By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

For more than three centuries the judges of the United Kingdom’s courts have struggled to preserve their independence from the monarch and the government, and thus their power to rule on the truth before them, not the lies presented by the ruling powers.  

When giving public lectures, optimistic, pensioned, and Scottish judges speak of “tensions with the executive [as] an inevitable part of the relationship with the executive”. Some of them claim that since 2003 the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice are constitutionally powerful enough on their own to protect the independence of the judges working below them.  

In the case of who attacked Sergei Skripal in the middle of England on March 4, 2018, they aren’t and they haven’t. The evidence of this will be on display in the Royal Courts of Justice on Tuesday.

That is when a retired judge and commercial consultant named Baroness Hallett (lead image) will convene the first hearing of a new inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess. Sturgess died on July 8, 2018, allegedly after ingesting a lethal dose of the nerve agent Novichok from a false perfume bottle her partner had presented to her after finding it in circumstances he has yet to explain with certainty.  

The British Government alleges that two Russian government agents were responsible for the attack on Skripal; they “are now also the prime suspects in the case of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley too. There is no other line of inquiry beyond this. And the police have today formally linked the attack on the Skripals and the events in Amesbury – such that it now forms one investigation… Our own analysis, together with yesterday’s report from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, has confirmed that the exact same chemical nerve agent was used in both cases. There is no evidence to suggest that Dawn and Charlie may have been deliberately targeted, but rather were victims of the reckless disposal of this agent.” That was then-Prime Minister Theresa May in a speech to the House of Commons on September 5, 2018.

Eighteen months later, police and prosecutors have issued no formal indictment for Sturgess’s death. The coroner’s court inquest into the cause of her death has been repeatedly postponed; it begins again on March 30.  Hallett has replaced David Ridley, the county coroner in charge of the inquest until now, for reasons which were decided by government officials in secret.  Until the secret becomes public knowledge, the independence of the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice is in doubt. Hallett knows the secret; the way she conducts the inquest will reveal it.    

In the Sturgess case Hallett has appointed Martin Smith as her chief assistant, the official solicitor to the inquest.  When they wish to speak to the public and press, they have appointed Bernadette Caffarey. She says Hallett “does require some help in contacting the press to alert them of the upcoming hearing… A coroner can choose to seek assistance from anyone they feel has the right expertise to assist them.”

Smith has been employed by Hallett in a major political inquest before. Caffarey currently works for Smith; she is paid her salary by the Home Office. In her last two jobs she was paid by the Home Office, the government ministry overseeing the judiciary and police, and by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). She is a state mouthpiece.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 28th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In a series of moves coordinated with German and other NATO government officials, Alexei Navalny has released a fabricated internet message while his wife Yulia Navalnaya is in Germany to seek German, British and US Government aid for Navalny’s release from prison on terms that will end his political ambitions in Russia.

The details, confirmed by more than a dozen people familiar with the matter,   have surfaced just four weeks  after Navalny was sent to IK-2 Pokrov, a special-measures prison near Yaroslavl.  

In a March 26  Instagram posting made to appear as if Navalny himself had prepared it in jail,  two pictures reveal a foreign service fabrication with a coded message for the Kremlin. Navalny, the code reveals, is willing to accept terms for his release similar to those accepted by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in December 2013.   In return for a letter to President Vladimir Putin admitting his guilt on the offences charged, the proposal is for him to be released to Germany where Navalny would be granted permanent asylum, never to return to Russia.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 28th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Kiev regime of Volodymyr Zelensky is now in the same strategically vulnerable position as Petro Poroshenko’s regime was after the presidential election of May 2014.

Both were facing domestic alienation and armed opposition, which for different reasons in the east of the country and the west, were impossible for the presidents to overcome, compose,  or coordinate.  Both have calculated they should provoke a military confrontation in the Donbass in order to draw the US Government and the NATO allies into rushing a combination of fresh money into Kiev and arms on to the line of contact in the east.

The shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, was a provocation planned to draw direct NATO military intervention on the ground; recovery of the MH17 victims’ bodies and aircraft black boxes was the cover story and camouflage.  But the scheme – devised by the US and Ukrainian secret services, adopted by Poroshenko, promoted by the Dutch, and manned by the Australians – failed; read the book explaining how.

