By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Photographs published in the German media, then republished in the press of the NATO allies, of an explosive device allegedly planted by Russian agents at Leipzig airport last month “do not correspond to what airport employees initially saw at the scene…the drone itself was a small, inexpensive consumer device intended primarily for photography and video recording.”

This has been reported by Ukrainian investigative journalist Anatoly Sharij in two lengthy Twitter (X) posts on September 6.

Sharij’s account is based on sources identified as Leipzig airport employees who said they were eye-witnesses of the discovery of the drone and of the official reaction which followed. According to Sharij, one of the sources “doubts that such a device could have carried any significant additional payload at all.”

The German government has officially blamed Russia for the Leipzig incident.

“With the attempted attack in Leipzig,” declared German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on September 1,  “Russia’s leadership has instead made a conscious decision to inflict further significant damage on our bilateral relations, which are already under tremendous strain. The Federal Government’s line, which the Federal Minister of the Interior has just mentioned, thus applies. Germany remains secure, and Germany is defending itself against opponents who seek to spread insecurity. The Federal Government is therefore taking action against Russia as the perpetrator of the hybrid attack in Leipzig.”

“The dangerous conduct of the Russian Federation described just now is part of a long series of attempts to destabilise, spread disinformation, threaten, sabotage and show aggression towards Europe. Unfortunately, Germany is no exception here. Russia’s leadership is treating our country with blatant hostility.”  

President Vladimir Putin responded, telling the Russian press on September 1 the drone incident was a plant. “I believe that it mostly has to do with the internal political situation. The Chancellor’s political standing is complicated. He is not trusted by his citizens, and it is clear why – because he does not uphold but sells out national interests, and because of apparent economic missteps: enterprises are being shut down, people are losing their jobs, and living standards are plummeting. It is not clear why they did what they did. They have only one explanation: they need to stand up against ‘aggressive Russia.’ You want proof? Here you are; they have planted it.” 

“I would like to remind everyone that some time ago – several months or even a year ago – the German authorities accused Russia of blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. I was really surprised that they came up with such a strange idea because we were interested in selling gas to Europe. We would be ready to provide gas today too. They only need to press the button, to make the decision to do it. But they don’t have the stomach for this, because of the US sanctions and everything else. Good, but now they need to explain the reasons behind their actions. Considering the falling ratings and the upcoming elections, including in Saxony, this puts the political future of the German ruling circles in question. I believe that this is the explanation. I think that this is yet another blunder, and that it runs contrary to the interests of the German people.”  

On September 6, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the German government’s fabrication was an act of war.  “ ‘Leipzig, the airport. They found some drone there. They said it was a Russian drone, and no one bothered to investigate. This is, in essence, the beginning of a real war. They expelled the Consulate General from Bonn, announced that they had terminated the agreement. The Russian House in Berlin is being closed. I recall that before the start of World War II, or more precisely the Great Patriotic War, the Germans also closed their diplomatic missions,’ he said, with the head of Russian diplomacy’s words quoted on the Vesti website. ‘And all those statements made by Merz about making Germany the leading military power in Europe again — they are being put into practice. He is essentially declaring war on us. And the lessons of history have not been learned at all. It turns out that these metastases of Nazism are beginning to break through. This is a dangerous phenomenon. I believe the Russian leadership will draw appropriate conclusions,” Lavrov said.”  

German sources have told me that “useful idiots”, German opposition groups monitored and infiltrated by German police and intelligence agents, are likely to have been involved in the Leipzig incident, with foreknowledge on the part of the German services. “There are forces in Germany like the old Red Army Faction, belonging to extreme left groups, which are training now to interfere with military production. Also, the Ukrainians could very easily with their drone experience build drones with Russian parts and launch them in Germany. They are able to perform a false flag operation. And not least, I see the connection to the Nordstream case here. Kiev has a motive to avenge the imprisoned divers in Germany.”

Two years before the Nordstream sabotage on September 26, 2022,   German officials participated in the fabrication of the Novichok poisoning claims of Alexei Navalny in August 2020. For the full account of that deception operation, read this book.  

Sharij, the author of the new and detailed account of the Leipzig incident, has been in forced exile from the Ukraine since 2012 and has been the target of reputational and physical attacks for many years. 

Sharij’s report was published by him in English. It follows verbatim. The lead photograph, right, was published by him without source attribution.   Parentheses and links in have been added to the text for clarification of the references.

