by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Arab, Russian,  and international media are reporting the Israeli government has issued an ultimatum that if Hezbollah does not withdraw its army and arms from their positions in southern Lebanon, between the Litani River and the Blue Line (lead image), and redeploy north of the Litani,  Israel will launch an air and ground attack on the region of southern Lebanon,  and also on Beirut. The Israeli ultimatum reportedly sets a 48-hour time limit.

There is no official Israeli record of this ultimatum. In the non-Israeli press, it is attributed to remarks on local television made on Saturday night, December 9, by Israel’s National Security Advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi.  However, in the version reported by Times of Israel, Hanegbi did not set any time limit.  

Instead, Hanegbi claimed that “Hezbollah’s Radwan force could attempt a similar murderous invasion from the north, targeting civilians in communities near the border. Israel, he acknowledged, was tackling Hamas ‘17 years too late,’ and it could no longer dare to tolerate the danger of the prevailing situation in the north, with Hezbollah’s forces at the border. Some 60,000 residents of border communities have been evacuated from the north since October 7, amid relentless and sometimes deadly clashes across the border between Hezbollah and Israel. ‘Residents will not return if we don’t do the same thing’ in the north against Hezbollah as is being done in the south against Hamas…”   

 “‘We can no longer accept [Hezbollah’s] Radwan force sitting on the border. We can no longer accept Resolution 1701 not being implemented,’ he added, referring to a UN Security Council resolution from 2006, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, that barred any Hezbollah presence within almost 30 kilometres of the border with Israel.  Asked directly if there would be a war in the north, Hanegbi said: ‘The situation in the north must be changed. And it will change. If Hezbollah agrees to change things via diplomacy, very good. But I don’t believe it will.’ Therefore, he said, ‘when the day comes,’ Israel will have to act to ensure that residents of the north are no longer ‘displaced in their land, and to guarantee for them that the situation in the north has changed.’

“Hanegbi noted that while many countries have missiles pointed at Israel, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, ‘Israel doesn’t invade them’. The fear regarding Hezbollah’s Radwan force is that ‘within minutes’,  it could cross the border and begin a murderous rampage in northern communities as Hamas did in the south on October 7. Israel cannot tolerate this threat any longer, he said. Hanegbi said Israel does not want to fight simultaneously on two fronts, and indicated it would therefore tackle Hezbollah after Hamas is defeated. He said Israel has been  ‘making clear to the Americans that we are not interested in war [in the north], but that we will have no alternative but to impose a new reality’ if Hezbollah remains a threat.’”  

The Russian Foreign Ministry is reporting no reaction to these claims, nor any ministry contact in Moscow with a Lebanese government official. None of the mainstream Russian newspapers nor the media specializing on military and security affairs are reporting the remarks of Hanegbi  as a signal of imminent Israeli air and ground attack against Hezbollah.

The Russian reaction is that the Israelis are bluffing.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, December 12th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Not even in revolutionary times have Russian elections been waged on the issue President Vladimir Putin proposed a few days ago of what it means, what it costs, what it risks for Russia to lead the national liberation of the world.  

Nor has Putin revealed after two days of intensive talks with Emirati, Saudi, and Iranian leaders, and then a telephone call with the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, what plan of action for the Gaza war they discussed. “Russia is thinking about an initiative on Gaza,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian has announced after the talks concluded.   

El-Sisi was so negative about this, the Kremlin record of his Saturday morning telephone call reveals no more than that he and Putin talked over “a number of issues related to Russian-Egyptian cooperation, which has been developing very successfully. Both parties expressed their interest in further expanding cooperation in various areas in a traditionally friendly manner based on the principles of strategic partnership.” The two presidents then wished each other good luck for their re-elections.

The Egyptian presidential vote is running for three days from Sunday with the result to be declared on December 18; the Russian poll will be held on March 15-17. The outcome is certain for both.

