Podcast | The Sberbank Troll & Infolklore (week 3)

Part One. The Christening of the Sberbank ReportSome of us might have seen last week a new character entered into our information space, and its Mana, its energy, doesn’t match its name. This is a core element in the Disinfolklore analytical method, so we can all learn how to do this. That when we see or perceive some piece of information warfare, we look for the Mana in the meme, and then we see if the name of that energy suits it.So if Donald says he wants peace while bombing Iran, then the Mana, the energy, the substance of what he is saying doesn’t match the name. It’s not peace. And obviously that example works for the Russians, and part of what I try to teach myself to do is learn to practise this in real time.And so this is an example of it from last week that some of us who spend our days in the Ukrainian information space might have noticed, this character. And you might remember my piece last year on how Disinfolklore, part of the Disinfolklore method, is to look at memes as characters that we would look at, like in a book.And then that enables us to examine them in ways which we don’t usually examine news stories. Ukraine being a perfect example of a character with female characteristics, according to the authoritarian mindset, who needs to surrender to the man, Russia. And so if we look at that in that analytical way, it does help us. Because people like Putler talk about Ukraine as a woman.Famously, the example I give on the 20th of February 2022, where Putler was giving a press conference. So four days before the full-scale invasion. And he used the term “like it or not, take it my beauty”. And Russians perfectly understood what he meant by this, because they understood the reference point.Which was a song by a Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mould. And Red Mould had this famous song in the 1980s called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin”. So again, archetypal Disinfolklore, in two senses of the word archetypal. And Putler communicates his threat via this piece of Disinfolklore from pop culture that is visible to the Russists, but not to these Western experts that we hear so much about.And the message was very clear, and it was very clear in gendered terms, as indeed that 1980s song is. “Like it or not, take it my beauty.” Perceiving Ukraine as a corpse, and also as the victim of necrophiliac, you know what.And it’s not just me who noticed this gendered speech and this means of threatening, what has come and what has been realised through the same means. He, and the adjudicated horrible word that Donald is, also use these same terms.So I did do a piece last year on gender mainstreaming, and the importance, the lenses of gender as one of the mainstreaming tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. But I just bring this up in the context of looking at particular elements in stories that we wouldn’t consider to be a character, because it doesn’t seem to be a person. And in this case, I’m looking at the Sberbank report, and some of you will remember this from last week, as one of the examples.A character is bornSo on the 25th of August, a Telegram outfit styling itself as Black Mirror published screenshots of a Russian language analytical note. Eight scenarios for the end of the war, dated April 2026, probabilities summing to a suspiciously tidy 100%. Every page watermarked with the Telegram channel’s own domain. The hackers claim the note was extracted from the correspondence of German Gref, chairman of Sberbank, with an unnamed interlocutor.Meduza - and some of you will know I am suspicious of Meduza - Meduza covered it the same day, and credit where it’s due, it said the quiet parts plainly. The screenshot’s authenticity is unconfirmed. But then went on to do a whole article about it. So the disclaimer is there, of course. And stated also that the note’s author is unknown.The bank had not commented, Meduza commented, and at the bottom of the article, Meduza appended an update. A financial market source suggested the text smelled of a chatbot, and an AI detection service scored the English version at 83% machine generated.But read the headline noun. Sberbank’s April document. Within four days, the Ukrainian aggregators had shortened it further. Hackers leak Sberbank’s note. Hackers crack Sberbank chief’s correspondence.And by the weekend, the thing arrived on my own desk already wearing its new name. The Sberbank Report. That, listeners, is a baptism. It’s a naming. It’s a naming of energy.And in this, the Disinfolklore analytical method, a troll is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. And christening an anonymous PDF with the name of Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, is a troll of the first order, because the emotion it moves is trust.I know Ming may laugh at that. The trust at the Sberbank. But I think you know what I mean. And that naming is an enlistment of the listeners.So here’s the detail I focused on. The name outran the legend on day one. And this is something we see a lot, actually. So after four days passed, folklorists know that we won’t even remember, you know, the original qualifications in the articles. And if we want to be cynical, we would say that Meduza is well aware of this.So even the hackers never claimed Sberbank wrote it. Their claim was that the file turned up in Gref’s