Dances With Bears

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Roman Abramovich — the oligarch whom President Vladimir Putin has publicly declared to be “trustworthy and honourable”  and sent to Kiev last month to negotiate war terms  — has what is known on police blotters as FORM. That is a long list of previous offences; dishonesty, deception, bribery, and extortion as […]

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with There was a map of the world on the wall of the Billy Mitchell Room of the Arctic Warrior Events Centre. That’s where President Donald Trump met President Vladimir Putin at Elmendorf Richardson Airbase in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025. On the map, the world was flat. Crisscrossing it were […]

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Last week, the Supreme Commander in Chief of the Russian Armed Forces, Vladimir Putin, revealed two military secrets of his strategy for achieving Russia’s war aims on the Ukraine battlefield. They involve weapons he has fired in the past.   The first was the launch of the Oreshnik missile (lead image) […]

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s a brave king who fights on after losing his arms and his legs. It’s a foolish king who asks his army and his people to believe in the certainty of swift victory and then requires them to pay the costs of attrition. Or is it the other way round — […]

By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Bringing the war home was a powerful slogan of the American anti-war movement in the decade between 1965 and 1975,  as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army advanced towards their victory, forcing the White House to armistice terms in Paris in January 1973, and then to evacuation of Saigon in […]