By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“Your Excellency, I would like to also thank you,” Shehbaz Sharif said to President Vladimir Putin (lead image) last September, “for supporting Pakistan and trying to have a balancing act in the region.”   

Sharif is his country’s spokesman prime minister. Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military ruler, was sitting in the third protocol seat on Sharif’s right side, opposite Putin’s foreign policy spokesman, Yury Ushakov.

Munir is one of President Donald Trump’s closest Asian allies and personal supporters.   If he said anything in the meeting with Putin, it has not been reported publicly.  Putin was briefed to understand, nonetheless,  that inside Pakistan, there can be no balancing act for Sharif – he is under Munir’s control; and that between Pakistan and the US, there can be no balancing act for Munir – he is under US control.

This was explained discreetly by Putin’s Defense Minister, Andrei Belousov, in April last year. The Americans, Belousov said, “are seeking to transform the regional security system into an American-centric one by strengthening Washington-controlled military and political structures. Such actions provoke tension, undermine regional stability, and increase the risks of armed conflicts…We are closely monitoring the attempts of extra-regional states to ensure military presence and logistical missions in Central Asia. We consider this unacceptable.”

Unacceptable at the table is one thing – Belousov didn’t say what Russia is going to do about it in the field. Last March, for example, just after the US and Israel had launched new attacks and resumed their war on  Iran, Russian and Pakistani officials confirmed Sharif was about to make his first visit to Moscow. Following US consultations Munir ordered the visit cancelled.  

Sergei Shoigu – Defense Minister until he was removed in 2024 for corruption and now Secretary of the Security Council – said more last month: “Our fundamental approach is that the United States and its allies must acknowledge full responsibility for their 20-year presence in Afghanistan and assume the main burden of its post-conflict reconstruction. We consider the return of third-country military infrastructure to Afghanistan or the deployment of new military facilities in neighbouring states unacceptable.”   

Shoigu meant that at Munir’s direction, the US is planning to deploy “new military facilities” in Pakistan. By that, Russian military intelligence means covert and overt US war capacities and operational plans in Pakistan to target Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India and China in the east. .

Meaning this much at the table is one thing – what Putin is doing, according to the Pakistanis, is trying to perform a balancing act.

Putin, Belousov, Shoigu, the intelligence chiefs, and the General Staff were all educated to understand that because the material world is dialectical,   it is impossible to balance between contradictions – they will always resolve themselves one way or another. Putin’s balancing act, interpreted on the Russian side dialectically, is to make sure he is either on the winning side or never on the losing side. When Putin has put himself on the brink of the latter, the General Staff have told him “We told you so” (MVG — Мы же вам говорили).  Starting at the US putsch in Kiev in February 2014 and the threatened capture of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol, the MVG is message has been delivered many times, and continues to be delivered.

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by Editor - Monday, June 29th, 2026
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By Pelle Neroth Taylor in Stockholm, introduced by John Helmer
  @bears_with

There is almost no point in explaining, example after example, why President Vladimir Putin is mistaken in his understanding of how to deal with the propaganda war of the western world against Russia. Click.  

This is because he demonstrates his refusal to learn by continuing to pay and believe his chief propagandists in Moscow (no names) and those in the western media whom they pay (no names). Click again  and again.  

Almost no point, I said.

What remains of the point is the human right, not just to speak, assemble and publish, but to think first. This — this is the moral duty of the free-thinking person. It’s a duty that comes before religion (including religions of national superiority, no names) because faith ought to follow after thinking, oughtn’t it? If not, faith is a childish mistake, compounded for grownups by the compelling force of state power and the beguiling subversions of class and cash.   

There’s nothing in the US Bill of Rights and Constitution to protect thinking, let alone to  require it.  In fact, Article 1 of the Bill and the First Amendment explicitly put the freedom of religion first and foremost, and assign faith superiority over the freedoms to speak and to assemble.   This superiority is a constitutional guarantee for lying, propaganda, brainwashing, information warfare. At least in the law-abiding United States.