correspondence with a person they cannot or will not identify. That is provenance as location, not authorship. An inbox is a place PDFs pass through. The maximal true version of this story, a rich man once received an email with this attached, establishes absolutely nothing at all. Every ounce of the document’s new authority was manufactured in the retelling.Tool 3: look for the Mana in the memeTool 3 tells us not to argue with the source. So we’re not like the European Union’s method, where you look at the behaviour, you painstakingly try and trace it back to Russia. Because in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we’re dealing with matters at great scale, and we don’t really have time to do that kind of stuff.And the stakes are a bit less for us on our timeline for proving provenance. But also mainly because it doesn’t matter if the provenance. Most of us can intuitively know now, and listening to Ming or Mockers or Wendy on any particular episode on Volya will know if things are Russian, basically, because it’s obvious to us.We’re intuitively looking for the Mana in the meme. We don’t believe their denials. We’ve seen the pattern before, and we remember the pattern from before. So we’re not like a newspaper article that seems to forget things one day to the next. And looking for the Mana in the meme tells us not to argue with the source.So we’re not concerned so much with the source itself. We want to read what is immanent. I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. What is the Mana? What is immanent in the artefact itself?So let’s have a look at it. Let’s read. So the note’s Mana, the note’s energy, is about clock pressure. Time works for Russia. The note says so in nearly those words, four separate times. Every month of delay is priced as a Russian asset and a Ukrainian cost.Its agency grammar is just as legible. Ukraine, it states outright, is not an independent player but an object. So that energy is in there. The puppet. The puppet Mana, rather, whose payoffs are set by others.So this idea that Ukraine is just a proxy for the US or for France or whoever. And that is the energy in a lot of what the note is.Its probability mass tells the same story. The percentages pretend to complicate. Add the scenarios and Russia retains occupied territory in roughly 88 of 100 of the futures, while Ukraine’s 1991 borders are awarded two. So that’s 88 out of two. Its precedents are a matched set, which many of us in this space since February 2022 have seen.Cyprus is invoked four times, Taiwan, Korea. Finland’s amputation is rebranded as a success story. And every analogy, a partition that held, not one that reversed in the victim’s favour.So the Mana there is the support of Russia’s position inside this supposed note. So the energy inside the artefact says, partition is a sober centre. Patience belongs to Moscow. Urgency belongs to you.Now say the name again, the Sberbank Report. It promises the opposite Mana entirely. The system’s cleverest bank, privately despairing of the war, candour smuggled out of the citadel. The name says confession, but the energy says instruction.So I came across this because I saw the headline and I thought, that’s a bit rum. I don’t really get that. So that’s why I went to the memo itself. And the headlines we were seeing, the naming of it, did not match the energy when I looked into it in detail. And I’ve just detailed some of that energy now.The name fails its own auditSo the name fails its own audit. Four tells, briefly, for those who like their scepticism itemised. The note cites Sberbank in the third person, once, in parentheses, as one of the outside forecasters of the key rate, next to a mid-tier retail broker. Institutions do not footnote themselves as external sources. Outsiders compiling public forecasts do.The document wears none of the furniture a bank product cannot appear without. No author, no addressee, no classification, no disclaimer. It explains Nash equilibria and prospect theory at textbook level, in a paper supposedly orbiting a CEO who has spent a decade putting Kahneman on Sberbank’s own stages. And I’ve spoken about Kahneman before, and his system one and system two model, as well as all his great work on how our choices are determined by who sets the decision frameworks.And it dates Ukraine’s Flamingo missile combat debut to February 2025, months before that weapon existed. An error no editorial layer caught, because there was no editorial layer.One more, because it matters for the genre. The note’s most probable scenario leans on the Iranian precedent of the 8th of April. Ultimatum plus deadline plus mediator equals deal. The Iranian precedent of the 8th of April collapsed. So the template collapsed within a fortnight, as predicted by me in writing many times since July 2025, when Donald seemed to start pursuing this peace archetype, this peace character, this peace deal character, to fix the markets.But the template collapsed within a fortnight of the document’s own dateline. The Strait of Hormuz shut again. And a blockade went up. Washington cried violation. A forecast that failed its first contact with events was nonetheless promoted to the front page four months later, because the payload’s usefulness never depended on its accuracy.The 7% chanceThe single most quotable atom in this affair is a 7% chance of Russian victory. Learn to distrust quotable atoms, and most