by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

According to the official White House schedule,   President Donald Trump doesn’t start his day until lunchtime when he sits down with his political heir, Vice President J.D. Vance, at 12:30. He has more lunches with Vance than he receives briefings from his secret services on the threats of his enemies.

Trump knows to keep his friends close, his enemies closer. But the President rarely meets in public with his closest protégés, the Cabinet Secretaries; even more rarely with his political allies, the Republican Party leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives; almost never with his wife, the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS).

He doesn’t meet with the leaders of foreign states unless Vance is present.

He doesn’t like extended press conferences with these foreigners, preferring instead what the White House calls “press gaggles”. These staged impromptus range from four to twenty minutes in duration in the Oval Office, in the back of Air Force One, or on the run from his Florida mansion to his golf course. In the official record since his inauguration on January 20, the most frequent physical event on Trump’s daily agenda is golf.

The most frequent documentary event is a Trump tweet; these are issued at a rate of one per hour through the 24 hours of each day.

At 1:18 pm on Wednesday, April 9, Trump tweeted his declaration of war against China. “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets,” Trump declared,  I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable.”

At the same time Trump retreated from his tariff strikes against those countries which have signalled they  are ready to kow-tow and pay more in tribute. “Based on the fact that more than 75 Countries have called Representatives of the United States, including the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR [United States Trade Representative], to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to Trade, Trade Barriers, Tariffs, Currency Manipulation, and Non Monetary Tariffs, and that these Countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the United States, I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately.”   

This was the most significant retreat by Trump in his term so far. It follows the collapse of stock prices on the US and international exchanges, and the sharp rise in yields (borrowing costs) for the US Treasury’s 10-year and 30-year bonds. “This is Trump’s capitulation to markets,” editorialized the Financial Times. “He has saved face by keeping tariffs on China…The stunning climb down from the US leader came after a week of turmoil in global markets, with trillions of dollars shed in equity prices around the world, a sharp sell-off in US bonds, and a plunge in oil prices to levels last seen during the coronavirus pandemic.”  

What has happened, according to the Japanese-owned financial paper in London, is a “regime shift whereby US Treasuries are no longer the global fixed-income safe haven.”  

Trump filled the rest of his afternoon, first with a photograph session with several motor-racing champions and speedway promoters, and then with signing a fresh set of presidential edicts (aka executive orders).

To reassure himself on who rules, Trump has installed two baroque, gilt-framed mirrors on the Oval Office wall, mounted at head level so that when Trump enters or leaves the office he can see himself alongside the portraits of George Washington (conqueror of the United Kingdom) and  James Polk (conqueror of Mexico), and above the bust of Winston Churchill (conqueror of the Germans).

Trump is also backing down on his threat to attack Iran and destroy its air defences, missile batteries, and nuclear enrichment sites. Listen to the podcast discussion of Trump’s vulnerabilities as viewed from Moscow and Teheran, analysed with the method of the historians of the last emperors of Rome when their empire was collapsing, and their military leaders plotted putsches.  

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by Editor - Thursday, April 10th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Until recently it was impossible to grow bananas in Russia except in the greenhouse of Count Pyotr Sheremetev at Kuskovo. That eighteenth-century establishment was so costly to operate,   the fruit was a rarity meant for the tsar’s table, and not too tasty either.

More than two hundred years of Russian banana history have elapsed since then with the revolutionary outcome that bananas have become the most popular fruit among ordinary Russians – and the bananas are now much tastier than the aristos ever knew.  The reason is that almost all the bananas eaten in Russia are grown in Ecuador.

That was until a year ago, when an American plan to recruit the Ecuadorian government to the Ukrainian side in the war against Russia intervened at the same time as the Ecuadorian humpback fly threatened to leap out of shipments of bananas as they landed in St Petersburg and Vladivostok ports.  In February 2024, a partial ban was imposed by Rosselkhoznadzor, the federal sanitary inspection agency, on the importation of Ecuadorian bananas.

This has cut the total tonnage of banana imports to Russia by 21% in 2024 compared to the average annual tonnage of the period, 2018-22.  For Russian consumers this has meant a banana crisis — fewer fruit in the market to buy, and at a rising price. Over  the two years 2023 and 2024, the average price for a kilogram of bananas as measured by Rosstat grew from 80 roubles to 146 roubles – a jump of 83%.   

While banana growers in India, Turkey and Indonesia then offered their own bananas to fill the supply gap, government officials announced in Moscow they were considering domestic production. In November 2024 Oksana Luth of the federal Agriculture Ministry announced she was studying a national greenhouse plan for commercial banana production. Andrei Platonov, head of a grower organization called the Association for Development of Subtropical Agriculture, told the press that the growers in his group would soon launch a homegrown banana crop for the first time. “If everything goes well, by the end of this year we will show you bananas grown in Russia,” Platonov told Tass.   

