By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When it comes to heads of state and government like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t shine often enough to reveal what they say in secret so that this can be compared with what they are saying in public at the same time; and in order for the record they are making to be measured against the records of their predecessors and successors.  

That sun can shine on the future if it exposes enough of the past. When White House and presidential documents from the past are declassified and published years after they were filed, they reveal a great deal about truth-telling (that’s called history); about the character of the individuals (psychopathology); about calculated and miscalculated deception (war).

From the release of White House records on private meetings and telephone conversations over the past decade, much has been learned from Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin out of their own mouths – which the Kremlin continues to keep shut. For example, here are some of the records on Yeltsin (2016)   and two years later in 2018.   The records of Putin speaking in secret with President George Bush can be read here (2025)  and here (2026)  

For much longer the sun has been shining on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. However, because Kissinger managed to stay alive for so long, public release of the tape-recordings he made himself of his telephone calls with Nixon, as well as with other White House and administration officials has been delayed until now. Tom Wells, an American historian,   has just published the book, The Kissinger Tapes — Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations.    The records start in January 1969 and end in August 1974. The new book leaves out Kissinger’s secret tapes of his time in the Gerald Ford Administration, 1974-77.   

Wells introduces his record with the story of how Kissinger cleaned and changed the transcripts of what he had said, and also prevented the release of the sanitized version while he remained alive; he died on November 29, 2023.  There are about 15,000 telephone records and 20,000 pages of transcript for the Nixon period.

For the first time this archive allows comparisons between the Kissinger-Nixon record and the record which President Donald Trump is making today. From this comparison, it is possible, as never before, to show that Trump’s foul mouth is no fouler than Nixon’s and Kissinger’s mouths were. “Bullshit” was the Nixon-Kissinger preference; it was recorded thirteen times. On February 5, 1972, for example, when Nixon was anxious that his orders for bombing North Vietnam were not being implemented, “bullshit” was his way of emphasizing that he wouldn’t brook delay at the Pentagon. “Give him [US Army Chief of Staff, General Creighton Abrams] this responsibility to see that carriers are moving and the [B-]52s are moving. I don’t want any bullshit…I want the air force and navy to follow this without compromise. I want them to hit everything in the B-3 area [Central Highlands of South Vietnam] or northern part of the DMZ…Knock the hell out of them. One of the problems before was that they never concentrated on anything.”

“Shit” was less popular; used four times by Nixon, three times by Kissinger referring to people they disliked. “Fuck” was used three times by Kissinger, once by Nixon. “Prick” was used once in five years – in Nixon’s hearing by his friend and lawyer, Leonard Garment. The two of them  meant it about the Republican Senator, Lowell Weicker.

Trump has made his swear words public to appeal to US voters; Nixon and Kissinger kept theirs a state secret. The difference isn’t between them; it’s between the way the American public and media interpreted the expletives then and interpret them now.  

It is also revealed for the first time that a half-century ago, the White House believed there was an exceptional “fondness” for the Jews inside the Kremlin just as the Trump White House knows it of Putin today.  Then Leonid Brezhnev was sitting in the General Secretary’s seat of the  Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “Hebrew”, Kissinger was saying on the telephone on June 11, 1973 —  “I think he [Brezhnev] would love, particularly given the Russian fondness with Jews.”

Kissinger was speaking at the time with the chief executive of Paramount Pictures about the dubbing of films Kissinger was requesting for the entertainment of Brezhnev when he arrived in Washington for a state visit. On paper and in retrospect today, this comment may be interpreted as sarcasm, meaning the reverse. The telephone record of 53 years ago suggests not. In the Trump White House there is no secret of their confidence in, and no sarcasm about Putin’s fondness for the Jews. 

(more…)

by Editor - Sunday, May 31st, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Vladimir Putin has ordered his two spokesmen, Dmitry Peskov and Yury Ushakov, to deny Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that the General Staff has been authorized to escalate war operations to regime decapitation in the Ukraine.

On Monday evening, May 25,  Lavrov telephoned US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and told him he was speaking for Putin: “On behalf of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin,” the readout said, “S.V. Lavrov officially brought to the American side information that in response to the ongoing terrorist attacks of the Kiev regime against the civilian population and civilian objects on the Russian territory, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation begin systemic and consistent strikes on the facilities located in Kiev, used for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and on the relevant decision-making centres.”   