Two hours after Putin put down the phone with el-Sisi, he picked it up again to call Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Kremlin communiqué has omitted to report what Netanyahu said.   

Instead, Putin gave the Israeli his personal assurance there will be no Russian participation in a Gaza blockade-busting plan to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinians by sea,   or across the Egyptian land border. Nor will the Russian military intervene to threaten Israeli aircraft if they commence bombing Beirut and southern  Lebanese targets in the war against Hezbollah.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, December 10th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

An Iranian-Russian initiative on the Gaza War was tabled when Iranian President Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi met with President Vladimir Putin for several hours on Thursday. For the time being the Kremlin is doing its best to hide it.

According to Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian,  speaking after Raisi had returned home, “a significant part of the negotiations focused on the Palestinian issue and Russia is thinking about an initiative on Gaza.  The two sides stressed the need for an immediate cessation of the war and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, he said, noting that the presidents of Iran and Russia also called for stopping the forced migration of Gazans and the immediate opening of the Rafah border to deliver massive humanitarian aid to Gazan people.”

There was a one-on-one session between Raisi and Putin at the commencement of the talks; a  session of the two presidents with  brief public statements; and then closed delegation presentations and a supper. Altogether, the talks lasted five hours. There were no press briefings at the conclusion.

There has been a blackout on the talks by Russian Defense Ministry, the military bloggers, and Moscow media like Vzglyad which has been taking a pro-Israel line.   No Russian official will clarify what Abdollahian meant by his claim that “Russia is thinking about an initiative on Gaza” – except to point out that Abdollahian’s wording does not mean that the “initiative” at this stage was initiated by the Russian side.  

Vedomosti reports that “Iran would like Russia to more actively express the pro-Palestinian position within the framework of public discourse, which would correspond to Iranian rhetoric. From the point of view of the North–South economy, of course, Tehran has a priority, it’s just that against the current background it, like any Muslim country, cannot demonstrate that it can have something more important than the situation in the Gaza Strip.”  

According to the Kremlin communiqué, Raisi told Putin “the events unfolding in Gaza” are “surely genocide and a crime against humanity. It is lamentable that more than 6,000 children have been killed by the hands of the Zionist regime. Even sadder is the fact that all these crimes have been supported by the United States and Western countries. What is even more regrettable is that international organisations and the human rights organisations have lost their effectiveness… One of the issues that I would like to discuss with you, Mr Putin, is Palestine, as well as the challenges faced by the oppressed but strong Palestinian people. According to statistics, one child dies every ten minutes. Bombing must be stopped as soon as possible. This is not a regional issue, but a global issue, and a solution should be found promptly.”

Putin replied by changing the subject.

“Mr President, I will definitely take you up on your invitation [to visit Iran]. And I should note that we will keep working almost through the end of the year. We have scheduled the signing of an agreement on creating a free trade area between Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union in late December. It will create additional opportunities for expanding our interaction.”  

The Kremlin has published the names of the Russian delegation accompanying Putin at the talks but refuses to disclose the names of their Iranian counterparts. “Wait for additional materials on our website”, the spokesman said.

Although Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was the second ranking member of the Russian side, Iranian sources confirm there was no military counterpart on their side.

Privately, Russian sources believe the two sides are discussing the protracted, long war strategy of Hamas and Hezbollah and the parallel engagement from Yemen and Iraq. They are also discussing ideas for breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza with massive humanitarian aid in which the Arab states and China are also engaged in the planning.

“The war has to be economic and infrastructure suffocation [of Israel],” a Moscow source says. “Yes, that’s the only way to beat the beast.”

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, December 8th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It has never happened before among the world’s diamond-producing and diamond-processing countries.

Meeting together last month in Zimbabwe in what is called the Kimberley Process (KP), the 57-member states  refused to agree to the US and European Union (EU) attempt to exclude Russia, producer of half the diamonds in global trade. To camouflage the outcome of the fight, the KP delegates decided not to issue a communiqué. Without that, the rules of the meeting nullified all points of agreement which the Kimberley Process states had accepted during their two-day sessions.