On this prospect, President Vladimir Putin has reversed himself.

Putin is the only official in Russian history to have inaugurated a line of banana boats carrying the fruit to St. Petersburg – except that when he did so one Monday in March 2010,  the banana boat line had already been operating with specialized refrigerated containers for several months, and with other transport technology for several years before that. The real reasons for the president’s banana interest were, firstly, a move by a St. Petersburg importer named Vladimir Kekhman to establish a commercial monopoly of the imports, driving his competitors into bankruptcy; and secondly, Gazprom’s campaign to lobby the Danish government to drop its opposition to the laying of the first Nord Stream gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed.  

That story was first told here.  The banana skin proved to be a slippery one. Kekhman’s business collapsed in the British and Russian courts, and his Joint Fruit Company (JFC) went broke. Much later, in September 2022, the Danish government secretly assisted in the destruction of the second Nord Stream pipeline off Denmark’s Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.  

Putin then revealed that he is the first Russian leader since Sheremetyev to be growing bananas himself in a greenhouse at his Moscow region dacha at Novo-Ogarevo — and to have invited the press to film the fruit ripening on the tree. That was nine months ago in July 2024.   

On bananas Putin has not so much slipped as reversed direction.  In 2014 the President was sure, he told a meeting with agriculturalists, that “we are not going to grow bananas here,  but we have many crops that can certainly be very competitive.”   Eight years later, in June 2022, Putin acknowledged: “No matter how hard we try, we will be unable to substitute bananas, despite our achievements in plant selection, of which our colleagues have reported today. We can, of course, produce them by using LNG to maintain greenhouses in the required condition. But it cannot be produced commercially, can it?”

Putin answered that question seven weeks ago. “Mr Manturov [Deputy Prime Minister, former minister of trade and industry], who is present here, is nodding his head. We discussed this matter with him. I have already spoken about this: just as in agriculture, when agricultural producers begged us: ‘Just don’t let anyone else into our market, we will do everything ourselves.’ Except for bananas, of course. But they started growing bananas, too. It’s a bit expensive, though, and it’s not necessary.”  

At the Kremlin,  necessity is measured in response to public discontent and then  to lobbying by  interest groups, or vice versa.  

Accordingly, it has been announced that bananas may soon be officially designated for state support for the growers. Sergei Izmalkov, the agriculture minister in the southwestern region of Stavropol has declared that “in order to qualify for certain measures of state support, it is necessary to give bananas the opportunity to be an agricultural crop in the Russian Federation. The Ministry of Agriculture of Russia is working in this direction, and I think there will be results in the near future.”  Izmalkov’s plan calls for federal funding of fifteen hectares of greenhouses to be built at the regional town of Nevinnomyssk at a cost of Rb1.4 billion.

Mikhail Minenkov, administrative head of Nevinnomyssk, has confirmed that the banana- growing complex is being built, with the expectation that the first crop will be harvested and distributed commercially in a year’s time. According to Minenkov, passion fruit, mango, avocado, almonds,  and pistachios will also be grown at the Nevinnomyssk plantation. “The project is new and interesting for the country and for the region,” Minenkov has told the press. “We have experience in projects in the field of agriculture. Once it sounded strange for Nevinnomyssk that we would grow apples and cherries, but today these projects have been implemented.”  

Telephoned last week for a progress report on how his bananas are growing, what the harvest volume will be, and what price for consumers, Minnenkov asked for an email, but then refused to answer the questions.

In fact, there is the general policy that in conditions of wartime mobilization and the hostility of both Ecuador and Denmark,  Russia ought to be producing bananas, and so the budget money ought to be going out to growers in the southwest. In practice, however, they have no bananas.

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by Editor - Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The snowdrops have already come through the snow. The grape hyacinths are flowering in their place. By the time the bluebells appear, I shall be back at my desk.

by Editor - Monday, March 24th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In Hollywood as in Bollywood, filmmakers and the executive directors representing the  production financiers  know that the money shot is the climactic moment in the shooting script which is put there to excite the audience, and to persuade the investors there’s money to be made.  In porno films, the money shot is the moment of orgasm. No ejaculation, no profit.

President Donald Trump has been emitting tweets to announce his money shot on the battlefield of the Ukraine, in the genocide in Gaza, and in his wars against the Houthis, Iran, and China. To implement his desire, he recently sent Christopher Landau, his nominee to become Deputy Secretary of State — the brains behind Secretary Marco Rubio — to announce to the US Senate a policy of “commercial statecraft.”  

