Battling Archetypes

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

Part One. Principles of Infolklore, Episode 3: Volya’s NestThe Most Valuable Position in the RoomTwo hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered:“I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.”The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why:“Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.”For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room.I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution.The Name Came FirstThis series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice.I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolklore. You will see that in my last podcast.So Infolklore creation is a first-order creative practice. It is not just counter-Disinfolklore. That is where I was three years ago, when I created the portmanteau Disinfolklore to describe what I had witnessed in Russia-occupied Ukraine: stories which communicate a sense of meanness directly into our inner minds, using archetypes. That is Disinfolklore, and it is all around us. There is no shortage of it. I would not have bothered to create the creative practice of Infolklore if Disinfolklore were not affecting our world in so many different ways, whether it comes from Russia or America or Brexit England. Disinfolklore is everywhere we look. It is pickling us in its nonsense and in its manipulations. So we not only need to learn how to identify it and understand how it works, which is part of my mission. We also need a means of countering it, in the sense of creating a world in which we are pickled in Infolklore instead.Infolklore is a first-order creative practice. Making the true stories, not just refuting the false ones. Those words were written before I had ever read a Volya transcript. And when they were written, the practice of creating Infolklore had exactly one validated specimen anywhere on earth: the Battle of Kyiv study I spoke about in the last episode. If you look back at my fourth-anniversary podcast for Volya, you will find it on Disinfolklore.net, where I post my podcasts every week.I also post weekly podcasts on PowerofMana.net, which is the Finding Manuland Atlas side of my work, the linguistics side. You cannot understand Russian disinformation, or any form of disinformation, without looking into the linguistics that underpins it. Russian disinfolklorists learn linguistics. In fact, linguistics graduates in Russian universities study Disinfolklore. They study propaganda, what they call combat propaganda, as part of their course. And the reason they do it is the reason you must too, if you wish to understand, underpin and create a system that will help us interpret and create an Infolklore-saturated universe instead of a Disinfolklore-saturated one. That is why you must study it, and that is Finding Manuland at PowerofMana.net. You can subscribe to my work there, at Disinfolklore.net and at DecodingTrolls.net. My main site is Disinfolklore.eu.So here is this episode’s claim. While the name Infolklore sat waiting for specimens, this station built the practice’s operating system. The working rules everything else runs on. The evidence shelf, the source grading, the wish filing, the correction ceremony. You, on Volya Radio, built all of it without the name. Here is the evidence.First, an update on the reading. In episode one I gave you the scale. When I described you to yourselves in those first episodes, the close reading behind them had covered many of your shows. Now all of the shows are part of the analysis.What Are They Trying to Tell MeNow the toolkit proper. Where would you send a truth-seeking audience for evidence? These Volya shows send it straight into the aggressor’s own channels, and they teach the frame for reading what it finds there. Here is This Week in Absurdistan, one of the station’s long-running news marathons, on Rosstat, the Russian state’s own statistics agency:“We never look at it from the perspective of this is the unvarnished truth from Russia. We look at it in the perspective of what are they publishing here and what are they trying to tell me? What kind of story are they trying to tell me?”What are they trying to tell me. I consider people like Mockers much more expert than people like Mark Galeotti, who is pulled in to talk about Russia all the time but who knows nothing about Ukraine, or indeed Russia, in the way that Mockers does. So on Volya we are asking what are they trying to tell us. That is source criticism, the discipline scholars take degrees in, taught as a morning reflex, and aimed at enemy numbers as well as enemy words.And when the enemy admits a terrible thing, the admission becomes a floor. Here is World at War, the strand where the war’s hardest numbers get read, on the abduction of Ukraine’s children:“These are the 100% provable cases with data, that the Russians themselves say 700,000 plus children and women have been abducted to Russia.”And in the same breath:“Even the UN, which has lowballed these numbers, admits that that is extremely low.”That was from a December 2024 episode. Seven hundred thousand, from the abductor’s own mouth. Many of us will remember the day that was publicised. I have the receipts. I have the screenshots, as probably do most of us who listen to Volya regularly. Our phones are full of screenshots of the evidence, of the receipts. The one number the Russists cannot dispute becomes the floor under the charge. The Russists’ confession is the minimum, and the truth sits above it. And it is almost unbelievable to people who have not been paying attention, as many of us who try to explain these matters to people in our real lives find continually.Nobody here pretends this reading is a grim duty. On the morning of Operation Spiderweb itself, the day Ukrainian drones smuggled deep inside Russia burned the bombers on their own airfields, someone in the Volya room said “the biggest pleasure at the moment is also reading Russian Telegram channel.” That was June 2025. Verification on this station is not a defensive crouch. It is a craft, practised with visible enjoyment, on the enemy’s own material.Then the discount turns around and comes home, which is the part that would astonish any propaganda ministry on earth. Here is Ukraine News and russia’s Hybrid War, a show whose own title spells russia with a small r, on our side’s frontline news:“For the last 12 months, the OPSEC, the operational security, when it comes to the front lines in Ukraine, has improved so much that 90% of what we hear from the front lines, it’s only something that the Ukrainian military wants us to hear, or it’s a Russian narrative. So everything that comes from the front lines, we have to take it with a grain of salt.”This is especially relevant at the moment. We have recently had the final announcement, after six months of great, well-kept OPSEC, of Ukrainian advances, and there are now discussions about whether new advances are about to be announced. All of us repeat, again and again, that we would rather not know these things