This dramatic collapse of the Kimberley Process happened in Harare on November 10. The disagreement and deadlock came over a letter from the Kiev regime, backed by the US, the EU,  Japan,  and Canada (the G7 member states) to impose a full ban on the trade in Russian diamonds. The Ukrainian attempt was backed by intense pressure from the US State Department and by Jewish diamantaires in New York for the international diamond trade to accept the US Diamond Protocol, a scheme of registration, inspection, auditing, and certification enforced by US intelligence and Treasury agents, to prevent any Russian-mined diamond from entering the international diamond jewellery market.

Instead, what has happened is that the global diamond industry has been cracked in half by the sanctions war. The defeat of the so-called “western bloc” in Zimbabwe is big news in Africa and India. It has not been reported in the New York and London financial press.

Diamonds are now likely to follow oil, gas, coal, gold, and other commodities into parallel and competing global market operations. In the diamond war, however, the outcome is also going to backfire on the Israeli diamond industry and the traditional Jewish centres in Antwerp, Belgium, and New York City, which have combined to take sides against Russia.  In time, they will be replaced by the Arabs, Indians, and perhaps the Chinese.  

The Israelis don’t think so. They are calculating that in the short run they will gain from the recovery of diamond prices when the shortage of Russian supplies hits much harder than it has to date. A source in Antwerp reports “absolutely no backlash [against the Gaza war] here from any of the five main diamond communities including the Lebanese. The Israeli industry has been declining for many years anyway, especially manufacturing – it’s uncompetitive with the Indians — but also trading. There is no diamantaire sympathy with any Arab country (or Iran). I hope and believe business rises above the political nonsense.”

The Kimberley Process, first created in 2003 to stop “blood diamonds” from entering the market from the genocidal wars of western Africa, is about to be confronted by blood diamonds from Israel.

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, December 7th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Between 1917 and right now in Russian history, it has been clear that the horse pulls the cart. That’s to say, the ideas people have, or the ideology of groups and the propaganda of media, churches, and governments are pulled along by their economic interests, by the class structure of the underlying society.

Not the horse in the picture. That’s the icon image, popularised in the Georgian Orthodox Church from the 11^th century, depicting St. George, patron saint of believers, spearing to death the Roman emperor Diocletian. Actually, Diocletian ruled the Roman empire from 284 until 305 AD, when he became the first emperor to resign voluntarily and retire harmlessly. Before that Diocletian, a professional soldier, did a lot of spearing of Gauls, Balkan tribesmen, and Persians, as well as Christians in Syria, before he decided to rusticate in his garden on the Adriatic.

The icon doesn’t represent what really happened. Long after Diocletian was forgotten, the icon has come to represent the victory of Orthodoxy over the anti-Christian empire. The icon image was mentioned last week by Andrei Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Defense Ministry and lead ideologist for the United Russia party, in a speech to the Patriarch and President Vladimir Putin. According to Ilnitsky, St George represents Russia,  and the spearing of Diocletian represents what Russia is doing to the US empire on the Ukrainian battlefield.

Now — most precisely at the World Russian People’s Council meeting in Moscow on November 28 — Ilnitsky, the Patriarch, and Putin are reversing the order of history. It’s now the cart of Russian ideology pulling the horse of Russian forces into battle with the Americans.

“They are fighting with us,” declared Ilnitsky,    “for the way people think, for the way they perceive the world. Right now we are fighting a civilisational war for the future. It is this war that we are waging on the battlefields of our own. We will win and revive ourselves by being reborn, or our identity will be wiped out. This is exactly what happened in the Ukraine for thirty years before the start of the SVO [Special Military Operation].”

Putin went further than spearing the emperor. “Our fight”, he declared, “for sovereignty and justice is, without exaggeration, one of national liberation, because we are upholding the security and well-being of our people, and our supreme historical right to be Russia – a strong independent power, a civilization state. It is our country, it is the Russian world that has blocked the way of those who aspired to world domination and exceptionalism, as it has happened many times in history. We are now fighting not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world.”  