Lavrov was repeating the new phrase, “systemic and consistent”, which his ministry had published in reverse order four hours earlier.  

Russian “patience is exhausted,” the ministry had declared. “In this situation, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are beginning to launch consistent and systemic strikes at enterprises of the Ukrainian defence industry in Kiev, including specific facilities for designing, manufacturing and programming drones and preparing them for operation…We are urging residents of the Ukrainian capital not to approach facilities of the military and administrative infrastructure of the Zelensky regime.”  

The Russian statements followed the strike over Saturday night-Sunday morning (May 23-24) by an Oreshnik missile on the Bela Tserkva airbase, south of Kiev, which doubles as an underground drone factory  and a military command-control bunker. Click for a summary of local and Russian reporting of the targets.  

The Oreshnik failed, according to Moscow sources.

No high-ranking casualties have been reported by either the Russian or Ukrainian media; there has been no evidence of emergency ambulance movements and medical evacuation flights taking high-ranking casualties to hospitals in Poland, Germany, or the US. There was a reported surge of medevac flights from  Rzeszow,  but that occurred on May 22, before the Oreshnik strike on Bela Tsekrkva.   

Surface damage at Bela Tserkva recorded on social media shows no greater damage than earlier drone strikes at Bela Tserkva last August.  

Former president and deputy head of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev called the Oreshnik, Iskander, Zircon and Kinzhal missile operation, including the Kiev city targets hit, a success in a strategy of persuading Ukrainian hearts and minds; this has not been publicly declared as a war aim by the Security Council before. “The ruins and gray ash on the site of their capital symbols,” Medvedev claimed, “demoralize the enemy no weaker than the loss of the battle banner.”  

Lieutenant General (retired) Andrei Kartapolov, head of the State Duma Defense Committee,  repeated that the weekend strikes were a new operational initiative. But he qualified the targeting: the aim, he said, is not the Ukrainian parliament Verkhovna Rada but instead “decision-making centres [which are] underground fortified [military] command and control centres…you need to understand that they are not located in the centre of Kiev. These are hidden, well-fortified points. And our task is to identify them and expose them with the help of existing weapons.”     

Kartapolov added that the decision on whether this new decapitation operation now extends to Vladimir Zelensky is made by “only one person – our Supreme Commander-in-Chief”. About Putin’s decision — signed, suspended, postponed, canceled — Kartapolov said he preferred “not to engage in speculation”. This was published on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 26.

Putin had decided already to announce he didn’t mean decapitation at all.

He ordered first spokesman Peskov to deny Lavrov’s statement. “Systemic does not imply any specific frequency. It doesn’t mean regular,” Peskov announced. “In fact, the Foreign Ministry laid it all out clearly in its statement,” Peskov added, reversing what the ministry statement had said.  

For the President,  Peskov had more to say.  “We generally prefer to achieve our goals peacefully, by diplomatic means”, he claimed on Thursday (May 28).   Peskov added that Putin is looking forward to a new round of talks with Trump’s messengers,  Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner: “As soon as they are ready, we will be glad to see them and we, indeed, wait for their arrival. As soon as time allows them to do that.”  By his last sentence, Peskov meant the US war against Iran.

Second spokesman Ushakov followed on May 28 with more disclaimer from Putin: “regarding [the question of] the Russian military’s shift to systematic strikes on defence industry facilities in Kiev, but has not yet received a response [from Trump]: We have issued a statement on this matter, and our recommendation has also been conveyed to the Americans through the appropriate channels. As far as I know, no response has been received yet… Russia has not conveyed any message from Russian President Vladimir Putin to US leader Donald Trump regarding the strikes on defence industry facilities in Kiev: No, no message has been conveyed.”   

By the phrase “no message has been conveyed”, Ushakov meant that Lavrov had not been authorized to speak on Putin’s behalf to Rubio, as Lavrov had claimed. Ushakov’s use of the phrase “defence industry facilities” meant that  he was denying that “decision-making centres” are the new targets. Out of Ushakov’s mouth, Putin is now overriding and countermanding the foreign minister and the lieutenant general speaking for the General Staff and for parliament.

