By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the cartoon,  Mighty Mouse was always on the defensive, repelling attacks from wicked aggressors, cats, for example, or dogs.   When the cartoon first began in 1942, the words of the theme song were also defensive:  “Mr. Trouble never hangs around, When he hears this mighty sound: ‘Here I come to save the day!’ That means that Mighty Mouse Is on the way!” After the defeat of Germany, Mighty Mouse changed his tune: he moved on to the offensive: “Here he comes, that Mighty Mouse, Coming to vanquish the foe With a mighty blow! Don’t be afraid any more ‘Cause thing won’t be like they’ve been before!” The mouse now decides who the enemy is.

In real life, in the sanctions war against Russia, the US Government has decided through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) which Russians to attack, In the process, though unreported,  the sanctions give millions of dollars’ worth of benefits to the business rivals and competitors of OFAC’s targets. The European Union, and its member governments, claim they will protect their companies from this US Government-backed asset raiding; in practice they don’t.

A new London High Court case reveals how OFAC helped an Anglo-Indian businessman named Pradip Dhamecha default on a two-year old loan and keep more than £34 million of Victor Vekselberg’s money because Vekselberg had been sanctioned by OFAC four months after the loan was signed and Dhamecha’s bank pocketed his cash. The court ruling, issued on September 12, also declares that the British Government’s policy to stop the extra-territorial reach of the US sanctions to British law and jurisdiction is worthless. “I do not consider the alleged policy is material”, declared Mark Pelling, a practicing Queen’s Counsel serving as a High Court judge.

The outcome of the case, Pelling decided, turns on the right of might; that is, Dhamecha’s right not to pay Vekselberg what he owes because the American Government might sanction Dhamecha for doing so. “Payment,” claimed the judge, heaping conditionals and subjunctives upon each other, “has been impliedly [sic] prohibited because of the probability [sic] that the relevant sanction will be imposed if [sic] it pays [Vekselberg company] the sums it  is entitled to under the contract.” (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 29th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Among Russian oligarchs, Alexei Mordashov (lead image, centre) holds two records. One is for empty promises: he has never told the whole truth in public or when he has visited President Vladimir Putin (right) for private conversations about his business plans and the Russian state interest. Mordashov’s other record is for losing more money invested in the US than any other Russian; that was at least $3 billion in steelmills which Mordashov bought to turn himself into a global steelmaker in case his Severstal steel group was taken over at home. 

It is therefore almost certain that when Mordashov flew to Cyprus last week to tell the Cyprus President Nikos Anastasiades (lead image, left) he intends to double the number of Russian tourists to Cyprus, it’s another empty promise. This is also the assessment of Russian and Cypriot tourism analysts.

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 23rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Whoaaa Neddy! Another hack has gotten out of the stable of American exceptionalist historians of Russia.

Actually, this one, Eleonory Gilburd, is a Russian-born, US educated and employed hack of the Soviet Jewish emigration like Keith Gessen, Masha Gessen  and Yury Slezkine. Russian exiles with axes to grind.   

They have plenty to grind on – the Romanov tsars, the Orthodox Church, Bolsheviks, Communism, Soviet bureaucracy, Stalin’s Terror, the KGB, and the Russian intelligentsia – with the exception of themselves. There being almost no one in Russia for them to dare to sharpen an axe on when that would have been principled and brave, emigration to the US was the option. Gilburd’s book is a documentary, not so much of the Russia left behind, as of the generation created in the US by the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment’s exchange of Soviet trade benefits for Jewish exit permits. They are the generation who want to return to a Russia, regime-changed and shaped in their image, and not to remain forever excluded, powerless, ignored as they are as Americans. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 22nd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Sergei Frank (lead image, right) is being removed from control of Sovcomflot, the Russian state tanker company and one of the largest oil and gas transporters in the world.  Frank is the only senior Russian state official to have been judged by the British courts to be dishonest and vindictive in litigation; to have perjured himself in courtroom testimony; and to have obstructed justice by a scheme of evidence fabrication against former Sovcomflot executives and partners.

Frank’s removal has yet to be confirmed officially; Sovcomflot is making no comments. The chief executive who has dominated the company for almost fifteen years appeared to be fully in charge at the July 24 board meeting. (more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, September 17th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was Aristophanes who said you can’t teach a crab to walk straight. Lenin wasn’t talking about crabs when he recommended taking one step forward, two steps back.

This summer, when President Vladimir Putin last talked to Gennady Timchenko about his family’s crab business, he said he was revising the old Lenin tract. Two steps sideways, and one step forward, Putin advised.  By sideways he meant that investigations under way in April by the General Prosecutor’s office, the Kremlin Control Directorate, and the Accounting Chamber of the Russian Fishing Company, controlled by Timchenko’s son-in-law Gleb Frank, have been called off. The federal minister in charge, Yury Trutnev, has also been advised to move sideways until after the first government auction of crab quotas start on October 7.

On that day, Rosrybolovtsvo (Rosryb), the federal Russian Fishery Agency, which is a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. will start auctioning catch quotas for 15-year terms in 41 lots of 1,000 tonnes each; the estimated state price will be about Rb125 billion ($1.9 billion). Bidding for the fareast crab quotas will run from October 7 to 11; the northern Barents Sea crab auction will take place on October 14-15; the official results will then be issued by Rosryb and contracts with the winning companies should be signed on October 28.

The Russian Fishing Company (RRPC) is expected to take at least a third of the offer, probably more since lack of cash and state bank financing to meet Rosryb’s terms prevent industry rivals from bidding. An additional cost requirement for the winning bidders is that they must commit to building new crabbing vessels at local shipyards. In support of its quota bid, RRPC is reported to have committed to paying $500 million for 22 vessels.