of us do. Fake precision, 7% chance, is a costume that Mana wears. Ask any headline number to name its parents. This one descends from the note’s sociological keystone.Putin’s approval at 67.8%, the lowest since 2022. That figure matches one pollster’s weekly series, which the note declines to name and which it silently prefers to the two other major series showing 79 and 73 in the same month.Onto that cherry-picked base, the authors then stack an unfalsifiable spiral of silence correction of a further 10 to 15 points, arriving at a real support level no instrument on earth could verify.Two discounts on a selected foundation. And notice that the correction runs against the Kremlin, which is precisely why a Western reader trusts it. That 7% is not a finding. It is bait, cut to the mouth of the fish. And it worked, because it drew my attention to it, and many of our attention to it, when we saw that 7%.The baptismal fontWhich brings me to the part of the story where I want to be exact rather than merely suspicious. Many of us have long felt uneasy about the exile media, and I’ve said so on this show before, as you know. But the lesson here is not a conspiracy, it’s a mechanism. And mechanisms are more damning because they often repeat, and we’ve seen this same pattern repeating again and again.Meduza’s own paragraphs performed the verification ritual honestly: author unknown, authenticity unconfirmed, bank silent. Meduza’s own headline and body then christened the object anyway. Sberbank’s document. Sberbank’s analysts assess. The caveat lives in the body, the name lives in the headline. And only one of them gets forwarded. Names travel, caveats die at the first repost.This is the leak economy at work. Outlets starved of access live on purloined paper. Purloined paper must be somebody’s to be news. So the christening becomes irresistible, and the christening takes place in its qualification, in its denial.Even by denying that it’s confirmed it’s a Sberbank document, that denial itself has the impact on our minds of seeding the idea that it may be Sberbank’s product, and therefore we can trust this 7 or 8% figure.The Surkov controlIf your own reporting says the author is unknown, your headline may not tell me whose it is. And there’s a control for this, which is what I call the Surkov control.And some of us will remember that in 2015 it was absolutely sensational. Surkov’s email box was gotten. Sorry, in October 2016, the Ukrainian hackers of CyberHunta, with InformNapalm as publication partner, released Vladislav Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation, his office email box whole. And the raw mail file itself, and more than 2,000 emails, with a second tranche to follow. That shape is what made verification possible.Strangers could test it. Researchers cross-checked mundane details against known events. Recipients confirmed their own correspondence. And the Kremlin’s denial that Surkov even used email had to survive contact with the man’s family passport scans. And it didn’t.And the English MP, an English Conservative MP, along with Alla, Ali, I can’t remember her name, from Euromaidan Press. Under the RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, they published the definitive analysis of the Surkov leaks, which helped me a lot in my work.Because it gave me access in Ukraine to the kinds of tricks. It gave me a basis for the suspicion I had already held that Russia was fake organising various demonstrations that I was being sent along as a monitor working for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor.And so it was very helpful for me to get this. But the point being here is that in this case, or in the Sberbank case, we just got this PDF, and none of it was very verifiable.The Surkov trove was a mountain of clerical dross with a war buried inside it. The Gref leak is one document that is all war and no expense reports.A payload density of 100%, which is the signature of authorship, not extraction. And two honest complications, so our scepticism stays a method and not a mood.Even verified troves can carry planted forgeries. The Citizen Lab documented exactly this, a lie seeded in a forest of facts. And according to great work by emptywheel, the Steele dossier had apparently been adulterated by Russian disinformation. So all of its truth-bearing content had been sullied by being tied in with stuff about golden showers and the rest of it.But a channel whose business is selling insider scarcity, which is the Telegram channel that published it, would withhold the trove, whether or not the trove exists? Hardly. And a release shape identical under both hypotheses carries zero evidential weight. However, I do use the CyberHunta example because it published an inbox which we could confirm that the leak had happened, whereas Black Mirror published, well, they published a legend.Filing the changelingAnd so the question is, is the Sberbank report - and when I use the term Sberbank report, I do it with quotes, air quotes, scare quotes, I think people call them - so is it Disinfolklore? Yes, but the quiet kind. And that’s what makes it worth looking at carefully.There’s no slur in it, there’s no gore, there’s no urgency on its surface. Nothing for the outrage radar to catch. And that is the design. So there’s no emotion in there, really, except for that troll that was designed for people like you and me, i.e. putting a