Incapacity to think, unwillingness to tell the difference between true and false, mental impairment – these aren’t terms required for the removal of a US president according to the 25^th Amendment of the Constitution. The amendment is a political subterfuge – it has kept Ronald Reagan, Joseph Biden, Donald Trump safely in office.

And so we come to this analysis of the success of the Swedish lie exposed in every respect by Pelle Neroth Taylor.

Read it and think. Think and read it again because the same lie operation is succeeding against you, wherever you are.

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by Editor - Saturday, June 27th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In the new Reason2Resist podcast, Dimitri Lascaris and I discuss the operational mistakes and strategic misjudgements which President Vladimir and his spokesman are making, as they reveal  in  statements this week their interpretations of the new Ukrainian drone  attacks, and the role the US is playing in encouraging them and guiding them on to target. Click to view or listen.

The evidence presented in the podcast can be investigated as follows.

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by Editor - Thursday, June 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When President Donald Trump (lead image, 3^rd left) announced the resignation of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (right) to make sure he would announce it himself without delay, he threw overboard the special relationship. He also declared that British foreign and domestic policy is to become – already has become — a colonial one.

In the history of British empire that hasn’t happened for almost two thousand years. Not since the Roman Emperor Claudius, accompanied by 40,000 troops, declared the island a province of his empire in 43 AD, and Emperor Hadrian followed in 122, ordering the construction of his defensive wall against the Pictish north. Today, Trump has pushed further northwards than the Romans; bought the rebellious Picts off; and constructed a golf course 230 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall.

“The special relationship is in operation right now,” Starmer had claimed in March. “We are ​working together in the region, the U.S. and the British working together to protect both the ​U.S. and the British in joint bases, where we’re jointly located and we’re sharing intelligence on a 24/7 basis in the usual way.” / 

Trump began declaring otherwise when he issued Starmer his first marching order on the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia in February.

“Our relationship with the United Kingdom is a strong and powerful one,” Trump tweeted, “and it has been for many years, but Prime Minister Starmer is losing control of this important Island by claims of entities never known of before. In our opinion, they are fictitious in nature. Should Iran decide not to make a Deal, it may be necessary for the United States to use Diego Garcia, and the Airfield located in Fairford, in order to eradicate a potential attack by a highly unstable and dangerous Regime — An attack that would potentially be made on the United Kingdom, as well as other friendly Countries. Prime Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away from the U.K. and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great Ally. We will always be ready, willing, and able to fight for the U.K., but they have to remain strong in the face of Wokeism, and other problems put before them. DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!”  

A month later, replying to Starmer’s special relationship fealty pledge, Trump said: “The United Kingdom, our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East. That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer — But we will remember. We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”  

In April, Trump told Starmer he should not have sent Peter Mandelson to Washington as UK ambassador. “He ‘exercised wrong judgement’ when he chose his Ambassador to Washington. I agree, he was a really bad pick. Plenty of time to recover, however!”  

Then on the advice of his banker and election financier Warren Stephens, the President’s ambassador in London,  Trump decided that recovery time for Starmer had run out.  He demanded he walk the plank. “Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of The United Kingdom. He failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!). I wish him well!”  

Starmer’s replacement is now a bidding contest for all aspiring British party politicians to receive Trump’s favour to take power in the next election; that must be held within three years, by August 2029.

In British voter polling of their party and prime ministerial preferences, this makes Trump more popular than Starmer of the Labour Party and Nigel Farage of the Reform Party.  Actually, at minus 64 percentage points Trump  is relatively less unpopular than Starmer and Farage.  He is still ahead, negatively speaking,  of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn;  he is trailing behind Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader.

By this measure, King Charles III is the frontrunner in the colony. He has a net favourability rating of plus 26%.    “The King and Queen got me to do something that nobody else was able to do, without hardly even asking,” Trump patronised the monarch on April 30. “In Honor of the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, who have just left the White House, soon headed back to their wonderful Country, I will be removing the Tariffs and Restrictions on Whiskey having to do with Scotland’s ability to work with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on Whiskey and Bourbon, two very important Industries within Scotland and Kentucky. People have wanted to do this for a long time, in that there had been great Inter-Country Trade, especially having to do with the Wooden Barrels used.”  