until they are properly confirmed. OPSEC is operational security, the discipline of telling the enemy nothing useful. Grain of salt, aimed at our own side’s good news, because good security means curated news. Everything gets graded here on Volya. Friendly sources included.And in the same segment, the tool I find most elegant: enemy silence used as the debunk. A panic was running that day about a Russian breakthrough, and here is how it was closed:“On Russian telegram there was no party there was no elation if that was a legit breakthrough of the front lines you know the Russians are going to go crazy with it but and they did not which told me that you know it’s not as bad as people trying to pan it out to be”That is the 12th of August 2025. No party on the enemy’s channels, therefore no breakthrough. The absence of celebration, read as evidence. The mirror of the admission floor: what the enemy cannot help boasting about, and what he fails to boast about, both testify.The enemy’s fakery, meanwhile, has been dismantled so many times on these shows that it now comes with an org chart. Here is SBU-Owls, a show named for the owls, this community’s word for whatever keeps mysteriously catching fire inside Russia, on the men who stage false captures of Ukrainian villages:“These guys, their sole purpose is to penetrate and to be able to plant a flag somewhere so they can take a picture for propaganda purposes, say that we have seized this territory. But they’re calling them flag bearers.”That is from August 2025. Flag bearers. The fake capture is now a staffed position in the Russian army. Once a room has read that job description aloud, no capture photo works on it again.The Question That Survived Its SpellingThe oldest question in law is cui bono. Who benefits. On these shows it is asked so routinely that it has become a named question, and I can prove that with a spelling mistake. Here is the host of Sunday Morning in Luhansk City, one of the Sunday shows that gives a wounded city’s name the top of the title, running the question on the Houthis and coming up empty:“I really actually have no idea what they get out of this to be frank I can’t answer the Kweebono question on this one I don’t know who benefits from this”That is Sunday Morning in Luhansk City, in September 2025, on Volya. The Kweebono question. That is the machine transcription meeting two thousand years of Latin, and I am keeping the spelling. Two things in that sentence delight me. A tool is real when it is allowed to return I don’t know, and there it is, run to a null, on air, no verdict forced. And a vocabulary is real when the machine starts misspelling it, because that means it is spoken, not written. Your Latin lives in the mouth.The ShelfNow the institution. The fan-fiction shelf, your own invention, and the answer to the most dangerous substance in wartime information, which is your own wanting.A wish is not a report. Every propaganda channel on earth files its wishes as news. This community files them as fiction, out loud, under a genre label, and the label flashed past once in episode two, in the clause “just my fan fiction.” Here is the institution behind the clause. The same week the bombers burned, a host on SBU Crime and Punishment and the Boom Report was dreaming about the Kerch bridge, Russia’s illegal bridge to occupied Crimea:“But hopefully the GUR or the SBU will broadcast live from Russian CCTV cameras when the thing starts going like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, right? And the spans start dropping. That’s my fan fiction. What do you think, Will?”That is from June 2025. The GUR and the SBU are, of course, Ukraine’s military intelligence and its security service. The Tacoma Narrows is the American bridge that famously shook itself to pieces on film. The wish is spoken, savoured, and filed as fiction in the same breath, and then handed to Will for review. The filing is a real act, done by name:“Anyway, fan fiction I suppose Wendy put it put it under fan fiction back to you”Decoding Disinfolklore, May 2026. Put it under fan fiction. A shelf implies a librarian, and the shelf keeps score, because sometimes reality reaches up and promotes a title. The shelf’s authors know their record is being audited:“I haven’t come up with any fan fiction just as late because You know, I don’t want to ruin my record of guessing pretty well”That is Kvetching, Ukrainian Culture and Book Club, on the 29th of June 2026. A record of guessing pretty well. A batting average, protected, for material filed as fiction. And on the very last day of this archive, the 5th of August 2026, on Decoding Disinfolklore, the whole system passed through one sentence:“Our own Will Thiel does a lot of really excellent analysis and I put into nest his analysis of his fan fiction, what he’d like to see happen. As anyone who follows him knows, some of what he does say has come to pass.”August the 5th. The shelf and the nest in a single sentence, and fiction being promoted to non-fiction, with the promotion announced. Hope, filed under fiction until reality promotes it. I contend no newsroom on earth runs a cleaner system for handling its own desires. The wanting is not suppressed, which never works. It is labelled, enjoyed, shelved and scored. And it is the opposite of Disinfolklore.A Year of WednesdaysFifty-three of these 1,121 broadcasts are this show, Decoding Disinfolklore. That is a year of Wednesdays. And on Wednesdays, the tools move in both directions.Some I brought to the room. The incoming troll radar, with its rule that your own doubt is itself data. If you don’t mind me quoting myself, and let me do my accent properly:“If I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them.”That is January 2026. Reading the absence, which asks what word is missing from an account, and who benefits from the hole:“The word that wasn’t there. For eight years the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk, occupation, was missing from almost everyone’s mouth.”Also Decoding Disinfolklore, July 2026. And the mirror. In June I read you Putler’s own words and named the trick in them:“The president of the Russian Federation invokes Goebbels in order to accuse the West of being Goebbelsian.”And the proof came from the man himself, who had described blame-shifting a few answers earlier:“He told you the trick. He told you its name.”That is Decoding Disinfolklore, June 2026. Accusation in a mirror: read the aggressor’s accusation as his confession. Naming a deployment is most of defeating it. Name them, and the power halves.But here is what the whole archive taught me about those Wednesdays. The room did not learn the method from me. Listen to what I actually said in July, introducing the red scrub-out, a practice I use of crossing out the enemy’s image in red before sharing it, so that their meme travels without its face:“If we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out like I do. I scrub it out in red if I need to so that you hardly see anything of it.”And in the same passage, this admission:“What I tried