number on Russia’s likely success in the war. However, that number itself and that implication is then belied by the content in the actual memo itself.There’s no trigger, because the intended emotion is not anger, but professional resignation. The calm, sinking downgrade of our own priors. The payload is entirely structural, carried in probability mass, precedent selection, and the grammar of who acts and who is acted upon. When the affect is stripped out, two of the tools in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use, which are part of the Twelve Tools, must do the work our indignation usually does for free.The Code of Positive Trolls in my analysis also binds me, and I cannot tell who did write this note. Not Sberbank, not the Kremlin, not Kyiv, not the channel that watermarked it. And anyone who starts a tasking chain from a stack of screenshots is performing the same trick in reverse.What I can tell you is that the name Sberbank Report is unearned, and exactly what would earn it. Raw email files with cryptographic signatures from a Sberbank domain, a trove with boring depth, forensic verification by an outlet that actually does mail forensics, a first-seen date for the watermarked file that precedes its own legend. Until that, then the extraction story is part of the artefact, not metadata about it.So, four rules to take from this example. First, a document’s name, Sberbank Report, is a claim, but we should audit it like any other claim. Second, real inboxes are boring. A leak that is all payload was written for release, not taken in one.Third, the most quotable number in any leak is the least trustworthy thing in it. Fourth, when the caveat and the christening share a page, only the christening survives transmission. So we have to do the caveat’s work ourselves out loud, which is what I do.The overheard sovereignAnd finally, as any of us who know high-powered individuals know, or have worked for them, they get zillions of emails. And so they don’t own all the emails. Anyone who looked through the News International hacking email troves, or any of these leaks, or even the Epstein files, you see that people get zillions of emails and attachments and all sorts of boring stuff.That doesn’t make it German Gref’s opinion, or even a report written for him. Even in the best case scenario, someone may have written it for him and sent it to him.And yet the only reason we’re really reading it is because it’s archetyped as the Sberbank report. And the archetype in there is basically the King’s speech overheard.So the Gref frame itself is the overheard sovereign, folklore’s oldest credibility device. The powerful man’s private speech is his true speech. But as just said, we have no evidence it is his true speech. And on the balance of probability, it’s not his true speech, because it’s from someone else. And it’s writing about Sberbank itself in the third person.And stolen documents inherit the sincerity precisely because they were not given. We discount the proclamation read from the balcony, and we credit the letter lifted from the desk. Every court in every story keeps a servant behind the desk, who hears something as they’re delivering the food to their boss. And every audience believes the whisper over the public decree.Note the dual audience design as well. The 7% victory headline is anti-Kremlin sugar for us. It buys distribution from independent media, and the deep structure rides on it. Time works for Russia. The freeze is the sober centre. Ukraine is an object, not a player.That’s the Mana. That’s the true Mana of the document when you look at it. The provenance legend is the delivery vehicle. The note is the payload.And that’s all I have to say about the Sberbank case. But I hope that was of use. I wanted now to talk about the principles of Infolklore.Part Two. Principles of Infolklore, Episode Four: The Courtroom and the LedgerSo we’re on episode four. And as some of you know, some of you listening, I’ve been going through the archive of Volya transcripts of the Spotify shows. And out of these, I’ve deduced some of the principles of Infolklore.I’ll stop you right thereSo, Sunday Morning in Odesa, the 19th of July 2025, an hour and 27 minutes into a Volya show. A guest has the floor. He tells the room he was once a Russian propagandist himself. So he knows these people. And what he knows is that they are donkeys and they’re stupid. He’s working himself up and the room is letting him. Then he says this.“They are orcs, orcs, orcs.”That’s Sunday Morning in Odesa, 19th of July 2025. Some of us will remember that episode. Orc is the room’s own word for the invader, borrowed from Tolkien. And I’ll come back to it before the end.The guest goes one step further. He says they are not human beings. And the host, on a Sunday, with a guest who is entirely on his side, does the thing I’ve built this whole idea of folklore around.“I’ll stop you right there because one of the things that we don’t want to do is dehumanise them because dehumanisation takes away some of their agency.”Hear the reason he gives. Not that it is rude, that it lets them off. A monster cannot be tried, because a monster did not choose. 10 seconds later, the host hands the guest the word he was reaching for, and takes it in the same breath.