Wooden barrels for 2026 to send the same American message that teachests had in 1773.

Trailing far behind Charles III, Starmer’s likely successor, Andrew Burnham, former mayor of Greater Manchester, is starting at plus 4%.   That is so low, the empire pollsters in the White House and CIA are calculating, that Burnham will have to follow the Trump line on boosting British defence spending  on US arms procurement; on joining the permanent war against Iran; and on defending the US-Israeli genocide and redevelopment plan for Gaza.

Burnham has already made a record of his subservience on each of these issues. Click to view here, and here,  and here.   In the new podcast with Pelle Neroth Taylor (London) and Martin Sieff (Washington), we discuss the dire straits for the British and the Hormuz Strait for the Americans and Russians. Click to view or listen.

by Editor - Wednesday, June 24th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There is a mistake that warfighters sometimes make, and that wartalkers – diplomats, academics, journalists, podcasters  – always make.

That’s the mistake which Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian staff officer and mercenary against France,  made when he repeatedly told his superiors (between 1816 and 1832) that “war is no more than the continuation of  politics by other means” (Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln).  

This was —  still is —  the line which small and middle-sized kings, states,  and armies think when they are up against empires with bigger guns and more men than they have. Clausewitz’s dictum is the wishful thinking of wannabe imperialists. It’s the  lullaby — Star light, star bright/First star I see tonight/I wish I may, I wish I might/Have this wish I wish tonight. How comforting that is for children to hear — how delusional for grownups  to believe.

The dictum of real empires and genuine imperialists is the opposite – politics, for them, is no more than the continuation of war by other means. War is an end in itself because force kills argument and resistance;  genocide kills everybody; and politics has no deterrent effect to stop either. Politics —  that’s to say talking, negotiation, diplomacy, bribery, propaganda, podcasts – is a trap which emperors and their staffs set for persuading their targets to mistake the empire’s schemes for their own interests and subverting their judgements into compliance. But if and when persuasion fails, there must always be the force of killing.

Killing comes first.  JD Vance, the  Republican Party candidate to succeeed President Donald Trump, is demonstrating how this works in the talking he has led with Iran – plus Qatar and Pakistan – to achieve the US war aims in the Middle East.

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by Editor - Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

On Friday (June 19), the Governor of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), Elvira Nabiullina, returned from a three-week silence and absence from office that was due, she claimed, to a “cold” and the “loss of my voice”.  

The anti-Russia propaganda platform, Financial Times of London, reported three people in the know as calling her ailment “a severe respiratory infection”. There is a deeper malaise, the newspaper added – Nabiullina is fighting on one side of the Kremlin “splits over how to manage the strains in Vladimir Putin’s wartime economy.”

Tass, RT, Sputnik, and other Russian state media have omitted to report Nabiullina’s ailment and the Kremlin malaise.   

According to four people in the know, Nabiullina has been telling Putin that she opposes increased state budget spending on fighting the war to a conclusion on Russian terms; and that at the CBR she will continue to keep up the key interest rate in order to lower inflation and cut the budget deficit.

Whether she threatened to resign ahead of term next June if Putin did not allow her to get her way is not known for certain.

Against Nabiullina’s faction of anti-war advisers, which includes the Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and the special negotiator with the Trump White House, Kirill Dmitriev, there are the majority of the Security Council; the General Staff and its intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov;  and the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. They have repeatedly and publicly signaled their advice to Putin to escalate on the battlefield with “systemic and consistent” attacks  because the trust-in-Trump (TiT) line has failed to deliver an end-of-war settlement guaranteeing Russian security.

Both Medvedev and Lavrov have publicly declared that Trump’s August 2025 “Anchorage formula” for the security guarantee has proved to be empty deceit. “It’s time to openly declare that there are no more rules regarding neo-Nazi Kiev and there can’t be any”, Medvedev has reportedly declared.   “Everything now depends not on negotiations but on what our frontline heroes are doing,” Lavrov announced on June 8.  

