By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The question everyone in their warfighting chairs has been asking President Vladimir Putin,  with a follow-up that no one is reporting:

What is Putin going to do to answer the escalation of drone war on the Russian mainland and deter the US and its allies from their war to destroy the Russian economy?

The President’s answer in public (so far) has been “Our responses will always be mirrored, wherever they try to strike at the territory of Russia, we will respond in a mirror, only several times more powerful. The enemy will feel it. He already feels it, I hope, and he will feel it several times more powerfully.”   

That was last week (July 13).

Ten days is a long time in politics. On Thursday (July 23), there came this follow-up question: Why did the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio call Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to a meeting and then  spend little more than thirty minutes telling Lavrov what he had come to say?  

Answer: we cannot say for sure.

Best guess: Rubio gave Lavrov a warning. He told Lavrov he had been instructed by President Donald Trump to say that the US holds Russia responsible for providing precise location intelligence and targeting details to enable Iran’s drone forces to penetrate US air defences and strike at CIA and US troop bases in the Arab territories, killing Americans.

Lavrov replied that Putin had instructed him to say that Russia holds the US responsible for providing precise location intelligence and targeting details to enable Ukrainian drones to strike at Russian civilian targets, oil refineries, oil ports, shipping on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, and consumer product warehouses from Moscow to Kazan, and deep into the Russian  hinterland, killing Russians.

In short, this is Putin’s mirror. It is telling Trump and the warfighters in the White House that if they continue, with their European allies and the Kiev regime, to strike outside the Ukraine battlefield, killing Russian civilians, the response will be tit-for-tat against Americans. Furthermore, Putin had warned: “He already feels it, I hope, and he will feel it several times more powerfully.”

Lavrov’s communiqué reported afterwards: “The sides held an in-depth exchange of views on a broad range of bilateral and international issues in follow-up to the recent high-level contacts.”

“When talking on the Ukraine issue, Sergei Lavrov informed his American colleague about the real situation on the contact line, highlighting the inadmissibility of the continued supply of weapons to the Kiev regime and the destabilising activities of European countries, which are still seeking to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia. Sergey Lavrov reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for a political and diplomatic settlement in Ukraine and its commitment to the proposals advanced by the United States at the meeting of President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Anchorage, which the Russian leader has accepted. They also talked about regional and international issues, including the situation in the Persian Gulf. Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio welcomed the resumption of full-scale contacts between Roscosmos and NASA, and spoke in favour of resuming interparliamentary exchanges and cultural ties. They also discussed the normalisation of conditions for the functioning of Russian and US diplomatic missions. An agreement was reached to maintain contacts between the two foreign policy agencies, including in the framework of the two countries’ activities at international organisations.”  

Thirty minutes isn’t enough time for all of this, let alone an “in-depth exchange” on any of them – except for one. “Lavrov highlight[ed] the inadmissibility of the continued supply of weapons to the Kiev regime and the destabilising activities of European countries, which are still seeking to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia.”

In this guarded fashion, and for the very first time, Putin has told Trump that if he continues to participate in killing Russians on Russian territory, Russia will strike to kill Americans in their bases.  

Asked what had been said at the Manila meeting, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said: “I’d like to reiterate that the Foreign Ministry reiterated our position about preparedness for a peaceful resolution process.”  About the attacks on CIA and US troop bases, Peskov also said: “I don’t think that reporting of any suspicions is a reason to comment.”  

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by Editor - Thursday, July 23rd, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The inevitability of escalation – that’s the binding strategic requirement for President Vladimir Putin’s decisions on Russia’s warfighting options.

It’s binding on the president because it is Article 12 of the Fundamentals of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence, which Putin signed in December 2024.  Here it is: “Nuclear deterrence is aimed to ensure that a potential adversary realizes the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies.”

Article 11 makes clear who the potential adversary is: “Aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack.”

Since the US putsch in Kiev of February 2014, and not less since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO, Cyrillic SVO) of February 2022, this means that on the Ukraine battlefield Russia faces the joint war of the US and its allies. What is special about the SVO is that it has suspended and postponed the Article 12 requirement of the inevitability of retaliation, turning it away from strategic nuclear options to tactical tit-for-tat or “mirror” options, as Putin calls them.  

Also, what is special is the way in which the “main military risks” to Russia identified in Article 15( c) of the strategic doctrine have escalated without (repeat without) effective retaliation. Article 15( c) reads: “buildup by a potential adversary on the territories contiguous to the Russian Federation and its allies and in adjacent waters of general purpose forces groupings, which include nuclear weapons delivery means, and (or) military infrastructure ensuring the employment of such means.”  

Who doesn’t understand there is now nothing potential about the “potential adversary” in this provision? Who fails to conclude that the inevitability of retaliation to operate for strategic deterrence to keep Russia from the destruction intended by the adversary is anything but inevitable right now?

So what is to be done? What is the method for analyzing the options, avoiding the deception operations and red herrings to which Sergei Karaganov and John Mearsheimer have been enthusiastically attaching themselves?

Click to listen or view the new discussion with Nima Alkhorshid broadcast live on Tuesday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viZp0bg5CdE

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Marshmallow imperialism is that view of American warmaking against Russia, Iran, China and Cuba which tastes sweet at first bite, but then melts in the mouth with nothing to chew on. That’s when the sugar addiction starts – this is wanting to taste more but never getting enough.

Chemical engineers in China reported a year ago that opium is a medically appropriate antidote for this condition.  Hopium, I mean.

In hour-long podcasts – that’s more than six thousand words of text —  it’s one thing to serve the audience marshmallow;  it’s quite another to present something to chew on, like beef. The two cannot be combined because the political podcast is a polarizing medium; it’s for one or the other.   Debating between fundamentally opposed viewpoints drives as many audiences away as it attracts, and so that’s not for podcasters.

There can therefore be no debate in podcast format with the twin ideas that the evil US empire is being defeated in war,  and that the sweet US empire – that’s the imperialism of American professors, CIA veterans, military experts, and podcasters – is now capable of overcoming the evil empire if they will be listened to in large enough numbers.

There are, however, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that allow the impossible — a debate on the US empire between marshmallow and beef.Here then is John Mearsheimer debating his views with mine on the US war against Iran and against Russia.

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 21st, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

As bird brains go, President Donald Trump doesn’t have what it takes to match an American crow.  

Trump, combined with Stephen Miller, spokesman and mastermind respectively, of genocide against the enemies of the Jews in the Middle East and the enemies of the Republican Party at home, still doesn’t remember where exactly he put his war aims against Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, and Cuba, or his peace agreements, term sheets, memoranda of understanding, summit declarations, and Anchorage formulas.

By contrast, Clark’s Nutcracker – a member of the crow species native to western Canada, California, and New Mexico  – can place 33,000 pine seeds in 2,500 different locations and recall them for retrieval when he’s hungry over an interval of at least 12 months. More — the bird continues to learn new lessons; its brain keeps evolving, grows larger and smarter. More seeds, more hiding places, more biding time. This is according to a study of avian intelligence by Louis Lefebre; it’s just been published in time for November Election Day when US voters should decide for themselves on Trump – whether his brain can be trusted to remember where he has hidden what he’s been taking from Americans and everyone else in the world.    

For a review of the brain of President Trump, handicapped by no neurological abnormalities according to the White House physician, peck here.  

The evidence of how that brain works can be followed in the tweets and talking points which Miller drafts for Trump to sign his name to every day. Repeating them is a symptom.   

 “Republicans should add Iran to the Russian Sanctions Bill. That’s what Lindsey [Graham] wanted to do, and it was going to happen. IMPORTANT!!! President DJT,” Trump tweeted three times — on Sunday morning and then twice on Sunday afternoon.   

At almost the same time, Trump tweeted his endorsement of his former national security advisor writing in a local paper that Trump’s war against Iran is a sideshow, almost over, as Trump  “begins the process of reorienting American grand strategy away from the Middle Eastern conflicts that have characterized the first quarter of the 21st century and toward the great power rivalries that will likely define the next.”   “America is on track to emerge from Operation Epic Fury in a far stronger position to win the competition that will define the remainder of the 21st century,” the advisor repeated with  Trump symptom.   

At the same time, Trump ordered eight waves of aerial bombing and missile attacks on Iranian targets.  

“Next week [July 20-26], it gets really bad for them,” he added in an interview, repeating his verbs and nouns. “We’re gonna hit ’em very hard tonight. We’re gonna hit ’em very hard tomorrow night. We’re gonna hit ’em very hard the night after. And then next week, it gets really bad for them, because next week comes the, uh, power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We’re gonna knock out all their power plants, we’re gonna knock out all their bridges, unless they get to the table and negotiate.”  

 A few hours later, in another interview Trump found the strategic rationale for losing the battle and winning at the same time. “[Question] are you concerned, though, that renewed operations in Iran might turn that around, or is that going to be a trend? Well, look, we’re making a lot of money. The defence companies are doing great. It’s jobs. It’s all jobs. I’m not doing this for jobs. But when you think of it, we make our own equipment. We make the best military equipment in the world. What I do want to do is make it faster, because we need it, but allies need it.”  

“It’s jobs. It’s all jobs. I’m not doing this for jobs” – repeat, contradict, repeat again.  These are wars which Trump keeps fighting in order to discover by repetition that he isn’t losing them.  

How then must President Vladimir Putin fight an enemy who plans to be making profits for the foreseeable future in dozens of wars to pauperize and beggar every potential competitor, across every regional front including Russia in Europe, in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Arctic,  and including the big one, that’s the war against China?

The answer to this question starts with Putin’s performance in answering Trump’s jobs and money-making war on the Ukrainian battlefield.

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by Editor - Sunday, July 19th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The E-Day (Escalation Day) decision has been put off.

The Kremlin has just run up the signal that Trust in Trump (TIT) remains President Vladimir Putin’s priority. This is the flag raised on Friday morning by Vzglyad, the Kremlin-backed publication.  “Russia has gotten the most out of the Anchorage Spirit”, according to the headline.  

“The diplomatic stage indicated by this phrase has nevertheless given Russia a lot,” the editorial continued. “It is wrong to assess the spirit of Anchorage on the scale of peace achieved or not achieved… the key task was…to achieve the US withdrawal from the active phase of the conflict or at least radically reduce their participation in it. After eleven months, we can say that this goal has been achieved in many ways. Yes, the Americans are still transmitting satellite intelligence data and selling weapons to the Europeans for Ukraine. But this is a completely different quality of participation than under Biden, when Washington was the main donor and coordinator. Europe is currently bearing the brunt of the supply burden.”  

Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special negotiator with the Trump family, has tweeted in support. “Biden’s corruption is at the core of the Ukrainian conflict,” he insists.  

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by Editor - Friday, July 17th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Russians and Americans – think tankers, military bloggers, podcasters  —  now calling for President Vladimir Putin to decide on Oreshnik missile and tactical nuclear warhead strikes on NATO targets, outside the Ukraine, are hopeful that the NATO response would be deterrence, not escalation. But they don’t know.

They also do not know what the impact would be inside Russia, after nuclear war starts, on the management of the domestic economy for manpower mobilization, civil defence, militarization of the country’s resources, state takeover of the banking system and allocation of capital. They are hoping the oligarch base of the Russian economy, reinforced by the Central Bank, the state budget, and Putin’s personal promises, would be preserved intact.

In short, business as usual during nuclear war across Europe, with a discount, offset or write-off of as many casualties in a day or week as the Ukrainian and Russian armies have already suffered in four years of the Special Military Operation.

Hoping for this outcome isn’t predicting it, estimating the probability, or knowing with confidence. It’s hopium.

This is a psychological state which can be bought and paid for, like state propaganda, product advertising, or information warfare. It’s also an outcome of decision-making on which money can be wagered, like stockmarket pump and dumping, vitrification of corpses, and Viagra.  

Scientifically speaking, hopium is a pathology.  That’s to say, abnormal, irrational, negative for life expectancy. This is how scientists try to detect and measure it: “Hope is a complex cognitive-emotional-motivational state that attunes individuals to the possibility of desirable future outcomes (Ortony et al., 1990; Peterson and Seligman, 2004). The emotional components of hope reflect an anticipatory state often experienced as positively valenced (i.e., a pleasant state). Hope is also commonly conceptualized in terms of its cognitive and motivational components that tend to accompany the emotional experiences of hope (Malle, 2004; Peterson and Seligman, 2004; Geiger et al., 2019a). Some scholars have defined and measured hope in terms of a cognitive-motivational axis rather than an emotional experience (Snyder, 2002), while others argue that the motivational components central to Snyder’s definition of hope are not properly part of the experience of hope and better fit under the distinct concept of efficacy (Van Zomeren et al., 2019). Despite differences, all definitions share a common focus on hope as a future-oriented state that orients people toward imagining positive futures (Fernando et al., 2018; Kantenbacher et al., 2022).”

Apply that science and let’s discuss with Dimitri Lascaris what the warfighting options are right now, and the antidote to the pleasant poison that’s hopium. Click to listen or view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mcF0umhHxU 

by Editor - Thursday, July 16th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

These are the pressing questions of the Russian moment:

Can President Vladimir Putin defend Russia from the escalating US-European war and at the same time preserve the oligarch economy at home?

Is there a combination of military escalation, including Oreshnik strikes on NATO territorial targets, with or without nuclear warheads, and business as usual in Moscow which Putin can decide and launch by surprise on E-Day (Escalation Day)?

Whose fault would it be if the answers to these questions happen to be Marxist (1^st lead image)?

“It’s not my fault if reality is Marxist” – that was the line attributed to the late Che Guevara (2^nd lead image), by the late Jean-Paul Sartre in 1960.  It was revived by the late Michael Parenti in 2006.  

It’s not the fault of President Donald Trump (3^rd lead image) that the war against Russia which he is directing is Marxist; and that the reality he is aiming to impose on Russia is more Marxist than Putin, the Russian oligarchs on whom he depends, and the podcasters supporting him from the University of Chicago, the CIA, and the US Army will acknowledge and allow.

Whose Marxist reality is proving to be more, er, realistic?

If you answer the first two questions with this third one, then you are about to realize that Putin cannot, will not, escalate his warfighting operations on the Ukrainian battlefield, on the high seas, or on NATO territory,  for fear of starting a revolution at home that will destroy the economic base, the oligarchy, which  put him in power in 2000; kept him in power since then; and keeps him and his successors secure for the foreseeable future.

The American and NATO Marxist warfighters understand this very well. Their Marxism comes out of the barrel of the gun, they are sure. Their war is a gun Trump has forced the NATO allies to pay him to supply, so that he and they can fire it from the Ukraine – no matter how few  Ukrainians can be press-ganged to man the front lines and survive the  Russian advance westward. They just signed the papers to provide $70 billion of this firepower and manpower for this year of the war, another $70 billion of it for next year.

They are aiming at production, supply, and trade of the Russian fuel and energy sector and of the farm sector; at raising the cost in state budget financing for defence; at lowering the profits of the bank sector; at threatening Russian lives from the drones in the sky above and from the mobilization of men to the front.

The aim is Marxist: to force a Russian revolution in the economic base which will trigger –they hope, plan, expect – either “fragmentation of Russia [with] a struggle over the nuclear arsenal, resources, borders and history”, or “Russia to become a fortress: closed, mobilised, in permanent siege.” That’s civil war or Stalin war, according to Andrei Melnichenko, the fertilizer and coal oligarch in a warning published in London last week.  

Putin has replied by summoning Vladimir Potanin, the nickel oligarch and co-founder of the loans-for-shares scheme which launched the Russian oligarchy in 1996. “Vladimir Olegovich,” Putin asked Potanin, according to the Kremlin communiqué, “you have a lot of areas of work in general, but in the main, how does the company feel?”  What followed in the communiqué was a prepared script on Norilsk Nickel.

What Putin really was asking was how the Russian oligarchs feel on the warfighting options now, before Putin must respond to the General Staff’s options plan for E-Day.  More than that, Putin was signaling through Potanin, not through Melnichenko, that he will restrict his escalation operations to those which the oligarchs accept. He was telling Potanin he will not risk their economic base to defeat Trump and the Europeans.  

That’s Marxist reality for you.

Click to listen to the questions and the answers in today’s discussion with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio of Canada.  

by Editor - Wednesday, July 15th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Conspiracy to commit murder is not a capital crime in the US state of South Carolina unless the murder plan  has twelve aggravating circumstances.   

Incitement to genocide is a crime in the state, though it, too,  is not punishable by death. Five years in prison is the standard sentence for both, plus fines of between $5,000  and $500,000.  

Lindsey Graham, the four-term senator representing South Carolina, suffered the death penalty on the evening of July 11; he had not been convicted of a crime in his state. The war crimes  he conspired to direct and finance, and the genocide against the Palestinian, Iranian and Russian nations he signed his name to,  live on without him as the policy of the Trump Administration.

There have been press reports in Moscow that Graham was executed by a Russian missile attack on the Skyfall drone factory which he and Vladimir Zelensky toured together  in Kiev on July 10.  In South Carolina, the convicted have the option to die by firing squad, electric chair, and lethal injection; bombing isn’t an option.

According to a Tsargrad report, there wasn’t time for Graham to catch the train out of Kiev to Poland (11 hours), then a plane to Washington (11 hours), land alive, and then die a few hours later into the Washington evening, purportedly of aorta dissection. The Russian report claims Graham was already dead on arrival in Washington. The rupted aorta reportedly is a fabrication to cover up the embarrassment to the Trump Administration of a successful assassination by President Vladimir Putin. Why Graham died but Zelensky survived the missile strike isn’t explained.

“There is one marker that can clarify a lot,” Tsargrad editorialised. “You need to monitor the funeral. If the terrorist senator is buried in a closed coffin, the funeral ceremony is not public, or he is quietly cremated in a private crematorium, this will dramatically increase the weight of the ‘kinetic hypothesis’, transferring it from the category of  ‘this is a puerile fantasy’ to the  category of ‘these things happen’.”  

President Putin and his spokesmen have said nothing about Graham. As for the targeting of military industry and drone factory targets in Kiev, Putin has been precise. On Monday, July 13 – when Graham was either dead of natural causes or Russian ones – Putin told an election rally that “our responses will always be mirrored, wherever they try to strike at the territory of Russia, we will respond in a mirror, only several times more powerful. The enemy will feel it. He already feels it, I hope, and he will feel it several times more powerfully.”   

Assassination of individual targets is terrorism, “pure terrorism”, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared the next day (July 14). Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov was asked about US-guided Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian shipping: “Moscow – and the President in particular – is working to put an end to all of this. What the Ukrainian regime is doing goes beyond piracy. At least pirates plunder for their own gain. Here, however, it benefits no one. The sole purpose is simply to cause damage and spread fear. It’s pure terrorism which manifests itself not only in the Sea of Azov but also in the Black Sea and Africa.”  

Killing Graham hypothetically – collateral damage for a decapitation strike aimed at Zelensky – that has been ruled out by Putin’s mirror. Decapitation strikes by the US and Ukrainians against Russian General Staff officers as they leave their homes in Moscow – that’s “pure terrorism” by the enemy, and Putin “is working to put an end to all of this.”

Exactly how – that is the point of the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid aired live on Tuesday (July 14). Click to view or listen here.

For the moment, Putin is insisting that the war to defend Russia from the US, the NATO allies,  and the Ukraine must be conducted as a special military operation according to mirror matching,  escalation symmetry, and deterrence by red lines announced in public and demonstration firings, like the three Oreshnik shots – Dniepropetrovsk (November 2024), Lvov (January 2026), and Belaya Tserkov (May 2026).

Moscow sources report the assessment of both intelligence agencies, SVR and GRU, is that Putin’s escalation limits cannot counter, do not stop, and fail to deter the escalation of the drone war on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russian hinterland, the territorial waters and the high seas. They add that the western allies are calling Putin’s bluff.

The sources claim it is now the recommendation of the General Staff, the Defense Ministry,  and the majority of the Security Council that Putin should drop the mirror, decide on asymmetrical measures, and authorize endgame escalation. “That decision is days away”, one of the sources said over the weekend.

The source believes the Russian military are now staking their honour on this decision because the alternative is “too little too late”, and “defeat by a thousand cuts.” Such a defeat is dishonour – “in practice, the Kremlin has only one option now.”  

by Editor - Tuesday, July 14th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Does President Vladimir Putin believe in the magic mirror?

That’s the mirror which answers questions. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall”, it has been famously asked for hundreds of years, “Who in this land is fairest of all?”  

Putin’s personal advisor, Kirill Dmitriev —  the fairest in the land in his own estimation — was educated in the United States:  he believes the magic mirror is the creation of a Walt Disney cartoon.  

However, trained by the KGB to be fluent in German, Putin came across the mirror in  the Grimms’ fairy tale version. That first appeared in 1812  and was translated from German  into Russian and published in 1826.  

The Russian magic mirror followed in 1833 when Alexander Pushkin told the tale. It reappeared in Alexander Afanasyev’s collection of Russian folk tales, Narodnye russkie skazki.  In that Russian version, the magic mirror had been acquired by a prosperous merchant. One of its powers, the folk tellers said, was that “you could look and find out what was happening and where.”  The merchant’s wife used the mirror to discover that a rival, a woman more beautiful than she was, was living with two oligarchs – er, bogatyrs – in a forest nearby. So she sent her servant to kill her rival with poison. Once, twice, three times she tried until she succeeded.

I won’t spoil the story by retelling all that happened except that the beautiful girl survived to live happily ever after. The evil-wishing sorceress didn’t. She “was tied to a stallion’s tail, and the stallion galloped across a field and scattered her smashed bones over the bushes and the gullies.”  

When President Putin describes his operations in the war against the US and NATO allies on the Ukraine battlefield, he often refers to the mirror as his rule for escalation in the warfighting.  He means that for every escalation operation on the enemy side, he will order the General Staff to strike back tit-for-tat, symmetrically. This way Putin thinks he has preserved the Russian initiative and escalation control. He also thinks that the other side has the same magic mirror and will be limited to the same mirror rule, tit for tat, as Putin insists. What is magic about this mirror in Putin’s doctrine is that his mirror’s magic is more powerful than the enemy’s magic, and that if Putin’s keeps repeating this often enough, his magic will deter the enemy from escalating its war to destroy him.

Putin thinks the US and the NATO allies are afraid of being tied to the stallion’s tail and smashed to pieces. He doesn’t acknowledge that they believe he’s a donkey.

“Victory will undoubtedly be ours,” Putin declared in a speech to a Moscow rally, “Everything to Win”, yesterday.  “Our guys, the fighters, are moving forward,” he added.

“Our responses will always be mirrored, wherever they try to strike at the territory of Russia, we will respond in a mirror, only several times more powerful. The enemy will feel it. He already feels it, I hope, and he will feel it several times more powerfully.”  

This is Putin’s public response to the rising pressure from within the Security Council, the intelligence agencies, the General Staff, and in the media of the military bloggers for E-Day. That’s short for Escalation Day – not TFT (tit for tat), not TIT (Trust in Trump), not the symmetrical responses from the genie in Putin’s magic mirror.  

This is the plan for escalation of military operations to cut the Ukraine battlefield off altogether from its ground and sea supply links to the NATO alliance; to cut off the US and NATO drone targeting operations in the airspace of the Black Sea, and the Starlink and other satellite deployments in space; and to do as much as possible for Russia’s allies, starting on the Iran front, to inflict cost and pain on the US.  

Intelligence sources in Moscow have been expressing confidence that Putin, having no alternative now, will release the General Staff from the operational restrictions he has imposed since the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022; most particularly “our responses will always be mirrored.”

In this latest statement, however,  Putin reveals that he believes he has an alternative.

The magic mirror.

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by Editor - Tuesday, July 14th, 2026
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The rupturing of the aorta which killed US Senator Lindsey Graham on July 11  causes sudden, excruciating pain across the chest; the internal bleeding causes death so rapidly most victims cannot be saved.

Graham’s fate is now to be inflicted by rapid enactment by the US Senate and House of the 500% tariff of the Graham sanctions bill on countries buying Russian oil, gas, uranium, coal, nickel, food grains.    The pain is aimed principally at China, India, Turkey.

The bleeding to death is planned to be the fate of President Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The Kremlin and its official media have issued no comment. Oleg Tsarev, the Ukrainian opposition leader in Crimean exile, published a death notice identifying the “very influential club”, to which Graham belonged, in which “there are no women or children. A very influential club.”  