“And what I will say is that they are monsters, but for me, all monsters are actually human.”And that is exactly the kinds of thing I’ve said many times when I’ve been accused of dehumanising the Russists. And a minute after that, the same host is calling them rotten and evil in language I’ll leave in the archive, and the show rolls on.The pub register comes straight back, but it comes back on conduct words, rotten and evil. Not on the one word that would have taken them out of the human category and out of the dock.90 seconds of radio. A friend interrupted, at the cost to the flow, with the reason given. You run the law on your own side on purpose, and you keep two books for the dead.For anyone arriving at this fourth episode, Disinfolklore is folklore-like information told with meanness. It’s built to bend moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations to someone else’s plan. Infolklore is the positive kind, true stories in the old story shapes, told with generosity by people with real stakes in real problems. The gate between them is the Code of Positive Trolls, which are six practices I mentioned.And the second of them, ethical discipline or right, is measured against the legal order the world wrote down after 1945. That is why the courtroom comes first in this family.Episode one told us the stated destination of this war on these shows is a courtroom in The Hague. Tonight is the evidence from the whole archive, 1,121 broadcasts between October 2024 and August 2026.Every count I give you is a floor, because, you know, I can’t keep everything, no one can keep everything in mind. But the working vocabulary of the law, war crime, proportionality, tribunal, legitimate target, is spoken in more than half of everything that this station has ever put on air.Will again today was talking in terms of the law. More than half, and it is spoken on your daily strands first, which is where I’m going to show it to you.The test, run on ourselvesJenny today was tweeting about the genocide convention. This is the post-World War II legal order I’ve been going on about for years. The Geneva and Hague Conventions are the world’s written rules for how a war may be fought.Geneva protects the people caught in it. Hague limits the means used. Proportionality is their working test: the civilian harm expected from a strike weighed against the military gain.That is the whole instrument. And Volya runs on it in both directions. Here it is in the first winter. SBU Crime and Punishment.In those days, Tracey’s great show. The 16th of January 2025, three hours and 42 minutes in. Will has just called Russia an atrocity machine. And then he turns the rule on his own microphone.“I don’t show videos of prisoners of war and talk about them in detail because there are strict rules around how you can treat prisoners of war. And I don’t want to see Ukraine doing the wrong thing either.”A prisoner of war, a POW, is protected by the third Geneva Convention from being made a spectacle. Will applied that to the show. Not to Russia. To the show, in the archive’s fourth month.Eighteen months later, on the last morning show in the archive that I was looking at, the 5th of August 2026, the morning after Kyiv had buried its dead from the night before, the host in that seat, Will, by the feed’s own listing, said why. He had just run the two limbs on Ukraine strikes. Is the target military? Is the harm proportionate? And then he named the standard and the purpose. The Geneva and Hague Conventions, Ukraine meets the test on each and every instance.“We evaluate them on purpose, specifically so that I could be hard on Ukraine if necessary. If necessary, because we don’t want to see Ukraine committing war crimes.”The 5th of August 2026. On purpose, specifically, so that I could be hard on Ukraine. That is the rule, as Volya would say it. And the room said it on the last day. What it does to the listener is precise.It converts the intention from wanting Russia hurt to wanting Russia hurt lawfully. It steadies the attitude. So the cheer that follows is licensed rather than reflexive.The code practice is ethical, right, with insight beside it, which is the sixth element in the Code of Positive Trolls. For those who don’t know, I’m a lawyer by training.And so when I use the term code, I meant that in a legal sense. And I take the code from the Buddhist jurisprudence itself, where it has been used for at least twelve or thirteen hundred years as part of the Mahayana path, these six elements, which are generosity, right, ethical discipline, patience, Mana or energy or perseverance, joyous perseverance, focus and insight.And the tell which makes it Infolklore rather than counter-propaganda is the direction. A counter-propagandist runs the test on the enemy only, but you, on Volya, run it on our own side first.And you say so. You name it. You do it and you name it. And the energy of what you do matches the name. So there’s a consistency between it.In propaganda, that is not the case. And watch the whole procedure once, in Will’s own words, because the internet does not do this. Nor do most media organs.The war crimes evaluatorBooms & Woe, the 20th of July 2026. Ukraine had hit warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s biggest online retailer. And the usual chorus had cried, war crime, war crime.The co-host put the question to Will by name. He walked the first limb. The company’s ownership had moved close to the Kremlin. Its handling policies changed after 2024.And parts that only go on weaponised drones were moving through its network. He walked the second. Warehouses. At night, hardly anyone killed relative to the value. Then the verdict, delivered like a judge who knows he can be appealed.