Yury Ushakov, the president’s spokesman for the trust-in-Trump line, announced on Sunday (June 21): “Russia does not expect the implementation of the agreements reached in Anchorage, but counts on the victory and the implementation of its own goals…Only one of the parties [Putin] adheres to the agreements today. Another [Trump] was not quite able to go through his part.”  

At the same time as Putin authorized Ushakov to issue this signal, he also authorized Nabiullina to give a contradictory one.  

At a meeting of government ministers in Nabiullina’s absence on June 10, Putin had claimed: “Overall, the [domestic economic] situation is under control – that much is quite obvious. And the measures we have taken are yielding the expected results. In fact, the inflation rate has declined. Where are we at this point? It is slightly over five percent. Therefore, I believe that we can expect a lower key interest rate and to be able to achieve other key indicators.”   

That was the marching order for Nabiullina to lower the CBR’s key rate. But then on Friday (June 19)  she announced the smallest possible reduction in the rate – twenty-five basis points – and threatened to raise it again between now and the national parliamentary election on September 18-20.  

“On 19 June 2026, the Bank of Russia Board of Directors decided to cut the key rate by 25 basis points to 14.25% per annum,” Nabiullina’s press office said. “The underlying price growth has edged down but remains generally in the range of 4–5% in annualised terms…Lending growth has accelerated in recent months. Fiscal policy over the three-year horizon will be more accommodative than previously expected. This may require a higher key rate path than assumed in the April baseline scenario.”

By “accommodative” Nabiullina meant to rebuke Putin for refusing to cut the war budget or social welfare spending during the election campaign.

Nabiullina repeated for the press the threat that she might not take the President’s orders in the future. “I would like to emphasise that neither a further key rate cut nor the size of it is predetermined at any particular meeting. We might need to take pauses to analyse all incoming information and the effect of our earlier decisions. It is only by maintaining a balanced approach, especially amid high uncertainty.”  

This was her riposte to Putin’s announcement of the week before that he wants an increase in government spending and therefore an increase in the budget deficit. “Mr Siluanov talked about the budget,” Putin said. ”It goes without saying that we must launch a new investment cycle taking into consideration present-day reality, as well as the proposals we have just heard from the business community. I think that this much is obvious.”  

The clash between the factions over the CBR’s key rate has been public in Moscow for months (years ).  Not quite public, but not secret, is Nabiullina’s attempts to manipulate both monetary and fiscal policy to bring the Ukraine war to an end on the US and NATO terms.  

Still hidden, however, is Nabiullina’s attempt to sabotage Russian military and financial assistance to Iran in the war against the US and Israel.

Last week, the Iranian Central Bank Governor, Abdolnasser Hemmati, was in Moscow with a delegation of experts to discuss measures to protect rouble-rial reserves and trade payments from US and European sanctions, and to enable a substantial increase in Russian financial assistance to the embattled government in Teheran.  That assistance now includes a Russian loan of up to $20 billion in roubles.

The agenda for these negotiations was announced in the Iranian and Turkish state media; they have followed up with detailed reports of the outcomes agreed so far.

In contrast, the CBR press office has imposed a blackout on the meetings; the Russian media have remained silent. Asked to confirm which CBR officials Hemmati met last week in Moscow, and what they have agreed to do, Nabiullina’s press spokesman refused to answer.

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by Editor - Monday, June 22nd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

US Vice President JD Vance, a Roman Catholic, has launched his presidential campaign for 2028 with the sharpest attack ever made on Israel and the Jewish bloc around President Donald Trump.

He has also promised American voters their pockets are about to start filling up as their gas tank costs less at the pump. “The fact that you’ve seen gas come down about 65 cents a gallon on the national average,…I think you’re going to see a substantial reduction in gas prices…you’re going to see significant relief at the pump on top of what we’ve already seen.”