to do in my work consciously and what many other people like Mockers and many of you do also unconsciously.”That is from July 2026. There it is, in my own voice, a month before the archive ends, and a month before I understood it was the claim of this whole episode. Consciously in my work. Unconsciously in yours. The method was in the room before the method had a name. My Wednesdays put words on your weekdays.The Oracle and the NestEvery toolkit is best seen against the thing it replaces, and the replacement on offer these days has a name. Under every contested post, someone is asking Grok, the AI chatbot bolted onto the platform, to rule on the evidence like an oracle, so they do not have to read it. This February my show watched it happen to a real video the machine had called fake:“The number of people who in this thread just was like Grok, is this real? And Grok had said no, it’s not real, that it was a skit, when it wasn’t a skit. But yet all of them take whatever Grok says as it being 100% factual. And they don’t do the search themselves to figure out whether or not what they’re seeing with their eyes is real.”I reckon this was Ming, who is really Grok’s worst nightmare. That is from February 2026. A simple search proved the video real. The oracle had said fake. The crowd believed the oracle. And then a teacher in the room graded the oracle the way this station grades everything:“That should be your starting point, not your end point in terms of research. That’s what I used to tell my students, you know, go ahead, look at Wikipedia, but go to the original sources.”That is probably Wendy.“At least with Wikipedia, they, you know, list references at the bottom.”That is from February 2026. Graded below Wikipedia, on the one criterion Volya Radio cares about: no reference list. The oracle answers so you do not have to read. The nest exists so that you can. Two architectures for trust, and this community picked its side nineteen broadcasts out of twenty.The Toolkit Leaves the RoomIn episode two, last week, I promised you a clip with 175,000 views, and here it is, in one sentence. A story that flattered Ukraine was flying around the timeline until a host read out the first comment under it: “This thing has 175,000 views, 1601 reposts. It is not true. Just look at the very first comment.” That is on Booms and Woe, in June 2026. The debunk was sitting under the fake the whole time, one scroll away, and the room was taught to look there first.That habit does not stay in this room. In March it reached national television. Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, presented Ukrainian anti-drone interceptors as American technology. Here is Sunday Morning in Ukraine on what happened next:“He was sitting there trying to claim these anti-drone interceptors as US technology and like, bro, you literally have the Wild Hornets watermark on your effing video. I guess the community notes and the mocking was a little too much for him and he actually did an on-air correction.”That is from the 8th of March. The Wild Hornets are, obviously, the Ukrainian drone builders whose watermark was still on the footage. Community Notes is the crowd fact-check on X. Watermark spotted, notes attached, mockery applied, and a Fox News host ends up performing the ceremony this station performs as routine: the on-air correction. The toolkit went out through the audience and came back holding a correction from one of the biggest studios in America. You did that. Not with an army of fact-checkers. With habits.The Name Was the Easy PartGather it up. The nest holds the receipts, and the top of the room belongs to Ukraine’s evidence, not the hosts’ own work. The enemy’s channels are read with pleasure, his admissions and her admissions taken as floors, their silences as debunks, their fakery filed by job title. The oldest question in law is asked by name, cui bono, and allowed to answer I don’t know. Your own wanting is labelled, shelved, and scored. Your corrections run at the pace of a weekly ceremony. That is an operating system. Generosity runs all through it, because every tool in the kit is handed to the audience the moment it works, and insight, the noticing itself, is given away as equipment.I spent months looking for Infolklore’s working machinery in the libraries of the world and across the entire world’s media, and episode one told you how that search ended. The operating system was never on those shelves. It was pinned to the top of a morning Space on X, above a room with a bad back and a cat. Many cats. You built it without the name. I only brought the name, Infolklore. The name was the easy part.As some of you know, I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mainly on Disinfolklore.eu, and you can subscribe to my work on Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net and DecodingTrolls.net. I also sometimes post on X. I will come back to more of the Principles of Infolklore next week, inshallah.Part Two. The Third QuestionThe second thing I want to talk about today is something that James posted and brought to my attention earlier this week. It is a book called Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine.The BridgeAs many of you know, I spent three years of my life on the broken bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. Most of the ten thousand civilians a day who crossed it, between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine, were older people, older women mainly, crossing for pensions and for family, through the queues and the cold and the shelling, because that was what living required them to do. Sometimes I gave one of them an arm across. A woman of seventy, for instance, one day. I have a photo of me guiding her. She is blind. I was wearing my bulletproof vest and my helmet. Helping her across was nothing really, a few minutes of my working day. But what was being done to her, and to a million people like her, by the stories broadcast at them from one end of that bridge, took me years to learn to read.This week I read the book James brought to my attention. Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine, published by Springer, with a foreword by a chap called James Pamment, M-N, Pamment, of the Psychological Defence Research Institute at Lund University in Sweden. Its first substantial sentence: “Truth is becoming increasingly scarce in our environment, much like clean water.”Truth as water. The image my entire framework lives inside. If you go to my website, Disinfolklore.eu, and go behind the splash page, the first page, you will see the search function. Put in Luhansk Well. I have spent years building an archive I call the Luhansk Well, and years hunting the clean water I call Infolklore, the tale that feeds the well we all drink from instead of poisoning it.I saw wells the way we used to see wells, those of us who grew up in north-western Europe and perhaps America, in the illustrations in folktales and fairy tales. I saw these wells everywhere in Ukraine, in Luhansk. I remember one Saturday in particular, driving all around the Chornobyl exclusion zone, not inside it but around it, and all of those amazing villages, every single house with the kind of well that every folktale illustration has had since the Brothers Grimm first published theirs in the nineteenth century. That is what I was getting at. The clean water in the well I call Infolklore, the tale that feeds the well we all drink from instead of poisoning it, like Disinfolklore.So I am developing a Disinfolklore system outside Ukraine, and the authors of this book are developing a counter-disinformation system inside Ukraine. The authors and I have never met. We have spent a decade drawing from the same war, they from inside Ukraine’s institutions, I from that bridge in a Luhansk forest. And reading their book, I kept finding the same discoveries, made twice over, in two different vocabularies. This episode walks through those twin discoveries one by one. And then it comes to the one discovery that has only been made once, on my side of the river, and what it would mean to carry it across.For years that bridge was the only pedestrian crossing between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. A long walkway over the Donets, a river we have known since antiquity, with a section blown out of the middle, patched with wooden steps and iron balustrades, for want of a better term, that pensioners climbed in the heat and in the ice. Ten thousand pensioners and civilians a day is a small town’s whole population, walking this broken bridge, in both directions, daily.I was there for the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose monitoring mission watched the security situation along the contact line. The mission’s watch ran from 2014, and I was inside it until April 2022. I was posted to that bridge from 2015 to 2018, then to Dnipro, one of the few Westerners ever to live and work in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I stood on that bridge. I filed reports from it. And almost every working day for three years, I crossed into the occupation and read what the occupation published about itself.In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and demands a toll before it lets you cross. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and does not own the river. It controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And whoever holds that crossing holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or returnee. Citizen or separatist. You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it.At Stanytsia Luhanska the toll was paid by pensioners. In hours. In winter cold. In the humiliation of asking permission to walk into, and out of, their own country.The Testing GroundThe book calls Ukraine “a key testing ground for a sophisticated form of information warfare.” I called the bridge ground zero of the same testing ground years ago, and standing there taught me what the machine being tested was actually for.After the February 2014 invasion, Russia held more than a million Ukrainians inside roughly ten thousand square kilometres of occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, and even more in Crimea. One enclosed population. One information space. One master source. No exit. No laboratory in the history of persuasion has had those conditions. And the machine that ran there was not built to spread lies. Lies were the surface. Here is how I have put it in my own manuscripts:“Russia’s great insight was that an entirely new culture could be created using Disinfolklore, broadcast constantly through every medium into a captive population’s minds. Russia set out in April 2014 to hack the identities of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine.”The verb I used is hack. The object is identities. The date is April 2014.Disinfolklore is my name for the narrative form this machine runs on. Folklore-like archetypes weaponised to carry lies, exploitative mental models and coercive control into minds. An archetype, for anyone new to this, is one of the old story-shapes, the characters and plots that thousands of years of telling have worn so smooth they work on us below the level of noticing. The Bear. The Bridge Troll. The Mother and the Maiden. The machine’s product is not a changed belief. Its product is a changed identity.One woman shows the whole mechanism. Take a Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman from Mariupol, a mainly Russian-speaking Ukrainian city. In Russian Disinfolklore she and her child, the Mother and the Maiden, were held captive by Ukrainian Nazis. Another archetype, and one which some people mistake for a real thing. It is an archetype. A story form, not a real thing. And her captivity was Russia’s stated cause of war. On the morning of 16 March 2022 she is sheltering with her daughter in the basement of the Drama Theatre, the building where generations of Mariupol met for tea and Swan Lake, with the word CHILDREN painted outside in Russian, just in case the Russians could not read their own language, in letters big enough to read from the air, indeed from space. A Russian aircraft bombs it. And here is what the machine does next, in my manuscript’s words:“The moment the bomb dropped, Russian Disinfolklore banished our archetype from the Inner Realm. Suddenly, she was among the Nazis deserving of extermination.”The archetype, that is, of the Russian in Ukraine held hostage by Nazis. The moment the bomb dropped, Russian Disinfolklore banished her from the Inner Realm of Russia. She was the reason for the invasion. The moment the bomb falls, she is reassigned to the category the invasion came to destroy. A machine in the belief business could not survive that contradiction. This machine did not break stride, because it was never in the belief business. It is in the identity business, and identity, in its hands, is the weapon it uses to brainwash those who become subject to it. It is reassignable at will.The dead of Mariupol are a range, not a number. Fifty thousand to one hundred thousand killed. A range, because Russia did not count them. The shame of genocide and contempt for Ukrainians meant the killers kept no count of the killed. No count of the number of people it banished, with its bombs and its starvation, from the Inner Realm of Russian-speaking Ukrainians deserving of Russia’s protection to the Outer Realm, the moment they were killed.The book knows this machine, of course. Its foreword states Russia’s goal as pressing Ukrainian sovereignty to the point where “the history, identity, and autonomy of a people can be erased.” And its case files hold the pattern the Centre for Countering Disinformation itself named the information alibi: Russia pre-accuses Ukraine of the crime it is about to commit, so that a ready-made counter-story is circulating when the crime arrives. The book documents pre-accusation running before the bombing of that very theatre. The same theatre. The machine wrote her alibi before it killed her. I catalogued the same move for years from the bridge under my own name for it, Provocation Logic. Some of you will