-president of the United States — a real assassination attempt or a staging? The question, in fact, is not idle, especially in relation to Russia. After the appearance of an increasing number of details in the case of the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump, a lot of interesting things come up behind the scenes of the assassination attempt… This is the true face of hegemony and the unipolar world: anyone who is against globalism, who stands in its way, is first subject to demonization (through the tools of the abolition culture), then physical elimination…Globalists don’t care about the United States, just like everyone else. They need planetary power, the absolute power of supernational capital. And all countries, including America and Europe itself, are just tools in creating a World Government. Trump is for America and against the World Government. As Putin is for Russia, Xi Jinping is for China, Modi is for India, and Orban, Fico, Marine Le Pen and AfD are for Europe,”

The Russian military sources briefing Moscow’s military bloggers have focused on the evidence as it became available and avoided standing for or against Biden and Trump, making cracks about each of them. Boris Rozhin, director of the Colonel Cassad blog, concluded his series of reports through the Moscow night and into Sunday afternoon: “He [Trump] pulled his head just in time. If he had stayed in a static position like Biden, we’d be living in a slightly different world.”    Note the adverb.

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by Editor - Monday, July 15th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In the ancient and current doctrine of the law of culpability for killing, the Latin term mens rea  is required to be proved beyond reasonable doubt,  in parallel with proof of actus reus. In short, the intention in mind to kill (aka motive) must be in combination with the hands-on act of killing itself.

In the public media trial of the Russian military of guilt for the air raid which hit part of the Okhmatdet Children’s Hospital in Kiev on Monday morning, July 8, the US, NATO and Ukrainian charge is that a Russian missile struck the hospital and exploded, killing 27, and injuring 17 out of more than 1,200 patients and staff in the hospital at the time; 4 children have been counted among the dead, 7 among the wounded.  

The Russian military reports for the day, including Colonel Cassad by Boris Rozhin, indicated that the targets of the Russian missile strikes in the Kiev area were military industry plants and,  as part of the electric war,  at least three electric substations in the city grid.   DTEK, the Ukrainian power utility, has acknowledged in several tweets that its power stations had been hit and were being assessed by DTEK engineers for repair.   

Motive and intention to target the Artyom (Artem) military plant in Kiev   is officially acknowledged by  Russian officials. It is the third attack on the site reported by Ukrainian officials.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, the Okhmatdet hospital had been struck by a US-made, Norway-supplied NASAMS air defence missile, fired by a Ukrainian battery attempting to protect the Artyom (Artem) plant. “Many eyewitnesses and other sources have already confirmed that a Western-made NASAMS surface-to-air missile hit a building of the Okhmatdet Hospital for Children in Kiev. Officials on Bankovaya Street [Zelensky regime headquarters] immediately started blaming Russia for deliberately killing children. However, no one said that the Artyom Plant is located next to the affected clinic, and that Defense Ministry buildings and military warehouses are also located next door. Certainly, no one said that pro-Bandera supporters are deliberately deploying air defence systems in residential areas, using civilians as a human shield. The Kiev junta has been using purely civilian enterprises for military purposes for a long time, either using them to assemble and repair military equipment or to store Western-made weapons and military equipment.”  

The Russian representative at the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, currently rotational president of the UN Security Council, told a special council session that the strike on the hospital had been a Ukrainian one, not a Russian one.     He added:  “The X-101 missile would have done a lot more damage to the building it hit [Min 6:52]…if it had been a Russian missile, there would have been nothing left of the building and the children and most of the adults would have been killed rather than wounded [Min 8:20]” Like Zakharova, Nebenzya identified military industrial targets. The two Russian officials have not identified the electric war targets.

They are not lying; they are telling less than the full truth. When that is understood from all the available evidence, there is no mens rea. No conviction in a western court of law. The prosecution’s case is dismissed.

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by Editor - Thursday, July 11th, 2024
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The latest Russian Defense Ministry daily bulletin was issued on Tuesday afternoon, July 9.  Since then the Pentagon and the White House have been as silent as the tomb.

Make that thirty-five American tombs.

“During the day [July 9],” said the Defense Ministry briefer in Moscow,    “the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out a group strike with high-precision weapons on American HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems prepared for strikes on the territory of Crimea, as well as the venue of an official meeting of the AFU [Armed Forces of the Ukraine] command staff. The objectives of the strike have been achieved. Four US-made HIMARS MLRS launchers were destroyed, as well as up to 35 foreign specialists who serviced them.”

Several hours later, the Pentagon briefer, Major General Pat Ryder, announced “a great kickoff to NATO summit events this week.”  General Ryder wasn’t referring to the largest number of US battlefield deaths ever recorded under hostile Russian fire. He had nothing to say about the Ukraine battlefield action, and the reporters attending failed to ask him about it.

At the White House briefing which followed the Pentagon, the lead announcement was President Joseph Biden’s telephone calls to officials in Texas dealing with Hurricane Beryl; his plan to meet on Thursday with Vladimir Zelensky;  and an assurance that “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine poses a threat to transatlantic security. That’s what it does. And it shows how critical the NATO Alliance is and how important it is to continue to make sure that it is strong, and that’s what the president has been able to do.”  Reporters did not ask about US combat deaths in the Ukraine.

The New York Times also blacked out the report of the Russian strike on the HIMARS batteries, focusing instead on the Kiev targets of the day, and on claims by anonymous US intelligence and other officials that “Russia is unlikely to make significant territorial gains in Ukraine in the coming months as its poorly trained forces struggle to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions.”  

“You’d think in an election year,” comments a NATO veteran with Afghanistan war service,  “that dead American ‘specialists’ would be an issue. This tells that they [the Biden Administration] are as committed to ‘victory’, or hiding an American defeat, as their [Trump campaign] opponents are.  They are also loath to get into the role they played in getting things to this point.”

That said, what interpretation can President Vladimir Putin and the Russian General Staff give after the 35 US battlefield deaths have been concealed by US officials? Should Moscow conclude that it is now Washington policy to fight Russia, not just to the last Ukrainian, but to the last American?

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
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