This is the first time in the four years of the Special Military Operation – the first time in Lavrov’s history as foreign minister – that the Kremlin has publicly contradicted him and repudiated one of his statements. Twice over in ninety seconds.  

Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special emissary for negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner – faction leader against Lavrov, Medvedev,  and the General Staff — tweeted with Putin’s authority that “if Ukraine has a critical shortage of air-defense missiles, it may be better to focus on peace than on provocations and escalation. Peace is always the best strategy.”  

This is Dmitriev’s signal that Putin expects Trump to deal with Zelensky, and that Putin will not allow his General Staff to do the job for him.

No system targeting, no consistency, no frequency, no end of war before the September elections — no change.

by Editor - Thursday, May 28th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Reading is more effective for understanding Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi than listening.

This is because reading uses more of your brain to process the incoming information, compare and fact-check it, than listening or viewing podcasts.

American brain scientists report new experiments which prove this. “To mirror the transient nature of spoken sentences, visual input was presented in rapid serial visual presentation format. The results showed a common core of amodal left inferior frontal and middle temporal gyri activation, as well as modality specific brain activation associated with listening and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was associated with more left-lateralized activation and with left inferior occipital cortex (including fusiform gyrus) activation. Listening comprehension was associated with extensive bilateral temporal cortex activation and more overall activation of the whole cortex.”  

In other words, think of yourself as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine with less electricity for powering your chips to process a smaller data base, and that’s you listening. When reading, however, you are going full throttle with more chips processing more calculations at a faster speed with a bigger database.    

There’s also a big difference in the power of thinking triggered by radio broadcasts compared to video podcasts.

When you read text, you control the speed. Your eyes scan shapes, link them to sounds, and allow you to pause or re-read to grasp complex ideas. With podcasts, the brain is forced to process at the speaker’s speed. Because spoken words are a continuous, fleeting stream, your working memory must work harder to retain information before it vanishes. When you listen and view a podcast, your brain processes the speaker’s vocal inflections, rhythm, and tone, which naturally adds emotional context and influences intuitive reasoning.

That’s a neuroscientific euphemism for persuasion.   

In the podcast called Judging Freedom, for example —  sponsored by firms selling money betting  on the price of gold, silver and other commodity futures —  retired army officers speak from interior decoration behind them which includes campaign citations and busts of victorious generals like Napoleon and Ulysses Grant; professors from desks and bookcases loaded with texts;  and spy agency veterans with antique furnishings acquired on undercover Middle Eastern postings. This display is meant to overload the cortex with data irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the information being propagated. You are meant to think you’ve come to your conclusions and convictions because the source is credible to look at, not because the evidence is accurate in the reading (and checking). Your short-term memory loses the data and cannot double-check; it remembers that you believed the man on the screen. That’s propaganda and subversion for you.

Gorilla Radio, presented from Canada for the past twenty-five years by Chris Cook, beats these AI limitations. It uses the auditory cortex but frees the visual cortex to double-check the readable world – without the interior decoration. It’s the antidote to propaganda.

So when Trump launches missile attacks on Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz and bombs targets in the port of Bandar Abbas, at the same time as he, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio   say they are hopeful of negotiating end-of-war terms with Iran, the meaning of the contradictory and confusing data is best transmitted by this new broadcast.

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 27th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Zugzwang is the position between adversaries when one is forcing the other to make the next move, but whatever move he makes will be his defeat.

President Donald Trump (lead image, left) is in it.

The only way out for him is to play for time, disguising his predicament with as much noise, camouflage, and confusion as his supporters can manage.

When this happens to presidents, everyone who can deserts him while throwing up subterfuges, shams, and smokescreens. This is what Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the leading candidates to succeed Trump in two years’ time, are doing.  

Those whose corrupt fortunes tie them to Trump and his successor, Eric Trump, have no alternative but to do all they can to damage the Democratic Party alternative.  This requires a combination of making war against Iran, Russia and China; making peace to reduce the price of oil, fertilizers, and inflation at home; making the European, British, and Asian allies nervous enough to keeping paying and stay loyal.