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by Editor - Monday, September 7th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When it comes to truth-telling at the standard of traditional investigative journalism, podcasting and podcasters don’t — not by a long chalk.

That’s an expression which appeared in British pubs long ago when darts players kept score by scratching it in chalk on an old slate tile. A long chalk was the large trailing margin between winners and losers.

Podcasting isn’t a pub game but a part of the audience wishes it was. They are the commenters who write out their comments after the podcast has wound up, usually to support with bouquets or attack with brickbats what was said. Brickbat is another pub expression, centuries older than long chalk, and not as neutral. It meant a piece of brick thrown for the purpose of hitting someone.

In podcasting, brickbats have turned into thumbs-down icons and up to a half-dozen lines of words, sometimes with insults, emojis, expletives.  

A computer analysis of 4,000 comments for Andrew Napolitano’s pro-Russia, pro-Iran podcast, Judging Freedom, recently discovered that they amount to no more than one percent of the total podcast audience. In making their mark, scratch the chalk or toss their brickbat, they are also erratic.  More than three-quarters of the commenters made their mark only once, and then disappeared from the podcast record.  Just 17.1% of the commenters registered their comment on two or more of Napolitano’s podcasts; 5.5% commented on three or more. Only 0.15% of the commenters — that turns out to be just six individuals — commented on ten or more Napolitano’s videos. Nobody commented on more than fifteen in the sample.

Dogs are more loyal to trees than commenters to Judging Freedom.

The minority of this dwindling and disappearing stream want to set the record straight; that is, they aim to add something they know in order to clarify or correct something that was said on the podcast.  In the time of print newspapers, they appeared in the Letters to the Editor column. In the old days that was better read than the news columns:  so popular it was, in fact, that newspaper editors introduced a new page of signed opinions which came to be called the Op Ed page. It is still the tree which invites all breeds of dogs.  

The majority of podcast commenters, however, want to see their names on the screen and appeal to the podcast producer to support the guest against rivals for ratings, or sack the guest with whom they disagree, and replace him with others they nominate for substitution. This is action gaming; it’s the intellectual equivalent of custom robos which blast away at each other until the commander’s robo has won all the hit points and destroyed the rivals.  

Russian robos and Iranian robos versus American, Ukrainian, German, British, and Israeli robos. This isn’t journalism. It isn’t armchair warfighting. Maybe it’s fun, but it’s factless, feckless too, because the winner is always the commander’s robos, otherwise the game wouldn’t be worth playing. For gamers there’s no fun in losing. This is why in podcasting like Napolitano’s, the commander’s Russian and Iranian robos are always within hours or days or weeks of winning their wars, and always certain to win. Robos with recognisable podcast names are always winning their games, always wrong on the battlefield: if they weren’t robos, this would be a disqualification from the game. Watch Robo Mearsheimer play to win. And Robo Macgregor.

For the past month, when the Moscow office was closed for its annual summer holiday, there was time to compile a list of the main questions commenters have been asking of me in recent podcasts, or brickbats they have been throwing.

One thing this minority of a dwindling minority share in common with each other — they don’t read. If they do or did, they would have discovered that the answers they ask for and the facts they guess at have all been published before: they can be read in Dances with Bears or in the books listed on the home page. In just seconds, they can be retrieved with an AI machine.  This is what the box or bar on the screen called SEARCH or PROMPT is for.

However, for podcast commenters and robo gamers who demand a quick-start manual, I have compiled the answers to the most frequently mentioned questions and allegations; and for a bonus, there is the AI machine answer to the most difficult question of all that has never been openly asked before.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 6th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When an enemy sworn to destroy Russia comes to the Kremlin for talks, the record of what exactly was said can remain secret for so long that whatever calculations and interpretations were made at the time – by the enemy and by the Russian side – are no longer remembered and be taken into account when the visits are repeated and the enemy’s intention remains the same.

Trying to remember and take into account – that’s a task requiring блокноты, aides-mémoire, prompt cards. Sherlock Holmes wrote his reminders on his shirt cuffs. But more important than where they are hidden is whether they are remembered before it’s too late.  In war it’s always that time.   

A week ago in Washington, DC, the records of Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, talking with his fellow Politburo members after the visit to Moscow of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were declassified and published for the first time. The records date from 1987 and 1988.

Excerpts are reprinted here, along with links to the full documents.*

On Saturday in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, received Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as he had anticipated in a press conference with Russian reporters four days before, on September 1. Between then and now, reading from papers and prompt cards, Putin has made several statements about the Americans.