The present situation in the Donbass is understood by the Russian General Staff, the Foreign Ministry, the intelligence agencies, and the Kremlin to be at this point of ignition. They also understand what has changed since mid-2014. The political capacity of the Germans to resist US folly has been eroded by the Navalny Novichok operation since last August,  and by party battles to replace Angela Merkel and her government at the September 26 election; so Germany is much weaker than it was seven years ago. The Dutch, having just re-elected Mark Rutte and continuing the MH17 show trial, are exactly where they were then. Everyone else in Europe, including the British, are more uncertain and unconfident than they were. Joseph Biden was Kiev’s principal ally in Washington then; now he’s mentally less capable of calculation or control.

An unusually detailed presentation of the Russian positions, as well as the Russian interpretation of the positions of the other sides in the conflict, was published this week in Kommersant. Reporter Vladimir Soloviev has transcribed what his source, the chief Russian negotiator Dmitry Kozak (lead image, right), deputy chief of the presidential administration, has provided verbally and in documents.

The current map of the war zone (lead image, left) can be expanded for view here.  A semi-official Russian military situation report can be read here.  

This is the Russian text of Kozak’s briefing.  Here is my translation, unabridged and unedited.

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 25th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The British government has selected a new team trusted with state secrets to run the inquest into the alleged Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess three years ago.  The appointments of former Court of Appeals judge, Lady Heather Hallett,  and Martin Smith as legal advisor will commence at a court hearing in London on March 30.

Hallett and Smith replace the Wiltshire country coroner David Ridley and his police advisor in the ongoing investigation of what caused Sturgess’s death.  

Hallett has been a specialist judge for  sensitive military, intelligence, and police problems under the direction of the Cabinet Office for many years. The Cabinet Office coordinated all security and police operations before, during, and after the alleged Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.

Smith was involved in the state investigation of the alleged Russian assassination by polonium  poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko on November 1, 2006.  Titled “Solicitor to the Inquiry”, he was acknowledged in the January 2016 report by the chief investigator, Sir Robert Owen.  

The move by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to raise the level of the investigation is likely to secure the Home Office and the security agencies from disclosure of evidence casting doubt on the official story that a Russian assassination squad, on mission to kill Skripal, left behind a bottle of Novichok which ended up in the apartment of Sturgess and her companion, Charles Rowley; they were poisoned at their Amesbury home on June 30, 2018; Sturgess died in nearby Salisbury Hospital on July 8.

London experts on inquests and coronial law say it is not uncommon for “complex and controversial cases” to be moved from local coroners to judges in London. The London lawyers will not comment, however, on the recent record of state security service for Hallett and Smith.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, March 24th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

For the first time, the US-based international media agency Reuters is being sued for lying about Russia in the British High Court. The three defendants in the dock are Catherine Belton (lead image, right); her source, runaway bank robber Sergei Pugachev; and Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins.

Roman Abramovich (left) has launched the case almost a year after Belton, Pugachev and Murdoch published a book entitled  “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West”.  According to Abramovich, he  has initiated the lawsuit in defence of his personal reputation and that of the Chelsea Football Club he owns. “It is my hope that today’s action will not only refute the false allegations in regard to my own name, but also serve as a reminder of Chelsea’s positive footprint in the UK.”

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Barnacles are unambitious. Once they attach themselves to the keel they don’t think they can influence the direction or even the speed of the boat. They confine themselves to feeding and reproducing. Barnacles are good at that because their penises are closer to their mouths than is true of most journalists. In this respect, the arthropod is a dickhead.

Anglo-American reporters reporting on other journalists reporting on Russia lack the genital-in-mouth modesty of barnacles. But whether in the mainstream media or alternative media, they are stuck where they are and must feed on each other. Unlike barnacles, they think they control the battleship in its fight with Russia; this is how it pays for dickheads to think.

The advertising markets are ambitious, parasitic, and dickheaded in the same way. But it’s not the same way in the US as in Russia. The latest reports on advertising revenues in both markets reveal that if it hadn’t been for the US election campaigns in 2020, revenue spent trying to persuade the American people would have fallen by 17%; this counts only how-to-vote adspend, not how to think adspend. They are correlated because as traditional advertising revenues fall, so do jobs for journalists.

The other driver of US advertising revenue last year was the pandemic-related growth of Amazon belonging to Jeff Bezos; the more money he makes, the more losses he can afford on promoting war against Russia at the Washington Post. In general, Covid-19 helped increase mainstream newspaper readership — without adding to their revenues. But in the US market there is no reader revenue competition over war against Russia between the Washington Post and the New York Times, as the war against Spain once served the competition between William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s  New York World.  However, last year the combination of Covid-19 and war against Russia improved reader trust in the New York Times brand compared to the Bezos brand at the Post, which had been more trusted than the Times in 2019.  The Times also increased its lead in the size of its online readership  compared to the Post.    