Inside the Deep State —  where the supply of money depends every budget season on action, not inaction; operations which Congressional committees like to vote for, not those they dislike and vote against — there is a loosening of vertical command and oversight from the White House, an increase in experiments, adventures, trial balloons, faits accomplis, stabs in the back. The Central Command operation on Monday, May 25, for example, was announced as “self-defense strikes in southern Iran today to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.”  It achieved nothing militarily. Politically, however, it drew Trump’s prompt endorsement: “Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are proceeding nicely! It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before.”   He then added a reminder of who his real targets are:  “The Dumacrats and Media have totally lost their way. They have gone absolutely CRAZY!!!”  

Trump also warned his successors and their campaign financiers that he isn’t a lame duck yet. “Just finished my 6 month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY. Thank you to the great Doctors and Staff! Heading back to the White House.”  

Zugzwang is also the position in which Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping find themselves uncomfortably. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too.

If  Russia, China and India each face wars with multiple adversaries led by Trump, what is to be done to conserve their domestic political power and maintain enough escalation control on their battlefields to deter Trump’s adventurism. When a Ukrainian press agency asked for China’s reaction to the escalation of Russian strikes against the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev on Sunday, the spokesman for Foreign Minister Wang Yi responding for President Xi answered: “China’s position on the Ukraine crisis is consistent and clear. Dialogue and negotiation is the only viable way out. We call on parties concerned to work together for deescalation as soon as possible and accumulate conditions for restarting dialogue and negotiation.” 

Saying nothing, doing nothing is a zugzwang, too.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, May 26th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The best way of learning how the men inside the Kremlin think is in the history of the Byzantine Empire which began in the 4^th century AD and whose last day, the anniversary of the empire’s last day,  we celebrate this week – May 29, 1453.

The Kremlin men, fresh from their trip to the Forbidden City in Bejing, don’t think the American Empire will last for a comparable thousand years. They also don’t believe, like the Chinese, that the American Empire is close to an end which Russians and Chinese should be preparing to celebrate.

In their manuals of tactics and strategy and in the annals of their negotiations,  treaties, and wars, the Byzantines, like the Kremlin men, tell themselves that the best way of deterring an enemy’s army from  testing the red lines they say they will defend is,  first of all,  to announce their red lines; and then to bribe the enemy from crossing them. Only if the bribes are paid, the red lines crossed by force, and the bribetakers have reneged, is war inescapable.

At that point, the Byzantines long accepted, the force to be applied to those enemies who have violated the commitments they took bribes to accept must be  ruthless, comprehensive, total.

“Do nothing unless you really have to,” advised the Byzantine treatise on strategy, De Re Strategica,  composed in  the 10^th century AD, “but watch the enemy’s moves carefully, so that you can strike effectively if action is unavoidable.”  

Bribery was a strategic method for achieving political objectives by postponing war. It was more predictable in outcome and cost less to carry out. But the Byzantine emperors and their advisers and commanders also understood that bribery is temporary because it’s always personal, psychological. One way  they employed it to extend its effectiveness was to lull the bribe receivers into false confidence in their power, kill them, and replace them with newcomers whose lack of confidence increased their dependence on fresh bribes and thus delayed their readiness to go to war.   

Buying time with a combination of bribes and regime decapitation has been the strategy of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their war against Iran in June of last year and since February 28 of this year. But this has been a failure; time is now running against them both.

They have also failed on one of the Byzantine strategist’s pieces of psychological advice – never hate your enemy so much that you don’t understand him, can’t anticipate him, or you end up underestimating his capacity to deceive you and succeed in his counterattack.

President Vladimir Putin doesn’t play chess like the Byzantines and he hasn’t studied their strategy history, especially the annals  where they explain how and why they defeated the Russians. Putin  and his associates have also failed to follow another of the Byzantine strategist’s pieces of psychology – never love your enemy, or want to be loved by him so much that you end up underestimating his capacity to deceive and counterattack.

In the Kremlin department of loving the Americans and wanting to be loved by them too much, the vizier in charge is Kirill Dimitriev, Putin’s special representative for arranging bribes to Trump, his sons, and friends.  