remember the series of six talks I did, after James’s question before Christmas, on the Provocation Logic Cycle. The abuser’s oldest sentence: look what you made me do to you. Twin discovery number one, and hold on to it, because near the end of this episode it turns into something bigger than either of our names for it.The Book, and How to Read ItLook at who wrote this book. Anatolii Marushchak is a human rights researcher in information and cyber law who co-founded the International Information Academy, a Kyiv research body he advises without payment. Anayit Khoperiya is the serving deputy head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation. Mykola Balaban is the serving deputy head of the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, and a historian of memory with a doctorate on Lviv in 1941. Stanislav Petrov is a cybersecurity lawyer who spent two decades inside Ukraine’s security institutions. Two of the four run the institutions the book describes. It is the record of what Ukraine actually did, under bombardment, written by the people doing it.And it must be read as what it is. Not one more case study. There is no other country on the planet that has gone through what Ukraine is going through and has gone through. Ukraine is the place where the identity-hacking machine was built and proven, before MAGA, before Brexit. So Ukraine’s answer is not one national system among many. It is the state of the art, the best any state on earth has yet done against the perfected form of the thing, the perfected form of Disinfolklore. Which changes how every page should be read. Where Ukraine’s response falls short, that is not Ukraine falling short. That is humanity falling short. The book is the high-water mark of all of us.What Ukraine BuiltThe story begins with civil society, not the state. In March 2014, as the fakes flooded in after Crimea, teachers and students at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where the idea of Russia was invented in the 1690s, launched StopFake, a volunteer fact-checking project built on one rule anyone can follow. Trace the claim to its source and publish what you find. VoxCheck followed. Detector Media mapped the Russian networks. Texty.org.ua did data journalism that Amnesty International has called some of the most reliable in Ukraine. I implore you to look at Texty.org.ua. They do great work, and I support their work strongly, with as much as I can afford to. The regulator banned retransmission of Russian state television in 2014 and blocked the big Russian social networks in 2017. I was in eastern Ukraine all that time, and I remember those moments, and the protests that came from the West: oh, Ukraine is censoring information.The state’s dedicated institutions arrived last, and then arrived twice in one month. In March 2021 the Centre for Countering Disinformation, the CCD, was created under the National Security and Defence Council, the body chaired by the President that runs Ukraine’s wars. Putting it there was the point:“The formal institutionalization of the CCD under Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council represents more than a bureaucratic milestone. It sends a clear signal that disinformation is treated as a strategic threat alongside cyberattacks or conventional military aggression.”Most governments file disinformation under communications, or under culture, or under nothing at all. Ukraine filed it beside missiles. Ukraine was correct. That same month the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, the CSC, known publicly as Spravdi, was established inside a culture ministry, deliberately at arm’s length from the security services, so that journalists and civil society could work with it without working for a spy agency. Its survival handbook for civilians, Dovidka.info, went live on 23 February 2022. One day before it was needed.Then the full-scale invasion, and the system went to war. Work that had taken days began taking minutes. A daily message box so that ministries, the Presidential Office and the military spoke with one voice. The Security Service blocking seventy-six bot farms holding more than three million fake accounts. Three million false people, switched off. The CCD tracing whole campaigns rather than single fakes: Black Hole, a metaphor planted on Telegram and grown into fabricated videos and falsified American news broadcasts, mapped and published as a pattern. UkrLeaks, dozens of interconnected accounts in several languages, attributed by name to Vasyl Prozorov, a sanctioned former Ukrainian officer in Russia’s service. A School of Strategic Communications training more than two thousand civil servants on curricula formally accredited by the civil service agency. Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency co-hosting strategic-communications weekends in Lviv. And in 2024, a joint CCD and NATO threat assessment presented to the Ukraine-NATO Council, the first such assessment NATO has ever prepared with a non-member state.Now watch four of this system’s finest moments closely, because they share a shape.Russian propaganda turned an elderly Ukrainian woman, filmed greeting soldiers with a Soviet flag, into an icon of the Russian World. The CSC did not rebut the symbol. They found the woman. They interviewed her, published her real story, and the symbol was abandoned. They did not argue with an archetype. They re-personed it. They gave the icon back her name, and the Mana, the emotional charge the symbol carried, drained out of it.Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency treats its own casework as information defence. Russian propaganda feeds on the corruption story, so, in the book’s words, the very act of uncovering and punishing corruption “denies the enemy this narrative resource.” Not a debunk. A starving. The narrative dies because its referent is taken away.Ukraine’s foreign ministry, with Estonia, built a teaching tool called the Distortion Test. You upload a photograph of yourself and answer questions about recent disinformation. With every wrong answer, your own image warps on the screen in front of you. Image-magic, the oldest sorcery there is. I talked about it in my talks on the laws of sympathetic magic before Christmas, which draw on cutting-edge, peer-reviewed cultural psychology.And the CSC works with the Yellow Ribbon resistance movement on a platform called Tyvukraini, You Are In Ukraine. A secure browser and a free VPN, run into the occupied territories, against the occupier’s digital-passportisation portal. Inside it, Ukrainian language lessons. By the middle of 2025, hundreds of adults and children were studying Ukrainian through that platform, from inside the occupation. The occupier hacks identities. Ukraine answers with a language class through a tunnel. The book’s own sentence on it deserves quoting whole: battles over connectivity, identity, and truth are as central as battles over territory.Re-personing an archetype. Starving a story of its referent. Teaching with image-magic. Defending identity with language. Every