“Praise Jesus” he declared in the White House Briefing Room.  

“You’re a country of nine million people,” Vance warned Israel and its supporters in an interview which followed in the New York Times. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

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by Editor - Friday, June 19th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Russian officials are insisting in private that tomorrow’s (June 19) signing of the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), with its fourteen points, is the signal for finalizing a similar multi-point term sheet for agreement with the US to halt the war on the Ukrainian battlefield.

They also insist —  add sources in a position to know —  that the Trump Administration is promising the lifting of US sanctions on the Russian oil trade and on the alternative fleet which has been carrying these oil cargoes to buyers in India, China, Turkey, and elsewhere. The sources claim that the Russian military plan for the peace pause assumes a ceasefire, including a halt to Ukrainian drone attacks, for at least the remaining two years of President Donald Trump’s term – longer if he is succeeded by Vice President JD Vance or by one of Trump’s sons. The Russian intelligence forecast is for a Republican victory in the 2028 presidential election.

If the future is this rosy, or if it only looks that way through rose-coloured glasses, what is to become of the UKRAINIZATION of drone warfighting operations now extending across the NATO bases, NATO drone manufacturing plants, and NATO exercises, deployment, and operational plans to prepare to fire them at Russian targets?

What is to become, also, of the AMERICANIZATION of security for Russia in Europe which President Vladimir Putin insists he discussed – one on one and in fluent English – and agreed with Trump at their Anchorage, Alaska,  summit meeting  last August 15? This is what Russian officials call the Anchorage Formula   – it means trust in Trump to deliver a security guarantee protecting Russia from the drone, missile, and other attacks currently under way on the Russian hinterland, on Crimea and the Donbass, and on Russian oil and gas cargoes moving to market on the high seas.

The Russian General Staff and its chief intelligence officer, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, believe that Americanization will put a pause on Ukrainization for at least the year ahead. These officers don’t give any credit for negotiating this pause to Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special negotiator with Trump’s bagmen, Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner; nor to the individual bribe schemes and slush funds they have been discussing together.  

And so the sources in a position to know are asking each other — if Ukrainization and Americanization are about to be implemented by an MoU-type paper for at least a year or two, what about the DENAZIFICATION of the regime currently ruling the Ukraine?  That has been a Russian war objective from the beginning of the Special Military Operation. It has been operationalized on term sheets in the Istanbul and Abu Dhabi talks as regime change in Kiev by an election to replace Vladimir Zelensky and his associates. The alternative is regime decapitation by military means or by covert methods.  

In the new discussion with Chris Cook, today’s Gorilla Radio podcast explains why the combination of Ukrainization of the war, Americanization of the peace, and Denazification of regimes is a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.  

Click to listen, starting at Minute 30 with the song, “This is not a Russian narrative, actually – let’s talk about reality”.

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by Editor - Thursday, June 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The general rule on the battlefield is Bang! Bang! You’re dead!

The general rule of White House and Kremlin politics is Bang! Bang! Maybe you’re dead! Maybe I’m dead! Maybe we’re both alive to fight the next round! Meantime let’s all get richer!

Hors de combat in war means you’re either KIA or too wounded to fight on. In politics, you aren’t KIA if your pockets keep filling up.

In the war which the US is waging in the Middle East to destroy the remaining resistance to its control over the flows of the region’s oil, gas, and money which is led by Iran,  President Donald Trump thinks he has won. He has destroyed, he says,  twenty years of the Iranian economy, military capacities, and domestic support for the regime, whose leadership he has transformed by killing. “The first group, they’re all dead. The second group, they’re dead. A part of the third group is gone, and we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people,” Trump said yesterday.       

The cost, he thinks, is about to be paid by what Vice President JD Vance calls the “Gulf Coast coalition”.  They will pay Teheran reparations for their war losses through a $300 billion fund Trump officials will regulate in exchange for which their shipping out and in to their economies will be released from interception at the Strait of Hormuz and tolls.  