“The sad reality”, concludes  a modern Greek historian of Byzantium, “that the emperors in Constantinople had to face was that the limited resources in money and manpower constituted the waging of war in more than one theatre an almost inconceivable prospect, especially since the maintaining of an active army posed a heavy burden”.  Their solution “was to praise the use of diplomacy, the paying of subsidies, and the employment of stratagems, craft, wiles, bribery and ‘other means’ to deceive the enemy and bring back the army with as few casualties as possible; a strategy of non-engagement that made perfect sense in military terms.”  

A Jewish historian of Byzantium in his manual for the Israeli leadership has warned that the “strategic advantage that was neither diplomatic nor military [is] instead psychological”. It’s a warning they haven’t comprehended. “Subversion is the best path to victory. It is so cheap compared to the costs and risk of battle that it must always be attempted, even with the most unpromising  targets infused with hostility ior religious ardour…the Byzantines had certainly discovered that religious fanatics can also be bribed, and indeed often more easily – they are creative in inventing religious justifications for taking bribes…”

In the new Capitals Uncovered podcast with Pelle Neroth Taylor (Sweden) and Martin Sieff (US), we focus on how to interpret the Russian General Staff’s Oreshnik strikes on command bunkers in Kiev and Bela Tserkva, and what to expect next if, as the Russians believe, Trump has signalled a green light to the escalation of their military operations.

(more…)

by Editor - Monday, May 25th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russian missile attack on central Kiev and on the airbase bunker at Bela Tserkva, 75 kilometres south of Kiev, over Saturday evening and Sunday morning, was a calibrated retaliation for the Ukrainian attack on the children’s dormitory at Starobelsk, Lugansk region,  on Friday.

Measured tit for tat against neo-Nazi terrorism — that is how the Kremlin believes it will deter Ukrainian escalation of the war against Russia.

The official Russian Defense Ministry announcement, issued late on Sunday afternoon (May 24), identified the missiles used as Oreshnik, Kinzhal, Iskander,  and Zircon.

The targets were “objects of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex, military infrastructure, as well as the control points of the Main Command of the Army, the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and other control points of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”  

This is regime decapitation for Ukrainian military commanders, not for the civilian leadership of Vladimir Zelensky.

Russian sources in a position to know also say that President Vladimir Putin now believes his campaign of bribes for President Donald Trump, his family, his negotiators and their business associates has achieved a new level of freedom to act against the Zelensky regime by military means because negotiations for a peace settlement have failed and ended.

“They were not fruitful, unfortunately,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged at a NATO meeting in Sweden on Friday (May 22). “Despite leaks that are not true, despite stories out there about us forcing the Ukrainians to take this position or that position, which are not true, we – if we see an opportunity to pull together talks that are productive, not counterproductive, and that have the chance to be fruitful, we’re prepared to play that role.  There are – there are no such talks occurring at this time, but we hope that will change because that war can only end with a negotiated settlement.  It will not end with a military victory by one side or the other, at least from a traditional standpoint of how military victories are defined.”

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had already acknowledged that the negotiating framework Putin and President Donald Trump had agreed on last August – the Anchorage Formula  – has come to nothing, and that the Russian army will bring the war to an end on its terms. “Many good words are being said about the enormous potential for mutually beneficial, modern, technological, energy-related, and other projects between Russia and the United States. However, nothing is happening in real life…we will achieve the goals of the special military operation under any circumstances. Preferably through diplomatic means, but if not, we will continue to do so within the framework of the special military operation.”    

Putin believes he is being clear in his public statements.

In his address after the Starobelsk attack, he said “it is clear to us, and it is once again made evident, whom we are dealing with, whom we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for. This constitutes a manifestation of neo-Nazism. It once again serves to confirm the terrorist nature of the Kiev regime.”  

“What makes things even worse for the ruling elite is the all-consuming corruption that is rotting society from within – corruption the regime’s leaders are covering for. In reality, they are participants in these corrupt schemes themselves. That is why they then help each other flee the country, seeking refuge in Israel and elsewhere abroad. Everyone – in Ukraine and around the world – knows that the Ukrainian government is corrupt through and through. Embezzlement everywhere. It has got to the point where they are stealing military equipment and personal protective gear meant for those being driven to the front like cattle, sent to die for the very people who are plundering Ukraine and its foreign aid.”