By that, Landau —  a Harvard-educated lawyer and Ambassador to Mexico during Trump’s first term – meant that “there is no force in the world that is as powerful as the American private sector”; and that it will be the Trump Administration’s objective to “unleash our private sector”, “out-hustle foreign competitors”, and fight China because they “are out-hustling us”.  

One of the first tactics in this American hustle strategy has been Trump’s executive order restoring the lawfulness of US corporate bribery for “gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.”  

This hustle strategy  and the tactics of the money shot are behind Trump’s announcement that as part of his end-of-war terms under negotiation with Russia at the moment, he aims to take US control of rare earth mining in the Ukraine, and also of the Ukraine’s nuclear power generating assets.  A shot at taking over the port of Odessa can be expected to follow.

Like old-fashioned make-war profiteering, this is end-of-war profiteering by corporatizing the terms of ceasefire, armistice, capitulation, security guarantees, and reparations. Two of Trump’s hustling associates, Steven Witkoff, the president’s special negotiator for Russia and the Middle East, and Howard Lutnick, the new US Secretary of Commerce, are his brokers in this plan.

Because Landau will not be confirmed by the US Senate until Monday, March 24, he has not been named to lead the US expert-group negotiators to meet in Saudi Arabia with the Russian team headed by Deputy Foreign Minister (retired) and Senator Grigory Karasin, and Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, formerly of the Federal Security Service (FSB).  Because Landau is a Spanish-speaking specialist on Latin America, he is afraid of being “out-hustled” by the Russians, and so he is obliged to depend on subordinates; they have not yet been identified.*  His chief subordinate, the Under Secretary of State for political affairs, is currently acting in the job. She is Lisa Kenna, a Middle East expert at the CIA and Arabic and Spanish speaker without  expertise on Russia.  Like Landau, she is a partisan Trump tweeter.    

The US negotiators in Saudi Arabia will rank below Landau and Kenna, and not above them in expertise on Russia or the war in the Ukraine.*  

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by Editor - Sunday, March 23rd, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“Don’t you ever let me hear this again, or I’ll lose my temper.”

That was Lucky Luciano’s (lead image, left) ultimatum to Vito Genovese (right) in 1946 when Luciano was in Havana, Cuba,  organizing his business comeback in the US, as Genovese tried persuading him to delegate the operations to himself. “Right now, you work for me, and I ain’t in the mood to retire,” Luciano added.  Everyone, including Genovese, knew what Luciano’s temper meant if he lost it.

When President Donald Trump wants everyone to know what he means, he issues a tweet threatening to lose his temper. “He can come back when he is ready for peace”, he told Vladimir Zelensky on February 28.  “Like nothing you’ve ever seen before”, he told the Ansar Allah (Houthi) government of Yemen on March 15.  “Iran will suffer the consequences and those consequences will be dire!” he said on March 17.    “They [Houthis] will be completely annihilated”, he added on March 19.  

In this podcast, Dimitri Lascaris asks what President Vladimir Putin and the Russian General Staff think of Trump’s threats and how the Russians plan to respond in the coming week’s negotiations in Saudi Arabia and on the Ukrainian battlefield. Click to view and listen.

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by Editor - Friday, March 21st, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the very first Pentagon press briefing of the Trump Administration, held this past Tuesday, Air Force Lieutenant General Alexus Grynkewich, who directs US military operations on the Ukraine battlefield and in Yemen, announced:  “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth,  they understand that when America gets involved in a fight, it’s our job to also end that fight as fast as humanly possible because we have a moral obligation to win and win decisively.”  

This isn’t the morality of self-defence, sovereign rights, human rights, just or holy war, the rules-based order, or even the morality of the ends justifying the means. This is war fighting for its own sake – and to prove that MAGA means MAWWA — Make America Win War Again.

In this discussion with Ray McGovern and Nima Alkhorshid, the prospects are analysed for a negotiated end-of-war settlement in the Ukraine following the telephone call between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.

The discussion then asks the question: If Trump is to be acknowledged as the peacemaker in the war against Russia, what is he doing launching air and missile raids on Yemen to kill as many of the Houthi (Ansar Allah) leaders as he can find?

Is this President Jekyll, President Hyde? Which one of them, or is it both of them who believe he has the “moral obligation to win and win decisively”?

View and listen to the hour-long discussion here.  

by Editor - Wednesday, March 19th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

At the beginning of this month, Bild, the German media sensationalist, claimed to have discovered “incredible developments between [Presidents] Trump and Putin. And they affect Germany! Bild research reveals secret talks between the US and Russia in Switzerland. It’s about an explosive gas deal for Germany! At the centre of the affair: once again the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 2.”  