In Russia, according to the report from the Association of Communications Agencies of Russia (AKAR) released last week,  the total spent on advertising in all media for 2020 came to Rb473 billion ($6.5 billion); that was 4% less than 2019. Traditional Russian journalism in newspapers suffered most – adspend in this market segment went down by 50%; radio advertising dropped by 30%; advertising on trains and buses, down by 38%; outdoor advertising, down by 27%. By contrast, advertising revenue spent on the internet grew by 4%; on videos, up by 5%.

By contrast also, the pressure on Russians from the Covid-19 restrictions triggered the biggest gain in advertising expenditure from the state savings bank Sberbank. Next in percentage gain in the Russian market came Leomax, a television retailer,  and Miratorg, a producer and distributor of meat products.  Political advertising was negligible in the Russian market; the next parliamentary election isn’t due until September 2021; the next presidential election until March 2024.

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, March 21st, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

How many times must we repeat: in this war which the US and NATO have started against Russia, force will decide the outcome, not words. So if President Joseph Biden (lead image, centre) and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) are afraid of running the risk of losing the former – watch the Donbass in the coming weeks — they will stick to wars of words; that’s propaganda, info-war, cyber-war.

In wars of words, truth isn’t the first casualty.  It’s the first weapon – that’s to say, our side’s truth is our weapon; the other side’s truth is a pack of lies (aka deception, disinformation, active measures, trolling). By the way, the US Constitution’s free speech amendment is a two-edged sword in this war-making.  Our side’s freedom to speak the truth or to tell lies is lawful; the other side’s freedom to speak their truth on our side of the front is an indictable crime, according to the Department of Justice. It’s foreign agent influence peddling,  election interference, sedition, or (if Julian Assange did it) espionage.

In propaganda warfare, one of the rules of combat as the Germans, British and Americans have all practiced it, is that repeating a lie often enough will conceal the truth. In British and American libel courts, truth isn’t a defence for publishing lies about public figures. It’s enough for the liar to demonstrate that the fabrications were already in circulation to legalise repeating them in media. Repeat our side’s lie often enough and this will erase the truth of the other side’s as if it had never existed. Novichok, for example, is a war-fighting word — NATO side claims it was a poison to kill Sergei Skripal three years ago; that was a lie. NATO side has repeated that it was a poison to kill Alexei Navalny eight months ago. It’s still a lie, but as a war-fighting word, it has managed to kill the truth on our side of the front. Almost.

In war-fighting with words like this, the big gun of the US and NATO alliance is the woozle. Novichok is a woozle.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, March 16th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Sovcomflot, Russia’s dominant shipping company and (next to the Chinese) the world’s most valuable energy tanker fleet, announced yesterday that in 2020 its earnings had risen almost 10%, and its profit jumped by over 18%.

However, the stock market is decidedly unimpressed. On the Moscow Stock Exchange, where Sovcomflot shares have been listed since last October, the share price moved up by less than half of one percent on a tiny volume of transactions.   

At its new price of Rb91.12 ($1.24), the market is telling the shipping company it is worth 13% less than the company claimed six months ago, when it issued its share prospectus at Rb105.

Worse yet may materialise in April, when the lock-up period expires for the anchor shareholders; they committed themselves to buying at Rb105 on October 7 and to waiting six months before selling out. At least one of them won’t do that, though. That’s OOO SCF Arctic, a Sovcomflot subsidiary holding part of the tanker fleet. In order to support the planned privatisation of Sovcomflot shares at the target share price, SCF Arctic promised to buy a block of shares from the share-sale bankers if they didn’t want them; that cost the shipping company $47.2 million.

In other words, Sovcomflot was an anchor investor in itself. The state sovereign investor, Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), was the biggest of the other anchors. With state support like this, Moscow market analysts say they aren’t surprised at the lack of commercial investor demand.  “The privatisation was a propaganda exercise”, comments a London shipping expert. “There is a problem in the reporting of Russian companies – the truthful part disguises lots of faking.”

The initial public offering (IPO) last October failed, says Pavel Gavrilov, a stock analyst with BCS Express in Moscow. “Technical difficulties, lack of information, the speculative component, and other factors” were to blame.