Excerpts are reprinted follow, along with links to the full documents.By way of bloc-noting them, the question to be asked and answered is whether the intention of the enemy remains the same and of the Kremlin leader.

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by Editor - Sunday, September 6th, 2026
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On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”

by Editor - Tuesday, August 25th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Every year at this time, as certain and regular as the Moscow city administration turns off the central hotwater boilers for cleaning, we close the office, postpone the flow of Dances with Bears, suspend the tweets.

But just as surely as Muscovites install electric water heaters for substitutes during the profilaktika (профилактика — профилактические работы), we will continue with occasional podcasts and write a book for Christmas release. We will restart on September 7. Like all ZHEK (Жилищно-эксплуатационная контора)  notices, not all official announcements come true exactly on time.

by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow, with Sahar Dadjoo, Teheran
  @bears_with

In an interview and video recorded in Teheran on Wednesday, Sahar Dadjoo asked the questions and these are the answers published on August 1.   

In focus is the US-guided Ukrainian drone attack on the Iranian cargo vessel Ana in the Caspian Sea which occurred on July 25. The timing is important. On July 17 and 20, Iran struck the US base Al-Tanf inside Syria near the Jordan border. The target was US special forces and a unit of Ukrainian drone operators which, according to Beirut sources, were identified by Russian military intelligence for the Iranian counter-attack. “The IRGC said its target was a US special operations command centre, claiming it had destroyed helicopters and a radar system.”  US troop casualties have been denied by the US; casualties among US special forces and Ukrainians have not been corroborated.

The Caspian Sea attack on the Ana, killing one Iranian mariner, followed on Saturday, July 25.

On the next day, July 26, Lavrov was telephoned by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to discuss the Caspian Sea attack and the measures Iranian and Russia officials were discussing for response and retaliation. For more evidence and consequences, click to read.  

Three days later, on July 23, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In their 30-minute exchange of warnings and ultimatums, Rubio said President Donald Trump had instructed him to tell President Vladimir Putin to stop aiding Iranian forces to target and kill Americans. Lavrov replied with Putin’s message for Trump to stop aiding Ukrainian forces to kill Russians. The full story can be read here.  

This is the timeline in which the military operations planners in Moscow, Teheran, Washington, and Kiev took the decisions that have had the consequences in telephone calls and face-to-face meetings just reported at the very top of the three governments at war with each other.

For the strategic meaning and likely outcome, here is the interview with Sahar Dadjoo.

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by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By Oleg Tsarev, Crimea, introduced by John Helmer
  @bears_with

The current restrictions imposed by the Trump Administration and NATO on Ukrainian drone and missile strike options against Russia reflect a strategy known as boiling the frog in warm water.

This is a strategy of gradual escalation, the timing of which is measured stepwise – so western strategists believe — in order to lull the frog into false confidence, and not to trigger the frog’s escape and its retaliation. That is, Russia’s counter-escalation with boiling water of its own.

The aim of the US and European strategy is the killing of Russia. The objective has been the same since 1917. This is the Hundred Years War against Russia. So long as the Kremlin and General Staff do not capitulate, this is going to be the Two Hundred Years War.

The belief in boiling the frog to death slowly started with experiments by German biologists in the late 19^th century. Since then smart frogs have learned lessons from the German biologists, or else the biologists have grown smarter by learning lessons from the frogs.  

From their experiments over the past century, Germans don’t learn the lessons Russians have tried to teach them.   Americans are the new Germans; the lessons are the old ones. President Donald Trump is an old German.

In this new essay by Oleg Tsarev, published on August 1,  the lesson to be learned by Russia’s supreme commander-in-chief, President Vladimir Putin, has been explained scientifically, also discreetly. Tsarev is a veteran Ukrainian political leader who has survived Kiev attempts to kill him because of the clarity of his analyses – and the political appeal of his truthfulness to Russians and Ukrainians alike. He lives in asylum in Crimea,   and publishes daily in this Telegram account.    

Tsarev is not saying the Americans are as unclever as the German biologists who first experimented with boiling the frog. He is not saying Putin is as unlearning as the frogs in the German laboratory. He is saying the myth of the slow boiling frog is a warning of the permanence and inevitability of the US strategic goal – if the lesson of counter-escalation isn’t implemented, and urgently. Tsarev’s boiling water recipe is for the Russian cook now.