one of these is a move at the level where archetypes and identities live, made by people with no theory of that level, because no theory of that level exists in their field. Hold that thought too. Ukraine’s best practitioners already fight at the third level by instinct. What nobody has ever handed them is the instrument that makes the instinct teachable.They Already KnowWhat separates this book from every Western equivalent I have read is its candour. The authors do not claim their system wins. In their forward-looking chapter, they say this:“As the information environment becomes more crowded, faster, and more aggressive, it is increasingly clear that simply reacting to individual fakes no longer works. This approach may help to correct a particular falsehood, but it does little to address the broader problem. It resembles treating visible symptoms while leaving the root cause untouched. Over time, this reactive logic exhausts institutions and allows hostile actors to keep the initiative.”That is the deputy head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation, publishing that about her own field, in wartime. They report that modern operations are built so correction cannot touch them, campaigns that “easily slip through mechanisms that depend on a clear distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false.’” They name the hardest terrain: Telegram is the primary news source for over seventy per cent of Ukrainians, and on Telegram there is no moderation to appeal to and no partnership to negotiate. They name the human cost: a society at risk of “believing nothing rather than everything,” with 46.2 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians deliberately avoiding war news during six months of 2025. Nearly half the country, looking away, because looking hurt. They concede the occupied audience outright: the information war inside the occupation is “essentially lost for now,” and liberation will bring the task of reintegrating citizens “subjected to intensive propaganda,” or what I call Disinfolklore, with no method named. And they concede the analytical ground itself. The phase in which an adversary studies an audience and works out what it will find credible, they write, “can only be detected by clandestine operations of the intelligence communities.”The question of why a story lands has been formally handed to the spies.And then, once, in one paragraph, the authors ask the question themselves. “It is rarely enough to simply point out that a claim is false. What matters just as much is understanding why certain stories resonate, which fears or frustrations they tap into, and where trust is already fragile. By identifying these points of tension in advance, it becomes possible to move from crisis response to prevention.”Why certain stories resonate. Asked, in their own words. Named as the road from crisis response to prevention. And then the book moves on, because no instrument for that question exists anywhere in their field. Later, in the same chapter, they even name the missing competence: narrative literacy, “which allows people to see how stories frame politics, identity, and social dynamics,” requested in one clause, with no method, no taxonomy, no course and no measurement behind it, because nobody has built them. The ceiling of the state of the art is not a blind spot. It is a stated vacancy. They have written the job description.The Third QuestionSo the whole field, theirs and everyone’s, stands on two questions.Is this claim true? That is fact-checking. Its unit is the claim, and Ukraine answers it as well as anyone alive. Who is running this operation? That is FIMI, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, the European framework the CCD adopted in 2023. Its unit is the deployer, and Ukraine now works it at the level of joint reports with NATO.The third question is the one handed to the spies and asked once, in one paragraph, in the whole book. Why does this story land, in this population, now? Not who sent it. Not whether it is true. Why it is believable before anyone checks anything.That is the folkloristic question, and the reason it can be answered in the open, without a single clandestine operation, is that a population’s stock of stories is public. The operator does not invent the fit between a lie and a mind. The operator finds it, in the same shared inheritance of tales we Indo-Europeans all carry. Anything found by looking can be found again by looking.One artefact shows the third level working on us rather than on the occupied. Four words. Don’t poke the bear.When I first heard this “Don’t poke the bear” troll, it was from a senior American military officer, in Sievierodonetsk, in the now destroyed Mir Hotel. He said it to me one night. I cannot even remember the year, maybe 2015 or 2016. He was a retired lieutenant colonel from the American military, and I had to ask him what it meant. When he explained it to me, I did indeed feel like secret folk wisdom was being passed to me. Don’t poke the bear.There is nothing there to fact-check, because the phrase asserts no fact. There is no deployer to attribute, because the man who said it to me was not a Russian agent. He was a decent officer repeating something that felt like wisdom. The first question cannot touch it and the second question finds nobody. What those four words carry is an archetype, the Dangerous Animal that cannot be reasoned with, only avoided, wearing the feeling of grandmother-knowledge. And in my manuscripts I state what I watched it do: “And it worked. For over two years, this single phrase held.” Held, while the gap between what the West could do and what it did stayed open. And people died in that gap. Hundreds of thousands of people died in that gap. A fairy tale about a bear did work that no missile could have done.Now the twin discovery that matters most, because it makes the third question answerable rather than merely askable. The repertoire is finite.I know it from my side of the Donets by counting. The Luhansk Well holds ten thousand seven hundred and nine unique items from the monitored information space of Russia-occupied Luhansk, 2014 to 2018, the occupier’s outlets and the Ukrainian and international reporting alongside them, every occupation item anchored to the public address it was published at, each item read against a codebook of archetype families. The bridge troll, the gatekeeper I stood in front of for three years, appears one thousand four hundred and fifty-eight times. One item in every seven. Andrei Marochko, the fake republic’s daily military briefer, performing the liturgy of statehood, five hundred and seventy-nine items. And the threats sort, over and over, into the three functions that the great comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil traced through the whole Indo-European world, the same three the folklorist Timothy Tangherlini found organising modern legend. Your safety. Your bread. Your children. The cells of my codebook are named for them.And the book knows it from its own side, by counting too. The CSC published a chronicle called How the Russian Information Ship Sank, built from its daily digests across twenty-one months of full-scale war. Its central finding: within the first two months of the invasion, the Kremlin had already deployed almost the full spectrum of its toxic narratives. Everything after was re-activation and recycling of familiar themes. The full spectrum in two months. Recycling ever since.Two archives. Two counts. One finding. The repertoire is finite. And finite is the most hopeful word in this episode, because a finite repertoire is learnable, what is learnable is teachable, and what is teachable can become exactly the narrative literacy their book requests in one clause.I will leave it there for this week, and I will continue both of these narrative vectors next week, with your indulgence and with a bit of luck.Continued from":First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