“All attempts at investigating or allowing competition in the crab business are now dead,” an industry source said last week. “This is now the fashion. Timchenko got the blessing from Putin.” (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 16th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday afternoon in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin kept Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for three hours, and then publicly endorsed him for re-election. Putin’s endorsement was unconditional: he could have warned against Netanyahu’s election pledge, revealed last week, to annex the West Bank of Palestine, but he didn’t. Putin could have warned against Israeli air force and missile strikes on targets in Syria, but he didn’t. “We have absolutely identical positions,” Putin declared, according to the official Kremlin record. Putin was speaking only for himself.    

That was made plain to Netanyahu during the Sochi session by the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Kremlin publication,   however, cut them out of the photographic record and official communiqué, as if they weren’t there at all. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 15th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In high state politics there’s a difference between the morons and the psychopaths – between Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau on the one hand, John Bolton and Chrystia Freeland on the other. The  difference is in the ability to count the fingers on one hand. 

Bolton has been removed because, notwithstanding Trump’s mental disabilities and small hands, the President can still do arithmetic. The current US voter polls show he is running a negative approval rating of 10 points, 54% to 44%; there has been a significant decline since July.    Trump’s  domestic policy approval is positive, however. He is being pulled down by disapproval of his foreign policy, and by American voters’ fear that the future will be worse.   Bolton is the finger on Trump’s hand which must be removed for the president to count on re-election.

Compared to Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson in the UK, Emmanuel Macron in France, or Angela Merkel in Germany, Vladimir Putin is a rock of stability, neurologically and arithmetically speaking,  too. His approval rating, last measured by the Levada Centre in August, was trending downwards, but still a positive 36 points, 67% to 31%.  The Moscow city duma and regional gubernatorial elections of last Sunday confirm what midterm and local elections usually show everywhere – voter discontent and the readiness to signal it as loudly as possible. In my Moscow district, for example, a middle-class one, voter turnout was double the citywide average, 44% to 22%; the winning candidate was from the Communist Party. This is not the regime-change threat reported in the Anglo-American media.

In the campaign for next month’s Canadian election, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is as much of a liability, and for the same reason, as Bolton was for Trump. For Trudeau to survive in power, it is the French voters of Quebec backing him, not the Ukrainian voters who support Freeland,  who will be decisive. Freeland’s last desperate measure, to encourage the Canadian press to report the threat of Russian interference in the Canadian election, is going to fail, not because it’s false, but because Canadian voters, starting in her home province of Ontario, regard her as a threat to their future. (more…)

by Editor - Friday, September 13th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russia has been warning Cyprus (lead image, left) for months to beware the risks and consequences of offering its offshore oil and gas to US companies in exchange for promises of a US military protectorate against Turkish invasion. So far the American response (lead image, centre – Secretary of State Michael Pompeo) has been to require Cyprus to block Russian Navy access to its ports; expel Russian capital from its banks; and put a stop to what Washington calls pro-Russian journalism in the Greek-language press. For details of this scheme, read this. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has denounced the Washington plan as an “artificial choice” and also a “gross violation” of Cyprus’s internal affairs. But so far the Russians have joined the Americans in accepting that what the Turks believe to be theirs is theirs, and that what the Cypriots (and Greeks) regard as theirs is negotiable.

For the first time, however, Cypriot and Greek military officers and experts have joined to plan  Cypriot military tactics against Turkey’s attempt at taking over the Cyprus offshore seabed and at fresh Turkish troop landings on the island. Not since the Cypriots fought a successful guerrilla war against the British for independence in the 1950s, and then in 1974 fought the Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island has a Cypriot military approach appeared.  Self-defence by the Cypriots – without alignment with Americans or Russians, and without backing from Athens — is unprecedented. (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Cover yourself. When it’s raining, you can’t borrow somebody else’s umbrella for shelter.

In September 1938, the umbrella of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became the symbol of his foolishness in accepting Adolph Hitler’s terms for the takeover of the Sudetenland, then Czechoslovakia,  as “peace for our time” (lead image, left), then telling the British to “go home and get a nice quiet sleep”.  

The US umbrella which Nikos Anastasiades, President of Cyprus, and Kyriacos Mitsotakis, Prime Minister of Greece, have applied to borrow, to protect themselves from the terms dictated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan(lead image, right)  isn’t yet as infamous. It’s already just as futile.  For Cypriot and Greek officials to pretend to such folly is a treason before their own people.    (more…)

by Editor - Monday, September 9th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs—this is still Goebbels-type but  stretched out and product-diversified  to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti’s method.

His new book on the business of Russian crime isn’t about business at all. There’s not a single item from a balance-sheet, cashflow analysis, asset trace, or financial indictment in Galeotti’s effort to exaggerate  Russian criminals to mean Russian people, all of them. 

The Russians are also the unique criminals of our world, he thinks  – no other nation on earth matches them for their criminality. So for the protection of the rest of the innocent world, and to protect the uncriminalized from being Russianized, the Russian state, that’s the “super-mafia” of Galeotti’s targeting, should be destroyed by warfare. And since Galeotti repeats the slang of the Russian streets himself to rub in his conclusion that “mainstream society” – that’s everybody –“ reflect[s] a fundamental process of criminalisation of politics and daily life”, he means that Russians deserve  more than their mouths washed out.  Galeotti is a mercenary; his book a weapon — a stun-gun for the naive,   an improvised explosive device for the unguarded, a neutron bomb for the sceptical.   Means, motive, opportunity for a hate crime in the service of a war crime. (more…)

by Editor - Sunday, September 8th, 2019
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