“I would like to add that the existing restrictions for Kiev are a consequence of the Western policy towards Russia of ‘boiling a frog in warm water.’ According to this policy, the degree of escalation should be increased gradually so that Russia does not begin to respond harshly. But we must not forget that when the West decides that it is time, all restrictions will be lifted.”

There is another point Tsarev means readers in the centre of Moscow to understand; an old comrade of his expresses it this way: “We should put a stop to the reactionary cycle, the talk of  tit-for-tat, symmetrical retaliation,  mirror escalation, anti-terrorism not war.  We must stop reacting to every Trump tweet, European declaration, Zelensky speech. MinOboron should stop labeling strikes as we  launch them. We must start labelling the system that produces those strikes and strike at that.”

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by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The appearance this week of an unrecognized man (lead images, top right, bottom 2^nd from right) standing next to General Dan Caine and behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is a signal that the days of President Donald Trump as peacemaker are over.

The days of Trump as permanent warmaker are now starting.

The unrecognized man’s signal is also that all the warfighting Trump intends against Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East must be low-cost in US casualties and in US gas prices at the pump, and ensure the cashflow for Trump’s succession campaign between now and 2028. This man is signalling US permanent war with pauses to earn a priority pass for votes and vote financiers at US election time.

Unidentified in the Ukrainian, US and Israeli press covering the White House meetings on July 28, he is Michael Needham. Axios spotted him eight weeks ago when his appointment as Deputy National Security Advisor was announced. “Why it matters,” the Israeli megaphone in Washington reported: “Needham’s new post as assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser is one of the more important jobs in a Trump administration consumed with foreign policy challenges from Iran to China, Cuba and Venezuela…’Everyone likes Mike. He gets the policy. He gets the politics,’ said a senior administration official.”  

In practice, Needham is now the boss of the National Security Council (NSC) while Rubio, the nominal National Security Advisor, moves around the world as Secretary of State and also runs for president as Trump’s successor. This is Needham’s official biography.  This is the best Wikipedia  has been able to compile for the 45-year old heir to Manhattan banker and broker, George Needham’s not insubstantial fortune.  

What is missing from Michael Needham’s preparation for the top of the Trump Administration’s warmaking staff is that he has no foreign area expertise, no foreign language, no intelligence, and no military background at all. Instead, he is East Coast Republican Party operative, with ideological training at the Claremont Institute of California,  a money-handling diploma from his father’s alma mater  Stanford, and six years as Rubio’s staff man at the US Senate.

War for Needham has been purely a domestic American fight. In this, a rare publication of Needham’s from 2018 entitled “Trumping Reagan”, there is no mention of war or of any foreign policy issue in the campaigns Needham was engaged in to build and then preserve coalitions of Republican voters for Trump.  

This inexperience and incapacity make Needham unique in the history of the NSC and of national security advisors.

In the only other episode of White House history when the two jobs of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor were combined in one man and when the US was at war – that was in 1973-75 — Henry Kissinger was the man and the Vietnam War was in its capitulational stage. Then Kissinger’s deputy was Brent Scowcroft. He had been a US Air Force lieutenant-general with fighter pilot training, war plans and operations experience at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a military intelligence posting in Belgrade, and a PhD from Columbia University;  “a principal architect of American policy toward post-communist Russia, ”the New York Times called him.   

Needham’s appearance in the Oval Office, standing between a special operations officer and a presidential election runner, a rookie warfighter himself,  reveals what the  new White House priorities are, and will continue to be to the end of Trump’s term.  View or listen to the discussion in the new podcast with Jamarl Thomas, first aired on Friday morning Washington time.  

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by Editor - Saturday, August 1st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It doesn’t take much time to compile from the works of John Mearsheimer a file of his mistakes of prediction, miscalculations of US and Ukrainian operations, and strategic misjudgements about the US war against Russia in Europe.

And yet, despite the plainness of this record, Mearsheimer is treated as a valuable asset, if not agent of influence by the Russian state propaganda organs which quote him with approval, and by US podcasters who advertise themselves as pro-Russian and who engage Mearsheimer to that end.  Mearsheimer has enjoyed something similarly official in China.

Watch this brief sample of Mearsheimer on the present war.