Yesterday, Sovcomflot’s chief executive Igor Tonkovidov said that “with swings in global oil demand causing extreme volatility across energy markets, SCF [Sovcomflot] Group has demonstrated resilience to such turbulence and has produced further increase in its key operational and financial metrics.”

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, March 15th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

William Brumfield is an American university professor who has specialised in photographing Russian architecture before the Revolution, especially churches. His pictures are optimistic, not so much for the revival of the Orthodox God as for the recovery of Church property from before (lead image, right).  If one of Brumfield’s pictures could do for a thousand words, the record of Russian atheism (lead image, left), secularism, communism, collectivisation and socialism would be erased as if it had never existed.

Brumfield has visited Russia more than fifty times in the past fifty years. In 2019 he was awarded the Order of Friendship by President Vladimir Putin, though not personally. The medal was sent to the Russian Embassy in Washington, and that’s where Brumfield collected it. The award is a multi-purpose one for foreigners; it has also gone to Gennady Timchenko’s wife and daughter for their good works as ex-Russian Finnish nationals. Since 2014 they have all been targeted by US Treasury sanctions.

Brumfield’s newest book is a candidate for selection in London as Pushkin House’s best book on Russia for 2021.  That’s if the selection committee agree to count it on their short list to be announced shortly.  The committee is run this year by two well-known Russia haters, Fiona Hill of the US National Security Council  and the ex-NATO secretary-general George Robertson.

Brumfield’s book is called “Journeys through the Russian Empire”. It reproduces the photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, taken between 1903 and 1916, displayed side by side with attempts at reproducing the same shots taken by Brumfield between 1972 and 2018.

Except for a brief record of the mosques and medrassas of Bukhara and Samarkand, the majority of both sets of photographs is of churches and monasteries located outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Brumfield is vague on what Prokudin-Gorsky was doing; he provides no direct diary excerpts,  letters, notes, or contemporary versions of what the photographer was thinking at the time. Brumfield appears not to have read Prokudin-Gorsky’s memoirs, published in France in 1932 and quoted in the Russian website dedicated to the Russian photographer since 2011.  

Brumfield is also fuzzy on what he’s been doing himself. He concedes “the nostalgic appeal of a lost world vividly rediscovered in brilliant colour. These photographs transport us back in time and create an illusion of memory”. But since Brumfield thinks he knows what happened next better than Prokudin-Gorsky could, the “nostalgic interpretations…may be superficially appealing, but they ignore a larger, at times devastating, context.”

Brumfield doesn’t mean the German wars on Russia;  nor the civil war invasions by armies from Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey, France, Britain and the US;  nor the current US-NATO war.  He is only thinking of the revolution of 1917 and of “the next decade…years of war, social collapse, hunger and savage violence”. On the one hand, Brumfiield acknowledges “the perspective that Prokudin-Gorsky implicitly endorses in his photographs is that of Russians as bringers of progress and amelioration”. On the other hand, he thinks the subsequent history didn’t bring that about either.  He doesn’t quite dare to say that he blames the godless Russians.  “Historical buildings are a form of real estate and as such are subject to competing interests. The survival or destruction of architectural landmarks – and specifically those photographed by Prokudin-Gorsky – may reflect many, seemingly contradictory impulses. We have noted the important role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in the process of restoration, yet the Church has often been criticized by preservationists for renovations taken after the restitution of church property”.

This is a book to help western readers imagine there would be a better Russia if only the present leadership would sign terms of capitulation; they are the terms which Fiona Hill and George Robertson have made their careers thinking up, promoting in public, failing to achieve on the war front.   

The book is a large volume of the sort publishers market to readers intending to display, flat on their coffee tables, how cultivated their owners are.  In this context – cocktails this evening, war tomorrow – it might have been better if Brumfield had presented his collection of matching pre-1917 and pre-1991 photographs without writing a word. That way the photographs would speak for themselves to “the competing interests”. Brumfield might have left the words to Hill and Robertson whom those fond of Russian culture can safely ignore.

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, March 11th, 2021
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

When the organ claiming to be the world’s leading financial newspaper conceals the large price subsidy for the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines manufactured by the NATO allies, in order to accuse Russia of price gouging the poor, you can be sure you are watching an information warfare attack.

And when the concealment of the vaccine subsidy operation run by GAVI and COVAX hides the fact that the UK, US, and the Bill Gates (lead image, right) and Melinda Gates Foundation are paying 92% of the $10 billion scheme, then you realise that Covid-19 vaccines are a weapon of war.

A war, not only against Russia, but also against China.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
No Comments »