“The Kiev regime clearly needs crimes like this. They need them to distract attention from what is happening at the front and inside the country, to provoke a reaction from Russia – and then, we know this, we have seen it many times before – to blame everything on us. On Russia. On our country. All the escalation, all the consequences of such crimes. I repeat, we have been here many times before.”  

This was the first time that Putin has identified Israel on the side of Russia’s enemies in the war, and as a safe haven for the Jewish members of the Zelensky regime on the civilian side, not the military command.

Was Putin signalling that he is now lifting his restriction on the General Staff plans targeting  Zelensky and  his civilians because they are “neo-Nazi terrorists”?

A Russian source in a position to know says yes. “The Anchorage formula looked like Putin’s agreement with Trump that he would push Zelensky into agreeing terms in diplomatic negotiations. In fact, it was agreement on the bribes to be paid to Trump in return for Russian freedom of action if Zelensky wouldn’t agree. Now the deal is – you [Trump] don’t have to deliver Zelensky. We [Russia] can take him out.”

Another source confirms the confidence of Kremlin officials that the Trump “fix is in – the war will end in three more months.”

Listen or view the discussion with Dimitri Lascaris in the Reason2Resist podcast, recorded on Sunday morning, Moscow time.  

by Editor - Sunday, May 24th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“The mutual respect the Chinese side asks us to show towards them when they respond with a theory of their supremacy over time over our dead bodies – that is offensive. For this to come from the Politburo of the Communist Party of China is more than strange. It’s a fundamental historical mistake. It doesn’t seem quite like the Communist Party of China feels that comrades are comrades.”

Click to view or listen to the podcast which was first aired on Friday afternoon, Europe time; morning US time.  

by Editor - Sunday, May 24th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

“We are not fighting anyone”, President Vladimir Putin announced in Beijing this week to the reassurance of his host, President Xi Jinping. “We are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States.”

Xi replied privately, also with reassurance for the US.  The US first, Russia second.

Publicly, this has been expressed by his  Politburo colleague Wang Yi as “win-win cooperation”,  and by Xi as “constructive strategic stability” and “win-win” with the US.    

More precisely, this is “comprehensive strategic stalemate”, according to a newly released report from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.  “Deep intertwining interests and complex interdependence are another major reason and feature of the new phase of the strategic stalemate between China and the U.S. Unlike the nearly parallel US-Soviet relationship during the Cold War, China and the US are increasingly forming an economic and trade relationship that is both complementary and mutually beneficial but also “easily manipulated and disrupted by the other…Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, China has united as one, daring and combative, and with firm determination, ample confidence, and steady steps to containment and suppression by the United States, it has openly safeguarded its legitimate rights and interests and achieved a phased stabilization of China-U.S. relations. The China-U.S. rivalry has shifted from the initial stalemate during Trump’s term to a new stage of comprehensive stalemate.”  

The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (中国现代国际关系研究院)  are the research and analysis establishment of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS); the report has been  published by chinadiplomacy.org.cn, which is jointly run by CIIS, the research institute of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the assessment of Arnaud Bertrand, the document’s composers include “the CIA and the FBI all wrapped in one.  You can hardly get closer to the horse’s mouth – short of sitting in on a Politburo briefing.”  

From the Russian point of view, this is a Chinese advertisement of a two-horse race which the Chinese side is confident they will win because they are already winning —  so long as they don’t have to go to war, like Russia, like Iran.  

The suspicion in Moscow of Xi’s ambition to become G2 with Trump was aired publicly before Putin before left for Beijing. It has been muffled since his return home without the agreement on the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline which was a priority on the Russian agenda.  

The Russian state media editorialized on the Russia-China-US “triangle” – the G3.  “The United States and China are strategic rivals, and that rivalry isn’t temporary… relations between Washington and Beijing are defined by uncertainty and suspicion Moscow and Beijing have constructed something far steadier: a relationship whose trajectory no longer depends on atmospherics or temporary political moods… Russia and China don’t fundamentally view each other as adversaries so while practical disputes may cause irritation, delays or bargaining, but they don’t threaten the relationship itself. Both sides may occasionally exercise restraint in directly supporting the other if circumstances become too risky or complicated. But neither Moscow nor Beijing is prepared to undermine the broader partnership for the sake of tactical advantage elsewhere because the relationship is seen as strategically valuable in its own right.”  