The Poison and the AntidoteThe poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything Russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote.Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything: we are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce.Two coined words in that quote. Disinfolklore is my name for folklore-like information told with meanness — stories built to bend our moods and our intentions, our attitudes and emotions. Infolklore is the positive kind: true stories, told with generosity, told by someone with real stakes in a real problem.The first kind, Disinfolklore, is an ocean, and we all swim in it every day, and it’s what motivates all my work. Because we swim in this ocean, I decided to try and work out what this ocean consists of. The second kind turned out to be scarce, almost to vanishing. This episode and this mini-series is the story of the search for it — the search for Infolklore. Months and months and months of failure. The best-loved books in the English language going into a machine, one after another, and coming back stamped: no.Automating DisinfolkloreAnd for those who haven’t been listening: what I’ve been working on since January is actualising my long-held plan, which is to automate Disinfolklore detection — and, in our detection, to create an automatic engine that will enable us, in times to come, to plug in a module the way today we may surf the web or look at ChatGPT. In the future we will have cognitive modules. And what I’m trying to build is for the… So that when we are confronted with the vast amounts of information, and information flows that continue to increase, we will have a means of interpreting it really quickly — as quickly as we really need to. And so I call that cryptotypic engineering, or Automating Disinfolklore.So, my attempts to build this machine. I started off with the 10,000 propaganda items that I collected and hand-coded in Luhansk, which I talk about a lot, back in 2015. And so for much of the year I’ve been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart.Where the search ended was really not in any library on earth. And I went through so many texts and types of narrative, from EUvsDisinfo to war college reports to all kinds of different narrative forms. And the search ended, really, in this room, with Volia Radio. And it ended with you. With us. And this whole mini-series is our own practice — but I’m just a bit part in this, with just this short time once a week. The whole series is Volia’s own practice, read back to us as principles. And this first episode is how I came to be reading the Volia Radio transcripts.Great thanks to all at Volya Radio for their great support of my work over the years!Teaching a Machine the Two KindsSo for much of this year I have been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart: Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral. A frontier model — one of the big AI systems, the kind that can read a whole archive before breakfast. And you teach it by feeding it specimens. What I’m doing is creating training pairs for a locally held large language model. Well — not, I mean, it’s locally held, but it’s held in a data centre somewhere; but it’s proprietary.And here is the real Disinfolklore, and you learn its smell — which I first scented when I was in Russia-occupied Luhansk in 2015 — and real Infolklore, teaching the computer to learn the smell of it, the scent. And half of the job has been relatively easy, in the sense that I’ve managed to gather together a corpus of hundreds of millions of artefacts in Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese: hundreds of millions in each of these languages, and in Hindi, in Dravidian languages, in MAGA language. So that gathering together, that corpus, was relatively easy — the easy half. The graph tells us something about the world we live in, which won’t be a surprise to any of us on Volia Radio, but it also tells us about my motivation in all of this work, which is to try and do something active about it. And I’ve been on this task in various forms since 2015, as I gradually worked out what was going on.And here is how I described the task to you last month. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy — everything we hear from Strelkov will do. We’re going to kill you all. Basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. I’ve spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes; even — maybe Ming will appreciate this — P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster.The Reject PileWodehouse had company in the reject pile. Sherlock Holmes went in, failed. War college reports went in, failed. The Battle for Kiev study — which I’ll get to in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut report — towards the end, the Battle for Kiev study done by John Spencer, a friend of the channel, did go in. And that was really my only piece of archetypal Infolklore: a serious piece of military analysis, by serious people, about the defence of the capital.But what I’m trying to do is build a system that will recognise the archetypal content in any sized lexical unit. And so it needs to be really flexible, and needs to be able to be trained on lexical units which aren’t all in the same format. So that particular war college report gave me a lot of hope — but then I tried others, and it just didn’t work.The EUvsDisinfo stuff didn’t really work. And for the same reason that an academic from the information school in Melbourne found that fact-checking doesn’t work: because it’s a different narrative form. You have to counter magic with magic. So if Disinfolklore manages to meld itself into our minds and alter our intentions and our moods, our attitudes and our motivations, through a means that most of us don’t really understand or can’t detect in real time, then Infolklore — which is a creative practice rather than a countering practice — has to do the same thing. And fact-checking just doesn’t do it. So there’s a lot of value in EUvsDisinfo’s work; it’s the format it presents.And so my own witness writing went in. It failed too. And it failed in its