“So if I’m the war crimes evaluator here, I’ll allow it. Especially in the context that Russia is taking an exact same interpretation as me in attacking facilities inside Ukraine for a much longer period of time, much like the cargo ships.”So if I’m the war crimes evaluator here. He put himself in the chair. You may disagree with the ruling, you cannot deny the procedure, and the procedure is the practice. The same instrument run the other way acquits the enemy when the enemy deserves acquitting, and a room willing to do that has earned the right to convict.Though, of course, and we heard Will say this, remind us all this week, as we all need to be reminded the whole time, there are no valid targets for Russia in Ukraine. And every time one of us, including me, for a moment talks about, oh, that’s not a military target, or even enters into a discussion about the rightfulness or wrongfulness of the particular targets that Russia hits, we are falling for a troll, because every activity of Russia inside Ukraine is unlawful.By contrast, Article 51 of the UN Charter, which Russia itself has signed up to, and which you must sign up to if you want to be a recognised state, determines that Ukraine has an inherent right to self-defence. And therefore, any activity against Russia that Ukraine prosecutes inside Ukraine, or indeed inside Russia, once it’s proportionate, and that test of proportionality can be affected by the proportionality that the invader, the country involved in the territorial invasion of Ukraine, has itself engaged in.So, on the 17th of February 2026, with Mockers away, Jenny ran Booms & Woe from Sweden as a two-and-a-half-hour seminar on the conventions, and opened by saying that war crime is a term this room uses all the time and ought to use properly. An hour in, Ioana, who co-hosts the news, sometimes with Will, drew the line the test needs.“That is not a war crime. That happens. But these striking apartment buildings in Odesa and children’s hospital in Kyiv, this is not collateral damage. These are war crimes. Back to you, Jenny.”A shell that hurts one civilian near a real military target is not a war crime. That happens. A room that will say that out loud is a room whose other verdicts can be believed. A radar that screams at everything protects you from nothing.Two vocabularies, one standardHow often? The room’s, Volya’s, fixed formula, the Geneva and Hague conventions, in that order or the other, is spoken in about one broadcast in 13.And nearly every time it is spoken at all, it is spoken on the daily news strands. The transmission wing, the genocide strand, and the Sunday shows, says international law instead.Two vocabularies, one standard. Most weeks in Will and Mockers’ shows, the morning shows and the weekend shows, from the first winter to the last month, with gaps.Not every week, and I’ll not say every week, but one in 13 at least. One more receipt, because it spans the whole archive. In November 2024, Will proposed that Russia’s power grid should be answered in kind, as a lawful demonstration within the conventions, and filed it where this station files its wishes.In July 2026, he read out that Blackout Sunday had come true, and he named the Hague and Geneva limits before he applauded. The Shelf episode three, which I spoke about last week, where he and others used the term fan fiction, which no newsroom in the world talks about their desires in those naked, clear terms.So the test is run on ourselves first, and the room tells us and explains why. So, the law of the sea. So here’s another quotation.“So just, yes, good on them, despite the fact that obviously, you know, that’s helping Russia’s war effort.”So this is the issue which we talked about before, where again, when Ukraine was and still is hitting and disabling the ships, the Russian ships in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, as far as we’re aware, it always gives the Russians and the seamen, no pun intended, a chance to escape.The numbersSo let’s think about the daily count of Russia’s losses from the Ukrainian General Staff, which is read on Booms & Woe every morning it airs.And Mockers reading it on the 21st of October 2024. As we know, she does a great commentary through it, which helps us see patterns in it which, if we haven’t heard the previous ones, we can’t see.And Prince Heather often chimes in, because she’s really on top of these numbers. And 1,710 liquidated personnel, not a record. Number two, a bumper crop.And then the tanks and the artillery and the fuel trucks. And then at the bottom of the list, this.“That’s a lot of infantry attacks, failed infantry attacks, sorry, should I say.”The accuracy reflex, mid-list, in the archive’s second week. Against the reader’s own pleasure. And here is the last month. Good Morning Kyiv and Booms & Woe.