Veteran journalist John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia. He has lived and worked in Moscow since 1989. Before that, he served as an advisor in the Whitlam and Carter administrations, the Arab League, and the government of Andreas Papandreou — a life, as he puts it, spent working for political losers.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Mike Robinson, Helmer dismantles the Western caricature of Vladimir Putin as a master strategist. Putin never played chess and, contrary to the rhetoric of the likes of Russophobes like Chris Donnelly, does not play Go either. He is, instead, a balancer of factions — above all the oligarch lobby created in 1996.
That balancing act, Helmer argues, is now failing under the combined weight of war, recession, and inflation ahead of Russian elections. He sets out the escalation options open to the Kremlin, none of which require nuclear weapons, and explains why Sergei Karaganov's calls for tactical nuclear use are a deception operation rather than serious doctrine.
He also discusses how memories of the Yeltsin years act as a constraint on Russian opinion, the failed February 2022 push on Kiev, the collapse of the Istanbul talks, and why Russian think tanks have produced no analysis of American vulnerabilities.