Trump will get more protection money than ever before from Qatar, he has just been assured by its ruler, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. “We are here to help whenever, you know, um friends ask us to help,” Hamad said – “we’re always here, uh, to help. Of course, also our bilateral relationship, Mr. President, since your historic visit in Doha last year, our, uh, trade partnership is gonna reach $1.2 trillion.”    

Trump corrected the Emir on the price. “Qatar is going to be investing much more than $1 trillion in the United States. We have over 18, it’s going to be 19.4 or so when the new figures are out, but, you know, we set a record. There’s never been anything like it…We’ll be having, uh, almost 19.1, $19.2 trillion invested in the United States.”  

In a following conversation with Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan  (MbZ) of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Trump repeated himself: The UAE, he claimed, has “invested trillions of dollars in the United States. And I was telling them [Qataris] before, in another meeting, that we have over $19 trillion being invested in the United States, which is a record, and it’s building factories, car plants, everything. We’re doing things that have never been done. The record was $3 billion many years ago with a different country, and we’re going to be over $19 trillion…I think we’ll hit $19.3 trillion.”  

MbZ has promised to match the al-Thani payment. “It is my pleasure, Mr. President, to be with you here. And I want to say…thank you for your support, your commitment to your friend, to your allies, and especially, thank you for your support during the six war — six-week war.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Trump replied. “See, when you’re that rich, you can speak that lowly [sic]. I was just wondering, can anybody hear that? But when you’re so rich, you have such confidence that you don’t have to do any strain to the voice.”  

Trump is right. There’s never been an American extortion and protection scheme as rich as this one in the Middle East. The shakedown dwarfs the Pentagon outlay of $29 billion for the men, munitions and equipment spent on the war against Iran since February 28.    

The Trump take also dwarfs the US budget allocation of cash and arms to Israel since the beginning of Gaza war in October 2023 – about $22 billion so far.  

Israel’s only mistake, Trump said aloud to the Qatari ruler, was not to capture southern Lebanon and destroy Hezbollah’s men and fortifications as quickly as he, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Trump’s Jewish advisers in Washington told him they were expecting. Asked if he’s disappointed with Netanyahu, Trump said: “we’re talking about, uh, some end details. I didn’t like that he, uh, did an attack based on a, you know, there’s a very minor, uh, little thing with some drones that were released and he ends up doing a very, I saw that attack… I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It, it just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal and that’s the deal with Iran. So, so, uh, when you ask me about Bibi, an unbelievable relationship. But Israel would have been blown up a long time ago had I not gotten involved.”      

Trump, Vance, and the White House election strategists are also calculating that by opening the Hormuz Strait now – with four and half months still go before the Congressional elections in November – and forcing the oil price downwards, they will cut the Democratic Party’s  gains in the House of Representatives to less than 20;  and in the Senate to just two. That would preserve Republican Party control of the Senate with a narrower majority than it has had. It would also protect Trump and his family by blocking a two-House vote for either  impeachment or removal of Trump on the  disability provision of the Constitution.

Trust-in-Trump (TiT) — in the Kremlin’s factional politics, President Vladimir Putin is now risking his party control of the State Duma in the September elections, and his succession for the 2030 election, by sticking to this strategy. TiT is what  he and his advisers call the Anchorage Formula.  Those advisers want a quick end to the Ukraine war on US and NATO terms, and a sharp cut to the Russian military budget so that it cannot fight the long war which the US, Germany, the UK,  and the other Europeans have in mind.

One of the TiT faction is Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina. She is now meeting in Moscow with an Iranian Central Bank delegation led by Abdolnaser Hemmati.  He has just been in Qatar negotiating the release of Iranian bank assets frozen on US orders. Hemmati has come to Moscow to work out a scheme for Iranian-Russian fund transfers to preserve and expand the vital military trade between the two armies as they face the same enemies.

Watch closely to see if Nabiullina stonewalls and sabotages Hemmati.   Returning from “sick leave” of almost a month, Nabiullina will face the press on Friday (June 19).

To interpret what happens next, click to view or listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid. 