“1,500 liquidated personnel. Now, when I say liquidated, I don’t mean dead. I mean unable to fight, so whatever condition they may be in. And that’s a lot, isn’t it?”When I say liquidated, I don’t mean dead. That is the rule as the room would say it. The number glossed against overclaim on the very day it was highest.And then at the end of the sentence, the weight heard. The aggregate runs also throughout all of the broadcasts. And it keeps a true number honest against the listener’s appetite for it to be slightly more than it is.The shrug is a mood. The reader audits it in herself. The Code practices are ethical discipline, accuracy against interest and joyous perseverance, focus. Because somebody read that list every morning for two years.Here is the reader policing the room’s numbness out loud, on the 29th of April 2026, turning from Russia’s losses to Russia’s overnight attacks on Ukraine.“We should not get used to having to read out data from an overnight attack by Russia on its neighbour, should we? And yet here we are in the 50th, in the fifth year, doing exactly that.”Fifth year. The machine heard.The namesSo the second part of this is: Russia’s dead arrives as a number. Ukraine’s dead arrives as a name, an age, a unit, a date, a birthday.Good Morning Kyiv and the Boom Report, the 5th of July 2025. A host remembers Roman Ratushnyi, who once climbed a tree to get enough signal to speak to Volya on a Space. A Euromaidan activist, a journalist, a soldier of the 93rd Mechanised Brigade, killed near Izium on the 8th of June 2022. His parents given his Order for Courage in his place.“This is his birthday today, or at least a remembrance of his birthday.”And then the host read the dead man’s own sentence about why he fought, which is harder than anything the hosts themselves say, and the room heard it as his, not as theirs.That is the naming channel of the old song. A verdict warns everyone away from a piece of conduct. A name draws everyone towards a life.The Code practices are generosity, patience and focus. The tell is the care with a name the reader cannot always say, because in December 2024 a host stopped mid-sentence to ask the room how to say posthumous, and Prince Heather taught him. And the room has been learning how to pronounce these kinds of words, which many of us happily don’t pronounce that often out loud.“During that moment of silence, they were able to hear a person trapped between the fifth and sixth floors shouting for help.”Ukraine keeps a minute’s silence at nine every morning for its dead. And I was speaking to someone this week who had just been in Ukraine, and they had been driving during the minute of silence in Lviv, and someone indicated to them to pull over, and they never drove again at 9am in the morning.So this is really solid, as we also hear from Lexicon. Great testimony this week from Lexicon about what it’s like to deal with the air raids and the children going back to school and all that.And the silence has walked into these broadcasts more than once. On the 18th of May 2026, the show opened with Robin standing in Ukraine, telling the room they were having a moment of silence right now, and then dropping off. Mockers letting her have it. And on the 23rd of November 2025, a host told the room what the silence had done that week. In a block of flats Russia had struck, Ternopil by the date, though the host did not name it.“During that moment of silence, they were able to hear a person trapped between the fifth and sixth floors shouting for help.”The silence kept for the dead found a living man. And the very next words in the room were a co-host announcing a fund. Grief to attention, attention to a fundraiser. That is generosity with receipts. And I’ll talk about that a bit more in a later episode.So, on Booms & Woe, the 17th of February 2025, Prince Heather had been describing the Ukrainian unit that goes back to the same field month after month with tweezers. Pink mist is the room’s phrase for what the direct hit leaves of man, and the room uses it of Russians.“The important reality is Ukrainian soldiers become pink mist also,” she said.The verdict word, turned on our own dead, and 20 seconds later she answered her own sentence with a unit that goes out every day to collect a bit of DNA so that the family can be told a name. The verdict register and the naming register in one minute, on the news strand, not on a memorial show. That is the strongest single receipt in the whole archive.Shell hole in a fairy taleThe transmission wing keeps the naming book thickest, and it holds it there. On World Poetry Day, the 21st of March 2025, the reader gave the room Victoria Amelina, the novelist who became a war crimes researcher when the full-scale invasion came, and who was killed by a Russian missile in a Kramatorsk restaurant at 37. Her own line, written under bombardment in Kyiv.“Still, I want to not forget, and I want to learn the names.”And I’ll finish on this point with Victoria Amelina, because one of her diary entries was Shell Hole in a Fairy Tale, about the fairy tale kindergarten in Stanytsia Luhanska, where I conceived of Disinfolklore because of the folkloric resonance of the entire situation.And as some of us will recall, one of the first strikes by the Russians, a couple of days before the full-scale invasion, was on the fairy tale kindergarten in Stanytsia Luhanska, which I had seen many times. And you could see the photographs of it in the New York Times, that the shell clearly had come in, and you knew which direction it had come from, the Russian occupiers.And I wrote to her when she published that short story, because it obviously resonated with me and Disinfolklore.So I’ll leave it at that for today. And yes. Thank you for listening. Out.Continued from: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe