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.
Click to view or listen to the discussion with Nima Alkhorshid today at 9:30pm Moscow, 7:30pm London; 2:30pm New York.
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