The balloon didn’t quite go up at Wednesday’s session of European Union (EU) officials in Brussels to decide [3] on a new round of anti-Russian sanctions, the fourteenth package of the EU’s economic war. Stopping Russian helium exports, one of the items in the package, wasn’t the sticking point.* The Russian helium balloon is going up, nonetheless – but not in the direction the EU, US, and other NATO allies imagine. What is happening instead, Russian industry sources reveal, is that the war conditions have accelerated Russian investment into a rapid expansion of the country’s helium production, ending Russia’s need...