The Bild story alleged that Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, made several visits for negotiations at the headquarters of Nord Stream 2 AG — the Baltic seabed pipeline’s operator, wholly owned by Russia’s sanctioned Gazprom — in Steinhausen, in the Swiss canton of Zug.  Grenell has denied the story.  

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, added there was no point in his commenting on Bild’s  claims because Grenell “has already denied it. And so the Americans have denied it. Also, there is a lot of information [in the Bild publication] that is not true.”  

The Bild report followed just hours after a report appeared in London by the Financial Times  maintaining that “a former spy and close friend of Vladimir Putin has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move that shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow. The efforts on a deal, according to several people aware of the discussions, were the brainchild of Matthias Warnig, an ex-Stasi officer in East Germany who until 2023 ran Nord Stream 2’s parent company for the Kremlin-controlled gas giant Gazprom.”  

The anonymous sources told the newspaper “Warnig’s plan involved outreach to the Trump team through US businessmen as part of back-channel efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine while deepening economic ties between the US and Russia. Some prominent Trump administration figures are aware of the initiative to bring in US investors, according to officials in Washington, and they see it as part of the push to rebuild relations with Moscow.”

Warnig told the FT he was “not involved in any discussions with any American politicians or business representatives.”

Stephen Lynch, a well-known arbitrageur between Russian and US asset buyers and sellers following the Yukos oil company’s  nationalization between 2004 and 2007, was reportedly behind some of the fresh media leaks, according to which “one US-led consortium of investors has drawn up the outlines of a post-sanctions deal with Gazprom, according to one person with direct knowledge of talks who declined to disclose the identity of the prospective investors.”   For Lynch’s record, including his attempt at a hostile takeover of gas assets of Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in 2016, click to read the archive.  

While Lynch has been promoting a Nord Stream takeover for his own commercial reasons, the planting of the story in Bild and the FT may have been an attempt by European officials to kill it.

“Senior EU officials,” according to the London newspaper, “became aware of the Nord Stream 2 discussion in recent weeks. Leaders of several European countries are concerned and have discussed the matter, according to several officials with knowledge of the discussions…The latest plan would in theory give the US unparalleled sway over energy supplies to Europe, the people said, after EU countries moved to end their dependence on Russian gas in the aftermath of the invasion.”  

Russian analysis of these purported dealmakers and their targets has been compiled in this new piece, published on March 18 by the Moscow business weekly, Expert. In its assessment of the German and British claims, Expert concludes   that American speculators are being attracted to the potential profit in schemes for buying low-priced Russian assets currently under sanctions; lobbying the  Trump Administration to lift the sanctions as part of an end-of-war settlement in the Ukraine; and then reselling the assets if and when business with Russia revives and the Russian asset prices return to pre-war market levels.  Lobbying the Trump Administration is the polite term for this.

According to Expert, a scheme to dismantle the current sanctions and refill the single,  undamaged pipe of Nord Stream 2 with Gazprom gas for Germany is between improbable and impossible. However, an alternative with better chances for speculators is a buyout of Rosneft’s German oil refinery at Schwedt.

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by Editor - Wednesday, March 19th, 2025
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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Vladimir Putin has solved the problem of how to conduct telephone calls with Donald Trump’s personality cult.

Following Trump’s tweeted claim in the early morning of Tuesday that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to”  the telephone call which took place over two hours  of the early Moscow evening,   ended without agreement on any “final” point.

Trump has remained uncharacteristically silent. The only tweet he has issued since the call with Putin has been an attack on a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama”.  

The US media have remained in the dark, while detailed results have been compiled and published by the Russian media. According to these sources, Putin agreed to the creation of “expert groups” to work on the military, political, and economic end-of-war settlement.  This is a signal that the efforts by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron to continue the war on their terms will be excluded, and that the Russian military advance westward will continue on all salients. Russian targeting of British, French and US military units on the battlefield, at Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk, and Kharkov and at staff bunkers in western Ukraine will continue.  

In response to Trump’s demand for a 30-day ceasefire – the Anglo-American proposal which was announced with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah on March 11 – Putin said no. Instead, he agreed to suspend the Russian electric war campaign, and for thirty days halt strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on condition that  Trump will reciprocate with a stop to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

No agreement was reached on Trump’s attempt to save the encircled Ukrainian forces in Kursk. Instead, Putin agreed that Ukrainians who surrender on the battlefield will not be shot. Putin also offered an exchange of prisoners of war, 175 to 175; and the return from Russian hospitals of 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

Although the discussion by the presidents touched on naval operations on the Black Sea, including targeting flights by US drones and NATO fixed-wing aircraft, no agreement was reached.