This is the first time Putin has identified the doctrine of national liberation in ideological, economic, and in battlefield war against the US doctrine of hegemony and exceptionalism.

“We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit. We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others. This is now clear to the global majority. But again, it is our country that is now at the forefront of building a fairer world order. And I would like to stress this: without a sovereign and strong Russia, no lasting and stable international system is possible.”   

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, December 5th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Salting the earth, ploughing a toxic chemical into farmland so that no food can be harvested again, was the invention of Abimelech, one of the tribal leaders of the Jewish people after they had invaded Caanan to create the Israelite kingdom,  and after the Israelite tribes had begun fighting among themselves.

Abimelech’s salting of Shechem is about three thousand years old. The Israeli use of depleted uranium ordnance supplied by the US, which invented depleted uranium as a “terrain-denial” weapon in 1943, is right now. The objective is the same as the Book of Judges 9:45  tells the story – genocide by making the land occupied by the Palestinians uninhabitable for the future.

Listen to Gorilla Radio tell the story of what the Israeli-US war aim is – and where it comes from in Jewish history.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, December 3rd, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When President Vladimir Putin wrote a condolence on the death of Henry Kissinger (lead image) , according to the Kremlin communiqué, the president said things in private to Kissinger’s widow which he left unreported to the Russian press.   

The Kremlin communiqué says: “Condolences over the passing of Henry Kissinger. Vladimir Putin offered condolences over the passing of Henry Kissinger to his wife, Nancy Kissinger. The message reads, in part: An outstanding diplomat, a wise and far-sighted statesman who enjoyed well-deserved respect around the world for decades, has passed away. Henry Kissinger’s name is inextricably linked with America’s pragmatic foreign policy, which played a pivotal role in defusing international tensions at the time and achieving crucial Soviet-American agreements that contributed to strengthening global security. I had multiple opportunities to talk face-to-face with this profound and extraordinary man, and I will certainly cherish the warmest memories of him.”  

What the Russian intelligence services, General Staff, Foreign Ministry, and Russian historians  remember about Kissinger, and Putin’s relationship with him, has also not been reported. In the  official record of Putin’s communications with Kissinger, Putin himself has never acknowledged, let alone agreed with the official assessments of Kissinger by advisors led by Yevgeny Primakov, former KGB head, foreign minister, prime minister, and, like Kissinger,  of Jewish origin. They told Putin that Kissinger was an untrustworthy liar;  a violent schemer;  a hegemonic expansionist if he could get away with it – always dangerous for Russia’s security.  

(more…)

by Editor - Saturday, December 2nd, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Long before the British intelligence agency MI6  invented the story that Russian military agents had carried the nerve agent weapon Novichok into England, fired it at two Russians, and left it in a dustbin for a local scavenger to find, take home and kill his girlfriend, there was depleted uranium poisoning.

This is a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

In the past thirty years it has been used by the US, British, and Israeli armies in their wars against Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (Gaza), Serbia, and recently against the Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield. As a US invention, however, depleted uranium dispersal as a gas to contaminate terrain for enemy soldiers has been acknowledged in secret since 1943.   

In the official military manuals, depleted uranium rounds are used because their metal concentration and intense heat burn their way through armour plate. In practice, they vaporise high concentrations of radioactive particles to cover large swathes of territory, civilian and military.

The US Department of Homeland Security defines a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) as “a nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, or other device that is intended to harm a large number of people.” DU harms a relatively small number of soldiers on a battlefield operating in tanks, other armoured vehicles, self-propelled artillery and reinforced  bunkers. DU  strikes a much larger number of people through the release of radiation downwind of the battlefield by penetrating their bodies, attacking their genetic codes, and triggering cancers, birth defects, miscarriages of the unborn, and premature death of adults.  