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by Editor - Thursday, June 18th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As they study the record of the US negotiations for an end to the Iran war, Russian and Chinese intelligence reporters have recently concluded that President Vladimir Putin should now refocus his talks strategy on Vice President JD Vance; ignore Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, discredited by their performance in Israel and Iran; and put an end to the role with the Americans of Kirill Dmitriev.

Russian sources with direct knowledge say the Chinese assessment of Dmitriev, leaked through Hong Kong and Singapore, is even more scathing than Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s. His  private condemnation of Dmitriev’s performance has surfaced in publicly expressed scepticism towards the trust-in-Trump (TiT) interpretation of the Anchorage Formula which Dmitriev promotes.  

The trust-in-Trump line was put on display on Sunday (June 14) when Putin claimed to be the first foreign leader to telegraph Trump with 80^th birthday wishes,  and an hour later elaborate in Putin’s fluent English over the telephone with Trump for forty-five minutes.

According to Putin’s spokesman Yury Ushakov, Putin “highlighted the exceptional character traits of the man he was honouring – traits that contribute to his success both as a person and as a politician. Donald Trump was touched by the remarks and thanked Vladimir Putin, noting that he was the first foreign leader to call him at the White House… I will even let you in on a secret: Donald Trump is not entirely thrilled by the number 80, as he is full of energy and vigour.”   

Asked by a knowing Russian journalist if Putin had sent “birthday gifts” to Trump, Ushakov said no on the line, yes below the line: “No gifts were sent but, as I have already said, the greetings were quite warm and reflective of the relations between the two presidents.”  

“Relations between the two presidents” mean the bribery schemes through which Dmitriev, Witkoff and Kushner have been negotiating their version of the Anchorage Formula since the presidents’ summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last August. They have included a scheme  to convert the $300 billion of Russia’s frozen Central Bank foreign currency assets into a fund for investment in the Ukraine and in the new Russian territories – a fund to be co-managed by nominees of Dmitriev, Witkoff and Kushner.

The consensus of Russia’s Security Council, however, including the General Staff, military intelligence chief Admiral Igor Kostyukov, deputy Council chairman and former president Dmitry Medvedev, and Foreign Minister Lavrov is that the bribery schemes have come, will come to nothing.  

In the assessments of foreign officials to whom these Russians have confided – the Hong Kong and Singapore sources now claim – the trust-in-Trump (TiT) strategy has failed because Trump cannot deliver the US security guarantee for Russia in Europe. The alternative is the Vanchorage strategy at the White House, which, the sources expect, will gain in domestic strength after the Congressional elections in November, and in the race for the presidential succession to follow.  

Likewise, the announcements of the memorandum of understanding for the staged end-of-war with Iran —  initialled by US and Iran officials, scheduled for official signing on Friday —  reveal that the Iranians and Americans have tacitly agreed it will be Vance, not Trump’s men, Witkoff and Kushner, who is now relied upon to finalize the terms during the 60-day ceasefire stage.

Vance signalled he is taking this lead in a seven-and-a-half minute briefing  televised by CBS on Monday. This is the Vanchorage Formula he agreed with Trump during the birthday celebration at the White House over the weekend.  Vance agrees on the concession terms between the two sides; Trump has accepted the risk of deal failure but is claiming the public credit for deal success. Trump, in the Vanchorage Formula, is also responsible for pacifying the regime in Tel Aviv and the Jewish community in Washington.

“We certainly expect the Israelis will be a participant in this process,” Vance told CBS. “But we think it’s going to be good for them. It’s going to be good for us. It’s going to be good for the Gulf Coast coalition…and if the Iranians comply with their end of the bargain, it’s going to be good for Iran.”

According to the confidential sources, the European leaders who promise continuity in the war against Russia “see and understand Russia and Putin’s system far better than Dmitriev and Putin can acknowledge,  and so they are hitting at it. Putin’s best chance now is to follow the Iranian lead on military escalation and Vance’s lead on negotiation.”

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, June 18th, 2026
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