The assessment in Moscow is that Putin has turned a battlefield restriction he has already imposed on the General Staff into a concession he now requires Trump to enforce on the Zelensky regime. The ball, as US officials have insisted they have put in Moscow’s court, has been played back into Washington’s court.

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by Editor - Tuesday, March 18th, 2025
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by  John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

NATO infantry operations veteran Major (retd) Mark Takacs (lead image) has published an  animated map analysis of the battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces around Sudzha, in the Kursk region, between March 5 and 14. Nothing comparable has been reported by the Russian military bloggers; their US copyists; or the Ukrainian and British propaganda agencies.

Without the intention on Takacs’ part, his military analysis reveals the reason for the announcement of the “immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire”  on March 11 in Jeddah by the US and Ukrainian delegations, after the plan had been composed by UK and US officials in Kiev over the previous weekend.  This is to restore command and control communications with the Ukrainian units still occupying about 20% of the Kursk territory they had taken last August; restore and refill the primary NO7 highway and secondary routes into the Kursk salient for supplies of fresh arms, ammunition and troops; and construct new defence lines and fortifications which had either failed or been missing during the Russian offensive movements of the previous week.

A parallel plan for the salients southward down the line of contact is likely, although Takacs has yet to analyse them. In short, the ceasefire has been proposed to continue the war, not to end it.

“The control of Ukrainian troops inside this incursion zone [Kursk] has been lost,” President Vladimir Putin said on March 13.  “At the initial stages, just a week or two ago, Ukrainian servicemen tried to get out of there in small groups. Now it is impossible. They are trying to get out in very small groups of two or three men because everything is under our complete fire control…If this area is physically blocked in the next few days, then no one will be able to leave. There will only be two options: surrender or die. I think in these conditions it would be good for the Ukrainian side to achieve a ceasefire for at least 30 days. We are also in favour of it, but there are nuances. What are they?”

“First, what will we do about the incursion section in the Kursk Region? What would that mean if we cease fire for 30 days? Does this mean that everyone who is in there will just walk out without a fight? Do we have to let them go after they committed numerous heinous crimes against civilians? Or will the Ukrainian leadership issue a command for them to lay down their arms and just surrender? How will this happen? It is not clear.”  

In his week-long record of the Kursk battlefield, Takacs corroborates Putin’s description that the Ukrainian forces have been cut off by successful Russian military operations. But Takacs indicates that despite the disruption of their communications and their supply routes, they have been able to hold on to their positions despite Russian air superiority,  drone and artillery fire control,  and a five to one numerical superiority of infantrymen.

Takacs also reveals he has found no evidence that the Ukrainian operations were adversely affected by the Washington press release announcing the “pause” in US intelligence sharing with the Ukrainian forces starting on March 5, and ending with the press release of resumption on March 11.

Earlier, on March 4, Takacs reported he was taking the pause seriously: “Much of the minute-accurate tactical intelligence data (0-20/30 km deep behind the enemy’s perimeter) comes from US technical intelligence sources. Of course, the Ukrainians also operate tactical reconnaissance systems, but mainly they cannot see into the areas behind the Russian brigades and beyond to the depth of the division without the Americans. This is a problem because Russian operations can be predicted by 12-36 hours (so even the often mentioned shift-of-gravity attack method can be avoided) if there is accurate information about these terrain sections. If this is not the case, then the Ukrainian defence will be at a significant disadvantage.”  

His subsequent assessment records no US pause, no Ukrainian disadvantage.

Another NATO campaign veteran comments on Takacs’s report: “There’s no mention of the supposed American support cut-off as a contributory factor in the Ukrainian defeat. Instead, we can see that on the Russian side, superior electronic warfare, persistent and patient preparation over several months, tactical surprise, and bravery (the Pipe Operation), and Ukrainian negligence are given credit for the Russian victory.”

The Takacs report also raises a question which Russian analysts and their American copyists have been reluctant to ask: why, with overwhelming air, ground and firepower superiority against the Ukrainians, and the months-long preparation of the operational plans, has the Russian offensive been so slow?

Watch the 20-minute Takacs video by clicking here.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, March 18th, 2025
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by Jean-Marc Bovy, Geneva
  @bears_with

Do you remember Sergei Skripal, that double agent poisoned in Great Britain, they said, by the Russian secret services? What has become of them, Sergei and his daughter Yulia, since they survived one of the most violent poisons that there are?  Why don’t we see them any longer? And there are other troublesome questions which only a great adventurer of investigating in troubled waters could tackle.

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by Editor - Sunday, March 16th, 2025
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