According to Homeland Security, it “works every day to prevent terrorists and other threat actors from using these weapons to harm Americans.” But when the US supplies its DU weapons to the Israeli and Ukrainian armies, it intends to cause this mass destruction by not caring for the harm they do — in fact concealing this harm, and publicly pretending DU ordnance is not what it is.

DU is a WMD by stealth. The US knows this because US and British soldiers who participated in the first battlefield use of DU shells and bombs, the war against Iraq in 1991, have been the long-term victims of their own weapons.

When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) fire their DU shells and bombs into the buildings of Gaza, they are not aiming at Hamas tanks, armoured personnel carriers, or howitzer units – the Palestinian forces have none of those. Instead, the Israelis are aiming at the mass destruction of the Palestinian people, including those still unborn. The supply chain for this WMD includes the Cypriot, Greek, German and British governments.

In Gaza, and in the Ukraine, they are all witting participants in targeting a race of people for extermination, now and for the future.

(more…)

by Editor - Friday, December 1st, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

There is one way in which regional war against Israel can be waged by the Arab states, Turkey, Iran, Russia, even China to which Israel and the US are vulnerable; against which they cannot achieve a quick and conclusive end to Hamas and prevent a multi-front, long and ruinous war for Israel; and against which the Israelis and Americans cannot fight by a firepower escalation against the major states when Israel’s survival chances are far lower than the US will risk.

This is proxy war by swarm.

The Houthis have been practising this on a sub-swarm scale with modest drone and missile salvos aimed at Israel’s southern coastline, Eilat port, and vessel movement up and down the Red Sea, as well as one Israeli-owned vessel capture on November 19.   

This week Houthi missiles have also targeted a US Navy (USN) destroyer in the Gulf of Aden.  “Nov. 27 Sanaa time, two ballistic missiles were fired from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen toward the general location of the USS MASON (DDG 87) and M/V CENTRAL PARK,” CENTCOM said. “The missiles landed in the Gulf of Aden approximately ten nautical miles from the ships.”  This alleged Houthi attack followed an abortive takeover the day before, aimed at the Israeli-owned tanker Central Park. The ship attackers were Somali pirates, not Houthi forces, the USN has told the US press.

Against proxy war by swarm the US is currently monitoring Hezbollah along the Lebanon coast by long-range Northrop Grumman drones launched from the US airbase at Sigonella, Italy.  At the same time, for safety sake, the USS Gerald Ford and its escorts have withdrawn more than a thousand kilometres westward, out of Hezbollah missile range. The Ford squadron is now reported to be under way in the central Ionian Sea continuing westward.  

The USS Eisenhower and its escorts, however, are now moving into firing range of Iranian drone and missile attack, and also long-range Russian Kinzhals, as the USN force has passed through the Hormuz Strait sailing northward on what the Navy press statement says is its mission “to enter the waters of the Arabian [sic] Gulf as the Strike Group continues to support USCENTCOM missions [to] patrol the strategic waterway, located [sic] on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula, to ensure freedom of navigation.”  

These operations of the US Navy (USN) and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) indicate they are meant to deter Iran from using their long-range missiles against Israeli targets. They remain sitting ducks for long-range Russian attack.  

But the USN-IDF combination is incapable of deterring, let alone defending against proxy swarms of either unarmed balloons or civilian motor yachts – unless they attack and destroy them. The futility of doing that with violence, as the IDF has done before, is the weapon the Palestinians hold – of winning the war by not losing,  and in the process to demonstrate that Israel is a US-NATO protectorate for race hatred and genocide.  

The impotence of the US Air Force was demonstrated in February of this year in its protracted engagement against a single high-altitude, unarmed “spy balloon” from China.  Greek sources have reported speculation of a balloon swarm in support of Hamas; there has been no press reporting of this yet.