In this podcast with Vanessa Beeley, the discussion picks through the evidence to find the meaning of the two Beijing summits for the Iran war, the Ukraine war, and the Taiwan war, for the permanent war to follow the successions of both President Trump and President Putin; President Xi too. Click to view or listen: https://beeley.substack.com/p/the-beijing-summits-world-governance

(more…)

by Editor - Thursday, May 21st, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

There’s a children’s playground called Multipolarity (aka Polycentricity). It’s large enough for children to play games of hide and seek*.

That’s a game as ancient as the Greeks of the time of Thucydides. He’s famous in China because President Xi Jinping quotes him to American presidents – last week to Donald Trump – as an invitation not to cheat when playing the game.  

Let’s play hide and seek with Xi and his visitor this week, President Vladimir Putin.  They are the hiders. We are It – the ones who must cover our eyes, count to ten, while the hiders do their best to conceal themselves from us. If we find them out, we win. They win if we don’t – at least that’s what they think.  

Wait a minute! that’s not the rule of the Multipolarity Game.

Putin and Xi have just spent a night and a day together and concluded by announcing they and their allies and partners should be It. The enemies – they are the other players, the hiders in the game with names which Putin and Xi use like “hegemon”, “unilateralist”, “fascist”, “jungle man”   instead of their legal names, Americans, their European and Asian allies, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia.  In this variant of the Multipolarity Game, these players should hide from It finding them out, then doing to them what they have been threatening or doing to It already.

“Our meeting today,” Putin said at one of his Beijing meetings, “falls on a momentous date, but our friendship with China is not directed against anyone. We are not fighting anyone. We are simply pursuing our own interests and following our own development path. What is more, we are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States.”  

This is not a Putin joke. Russia is at war, fighting on several fronts “including the United States”. Scores of Russians are being killed every day on the Ukraine battlefield and in the hinterland of the country; their ships, cargoes and money seized or destroyed far away from the homeland. About them,  Putin is announcing to the hiders that he’s the seeker; that he’s put on his blindfold and is about to count to ten (one hundred, one thousand more like) while he has sent a special friend called Kirill Dmitriev to join the Americans in their hiding places. 

Wait a minute, another minute! In the game Putin and Dmitriev are playing with the Americans  with whom they have been friends since their meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last August,  who is hider, who is seeker, who is It, who Isn’t?

The game, Xi told Putin before they had their Wednesday tea party, “remains far from tranquil. The damage caused by unilateral actions and hegemony is unprecedented, and the threat of regression to the law of the jungle looms large. In this regard, I have put forward the concept of a community.”    This is Xi’s way of saying we are all children together so let’s play the game and stay the best of friends, win or lose.  

“In the 21st century,” the game — they have just solemnly signed (May 20) —  is “evolving towards a long-term state of polycentricity and the formation of international relations of a new type.” The game’s up, they say, for those “states to single-handedly manage world affairs, impose their interests on the entire world and restrict the sovereign development opportunities of other countries in the spirit of the colonial era.”  

“I have agreed with President Trump,” Xi had announced the week before, “on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. “Constructive strategic stability means positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.”   This is Chinese for adults, not children – no playing hide and seek because everything will be in its proper place.

Does Xi really mean that, or are he and Putin kidding, just like adults do with children?

(more…)

by Editor - Wednesday, May 20th, 2026
No Comments »

By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Doubling down is what the alliance of Russia’s enemies should do now, editorializes the Financial Times, the Japanese propaganda platform in London, pointing at the summit meeting in Beijing between President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping. The alliance “should take confidence in their strategy — even if it will be a long haul — and double down on supporting Ukraine with the weapons, intelligence and cash needed to see it through.”  

One Anglo-Japanese stone, two Sino-Russian birds – “even if Moscow is ever more the junior partner in the relationship, this will be an opportunity for the Russian president to project strength beside a fellow strongman leader”. 

The two birds reply with stones of their own.

(more…)

by Editor - Tuesday, May 19th, 2026
No Comments »