Putin’s negotiator with the Trump administration for sanctions relief, Kirill Dmitriev, has fallen uncharacteristically silent without publishing a tweet for 48 hours.  

Over the same period,  press reports  have appeared in the Middle East confirming that  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has decided to transfer his Russian S-400 batteries to one of three US allies in the war against Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE or Qatar;  and to have ordered Turkish forces to raise their flag at bases surrounding the Russian naval base at Tartous and the Russian airbase at Khmeimim, near Latakia on the Syrian coast.  

Responding to criticism of Putin for “betraying” the General Staff on retaining the Syrian bases and on supporting Iran against its enemies, a Moscow source commented: “The official justification for Putin’s approval [of the resale of the S-400 systems delivered to Turkey between 2017 and 2019 but never fired] will be as hypocritical as the Americans — it will be a ‘defensive weapon’ to be used in ‘specified circumstances only.’ And that’s it.  I expect no limits to what the Kremlin will stoop in their money-making now. You can expect, a year from now, Russian S-400s and 500s will be sold direct to the Emiratis and Saudis. No doubt about it. Strictly speaking, the Turks do not have to do a resale. They will say they are giving military defensive cover, jointly with Europe and the US, to the Arabs; the Russians will go along with that.  Putin’s problem is more urgent: he has to win the war in Ukraine to have any say in anything anywhere. If he doesn’t decide on this now, he’s Gorbachev 1985, waiting to be dismembered and sold in pieces to the Arabs, Turks, Europeans, and Chinese.”

Another Moscow source has been reporting the anticipation among Security Council officials that Putin must agree to the General Staff’s escalation options “within days”.  

In this timing, by coincidence or by calculation, the Russian oligarchs supporting Putin have published an appeal to him with strings attached. These have been spelled out by Andrei Melnichenko and published by The Economist on July 9.   Melnichenko warns Putin, and also the Graham sanctioneers in the White House and Congress, against four “scenarios” – “a humiliated Russia, lingering on the periphery of the West”, “Russia in China’s orbit”, “the fragmentation of Russia, which would rapidly become unmanageable”, and “Russia to become a fortress: closed, mobilised, in permanent siege”.  

Moscow sources believe there are more options than these.

They say the Security Council has proposed to Putin to decide that if he is not to face slow bleeding defeat, he must commit now to “complete Russian victory cutting Ukraine off from Europe, NATO and the US;   decapitation or exile for the Zelensky regime; and for Kiev and the main cities to be run in the manner the US runs Iraq. That victory brings military to power in Moscow.”

This is anathema to the oligarch base on which Putin has depended until now, when, Moscow sources agree, that is impossible.

“Melnichenko is speaking at the behest of the state oligarchs clan of which [First Deputy Prime Minister Denis] Manturov is the face and coordinator”,   according to one source. “They know [Roman] Abramovich is not the right person to intermediate. They want to retain their external wealth and their Russian assets so they are floating a ‘nothing and everything is possible’ balloon – if need be, to open a platform independent of Putin, but if he will come to an accommodation, so much the better.”

They are worried, a source in a position to know claims, by “the prospect of a entire shift toward a Chinese-style takeover by a military-nationalist alliance, the state takeover of all oligarch assets, a change of leadership at Rosneft and the state banks. This may not be plausible for the Kremlin. But it is being floated now. And there are other scenarios which the oligarchs also oppose. One would be for Putin to preserve his continuity in power on striking a grand deal with India and China. The Indians will show the middle finger to the Americans if the Chinese will but not alone. Putin will have to join, too.”

Another Moscow source suggests Melnichenko’s pitch looks to “be orchestrated by the British – they might have his balls in a nutcracker and they are putting him up to it now to test some of Putin’s allies and high-ranking bureaucrats. The usefulness of [Mikhail] Fridman, [Pyotr] Aven, [Roman] Abramovich has expired. There must be several other plays in the works and [Melnichenko] could be the chosen one to make the next move.”

That’s for later, the source adds. “Right now the problem for Putin is that in facing the war which the US and NATO are escalating against him, they have a succession objective, but he does not. Putin has created no successor.”

by Editor - Sunday, July 12th, 2026
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