On November 21 the Turkish and Arab media reported that “approximately 1,000 international boats will gather in Turkiye on Wednesday [November 22] before heading toward Gaza to break the Israeli blockade…In an interview with Turkish news website, Haber7, Volkan Okcu, one of the organisers of the protest, indicated the boats will carry 4,500 people from 40 countries, ‘including anti-Zionist Jews’. Among the 1,000 vessels would be 313 boats filled with Russian activists, and 104 filled with Spanish activists, he said. Only 12 Turkish vessels will join the flotilla…The maritime convoy is set to make a first stop in Cyprus before continuing toward the Israeli port of Ashdod. Some participants in the flotilla will also reportedly take their spouses and children on board.”  The same report has appeared here  and here.

In an Israeli newspaper version of the same story, Okcu was quoted as saying: “The Zionist regime seems to have no chance to repeat the Mavi Marmara incident…The vessels sail under the flags of the US, UK, Luxembourg, Russia, Germany, Spain, Poland, and many other countries…The moment we enter Gaza’s territorial waters, [Israeli forces] can only search us or tow us to their ports, and impose fines, but will not be allowed by international law to raid the convoy in international waters, the way they assaulted the Mavi Marmara in 2010. [Israel] would pay a heavy price for attempting any crazy action against such a large international peace fleet.” That was published on the morning of November 21.

A week has now elapsed without the flotilla materialising in Turkey, and without a sign in Moscow that more than 1,200 Russians are aboard the reported 313 vessels with Gaza as their destination. Moscow sources refuse to discuss the operation openly amid signs that if there has been Russian government and military backing for the proxy swarm, there is now a Kremlin veto on the operation, at least for the time being.  

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, November 30th, 2023
No Comments »

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

It was the US strategy for dismembering the Soviet Union, and then destroying the surviving Russian part, to install individual politicians and formations of economic assets controlled by Washington. The first chosen was Boris Yeltsin; then his prime minister Yegor Gaidar and chief of staff Anatoly Chubais; and then the oligarchs who emerged from the 1996 presidential election campaign controlling almost everything that counted.

Yeltsin’s removal and replacement by Vladimir Putin in 2000 was another US operation through the oligarchs.

When they began to lose control of the reviving Russian military, and the Army took tighter control of Putin, the US methods for the destruction of Russia accelerated across the border with the Ukraine.  As this US military strategy has now led to the near-total destruction of the Ukraine, and of everything the US and NATO have put on the battlefield, there remains for the US its last Russian card to play. This is the oligarch card.

The sanctions war began in March 2014 and has been running against Russia’s strategic economic assets and its technological capacities to wage war against the US.   It has aimed at the Russian oligarchs, not because they are Putin’s “cronies” – as the US Treasury regularly refers to them — but to compel them to take sides with Putin and the Army, or against them.  This is the oligarch trap – and for the time being only a few have fallen into it: Mikhail Fridman and his partners, Pyotr Aven and Alexei Kuzmichev of the Letter One group of banks, supermarkets, energy, and communications; Oleg Tinkov of the Tinkoff bank; and Arkady Volozh of the Yandex group are the most obvious casualties.   Oleg Deripaska isn’t more loyal to the state than to the oligarchy, but he hasn’t fallen into the American trap because US sanctions against him began much earlier.

At Putin’s annual dinner for the oligarchs, the president appears to cater, they appear to kowtow, in a public ceremony of loyalty which means less of that, and more of favour than either of them lets on. In this year’s ceremony, there were eighty at the table – three state officials plus Putin, and 76 oligarchs, the largest number in the nine-year record of the dinner. But unlike the earlier dinners, the Kremlin and the oligarchs are keeping secret not only what was said, but also the names of the invitees.  For the oligarchs who are already sanctioned by the US and the NATO allies, this secrecy is no benefit. The secrecy instead is for the domestic political purpose of concealing the terms on which the oligarchs will continue to dictate the state’s economic priorities, and prevent the state recovering the assets the oligarchs have been stealing from the beginning.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, November 29th, 2023
No Comments »