This ought to be familiar for another American political reason.  It’s Joseph Nye’s soft power idea from Harvard revitalized by Mearsheimer as his offensive realism idea at the University of Chicago.   Because Nye is now dead (2025); because, before he expired, Nye was recognized by his targets to be just another US warfighter for the same old empire; and because the Trump Administration has replaced soft power, propaganda and USAID tools of policymaking with hard power, US Department of War tools, the political equivalence of Nye and Mearsheimer has not been understood.

 Why have Russians who have been the targets of US warfighting since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 failed to see this equivalence? Why are American university professors credited with theories that are provably  wrong on the evidence, believed by the Russian targets of US warfighting? Why doesn’t the Hundred Years’ American War against Russia produce theory and practice of a different kind and a different source?

The answer is that the Russian Army’s advance on the Ukrainian battlefield has not been matched by the advance of Russian ideology against the thrall in which US ideologists and influencers continue to be held in some Russian power centres. This outcome is evidence that Nye’s idea is still  succeeding in Moscow. And so long as this is true, Mearsheimer’s idea will also enjoy Russian success, no matter how wrongheaded it is.

A Soviet education in Marxism and mathematics isn’t necessary, though, for this equation to be invariably true: S (Soft power) equals H (hard head) equals W (wronghead).

This recalculation has not yet occurred for Mearsheimer but it is bound to happen. Well, maybe not. As Anton Chekhov once explained to Russians, what ought to happen is not bound to happen. “They say –” Chekhov wrote in his note-book in 1921, “they say ‘In the long run truth will triumph’ but it is untrue.”

Mearsheimer realism turns out to be Mushheimer imperialism. That’s a triumph for him for the moment. It will remain true for long as the empire has its run no matter what can be seen and said from the record.  

by Editor - Thursday, July 30th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As tactics for warfighting against Russia go, drones are a new one, and if measured by Russian public opinion, they are more effective for the time being than old tactics like Alexei Navalny-type operations, or Trojan Horses like Mikhail Khodorkovsky,   or Fifth Columnists like Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina and the President’s special negotiator with the US, Kirill Dmitriev.

Combine them altogether, as the escalation promised by the G7 and the NATO declarations of June  and July,  and you have another of the strategic miscalculations which have defeated the Swedes, Poles, British, French, Germans, and Americans in the past, the long ago and the right now. Russians learn and recover from their mistakes, no matter how great the price in treasure and in blood they pay.

Just so, the mistakes which President Vladimir Putin has made, grave and costly ones, are now being repaired.    Not soon and swiftly enough, to be sure, to avoid the price in treasure and blood which has been paid, goes on being paid.

Notwithstanding, the escalation of the drone war in the Russian hinterland, on the near seas and the high seas, is forcing the Kremlin into an acceleration of the successions of the Putin presidency and of the oligarchy which his rule has represented and on which he and his family depend.  From guarded conversations with sources over the past month, it is clear these successions are not those which the Anglo-Americans and Europeans are aiming at; nor are  they the forecasts of the US podcasters representing what they imagine to be Russia’s best interests.

These successions will not be signalled by the launch of nuclear fireworks of the kind threatened by Moscow think tankers and media celebrities with safe-haven residences in Germany or Italy.   

The Russian successions accelerated by war escalation are starting in the oil sector at Rosneft, Gazprom and LUKoil, and in the associated refining, generating, and logistics – pipelines, railways, ports, shipping. The successions are beginning at the sources of debt and credit finance at Sberbank and VTB. They are under way in the military-industrial complex, especially Rostec. The well-known names which are aging, ailing and passing include those of Igor Sechin, Alexei Miller, Vagit Alekperov, German Gref, Andrei Kostin, Sergei Chemezov.

The fight over the successions under way in the 1996-2026 generation of the oligarchs is already visible in the self-promotions of individuals like the half-witted Andrei Melnichenko, and his cleverer peers, Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska. Between them,  there is a fight for the profits of what one faction hopes will be a long war, the privateers and red flaggers; and the other faction of oligarchs who want peace now, the capitulationists and white flaggers. Yes, the Putin oligarchy is cracking up into reds versus whites.

Yes, the war aim of the NATO escalation is to trigger a revolutionary situation inside Russia. But no, the outcome is not theirs to dictate by drones, sanctions, or the assassinations of oligarchs recently agreed between the national security advisors in Athens and Kiev. From the inside, when they are happening, revolutions appear to be confusing, chaotic, unpredictable, incredible. We are on the edge of another one in Russia. View or listen to the discussion with Mike Robinson in the new podcast from London on UK Column News. 

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by Editor - Thursday, July 30th, 2026
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