own particular way. The person who named the framework — me — cannot be its neutral witness. And so, I built the instrument; I cannot also be the specimen that calibrates it. There I sat, month after month: a machine hungry for the positive kind, and a whole civilisation of shelves unable to feed it. Conan Doyle could not feed it. The finest comic novelist in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, could not feed it. The war colleges of two continents could not feed it. And I could not feed it myself.The Wodehouse FailureThe Wodehouse failure deserves its own telling. And for those who aren’t familiar with P.G. Wodehouse, he wrote about a hundred — 110 — about the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster: a slave owner, or rather a gentleman, and his servant. And it came closest of anything. And the way it fell short taught me, really, what Infolklore actually is, in some respects.On the 19th of May I proposed to the frontier model the Jeeves and Wooster series as a training corpus for the positive kind, for Infolklore. I was confident that if any books in the English language were going to pass, it would be these sunlit, kindly, perfect books. And the adjudication that came back was, on its face, glowing. Jeeves is archetypally saturated: he’s the trickster servant, the clever slave of Roman new comedy, a figure the stage has carried for more than 2,000 years, still quietly running his master’s life. Bertie Wooster is the holy fool, the indulged innocent, whom the plot punishes and protects in equal measure.When I say archetypally saturated, I mean the stories are full of the old shapes — characters folklore has kept alive for millennia because they do something for us. And on the Code of Positive Trolls, Wodehouse passes everything: generous on every page, patient, non-coercive. Nobody in those books is ever mean to anybody. Temperamentally, Wodehouse is the exact opposite of Disinfolklore. Yet still, it had to be turned away.And I felt this refusal personally. Those books have been friends of mine for decades. I turn to them in times of stress and difficulty because they’re so light, they’re so easy to read, they’re so pleasant, they’re so joyful. But the machine had a reason, and the reason was right. One leg was missing: real stakes. Nothing in Wodehouse refers to a real problem in the real world. Nobody in the Drones Club is under fire. Aunt Agatha, terror that she is, never shelled a city. The stories are true to human nature, and true to nothing that is actually happening to anyone in the real world.That near miss sharpened the definition. And here it is, the finding that the whole season, the whole search, paid for. Infolklore must be true. It must be soaked in the old story shapes. And it must be told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. All three legs, no exceptions — not even for Jeeves.Lexical Units, and the Twelve ToolsThose of you who are interested in the Disinfolklore analytical method can look at disinfolklore.eu, my main site. The twelve tools, the twelve-tool way, goes into detail there on each of the different elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method. And that is essentially what I’m looking for in lexical units. When I say lexical unit, I mean a sentence, a word, of any size — and it could be a 20,000-page article, or a one-page article. What I’m building must work, must be sensitive enough to work on every kind of lexical unit, and indeed on images themselves. So that’s the goal I’ve set myself, and it may take me years.The Code of Positive TrollsSo, the code, plainly. I keep saying passed and failed, so you’re owed the test itself. The test is the Code of Positive Trolls. I trademarked it in February 2020 with the European Union trademark body — both Code of Positive Trolls and Positive Trolling. And I established a Twitter account in February 2020 as Positive Trolling, and then I switched, changed the name, in May 2021, when I started actually… So I trademarked the Code of Positive Trolls as a moniker in February 2020, two years before the full-scale invasion, and it’s been the engine of everything I’ve done intellectually since.And here is how I put it in a February piece called Archetyping Bad Faith. There’s a key core module in the Disinfolklore analytical method, which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline, or right. The first element is generosity. Six practices — they’re old practices, far older than any of us or any of our languages — carried into the information battlefield. In plain English, they are these. Generosity: you give more than you take, and you protect people from harm. Ethical discipline, or right: you tell the truth, and you hold yourself to the rules you would hold anyone else to. Patience: you can wait, and the waiting does not sour you. You actually notice what is in front of you.Say them once, because the whole series hangs on them: generosity; ethical discipline, or right; patience; Mana, or energy; focus; and insight.The word trolling frightens nobody in Volia Radio. But for newcomers: in my book, trolling is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind. Any. Advertising is trolling. Courting is trolling. A joke between friends is trolling. The question is never whether someone is moving your emotions — everyone is moving your emotions, including yourself. The question is: which kind of a troll are you?And the test takes all six practices at once. Fail any one, and the story falls to Disinfolklore. Whole — there’s no partial credit. In practice, the place where the bad stuff fails is nearly always the same. They’re almost always negative trolling. They lie a lot, and so fail especially the second limb in the six tests: ethical discipline. I wrote that in November 2022 on Substack, where — disinfolklore.net, powerofmana.net, which is the linguistic element of my work, and decodingtrolls.net — you can subscribe.For the record, the formal definition of the poison in one breath. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic demands of Disinfolklorists. Hold on to that little four-part engine: moods, intentions, motivations, attitudes. That’s where every story does its work on us. Both kinds work there. Only one of them works there with your interests at heart.The BreakthroughSo, the breakthrough. Months in. Holmes rejected. Wodehouse turned away. The war colleges bounced. And one day I stopped feeding the machine literature and news, and served it one of the Volia shows instead — whole, as broadcast. The timestamps, the jokes, the swearing, the cat. The cats. Isn’t it interesting and curious that all three of our daily broadcasts — Will’s, Mockers’ and Firefella’s — have cats who sometimes meow? And today Mockers’ cat meowed, and my cat paid attention to that meow. I digress.So Will was on, and Will told the tale of the Russian general who was shot in a lift while visiting his mistress. Some of you might remember that morning. And Will, en passant, dropped this line: you could say he died of a lack of family values. The machine’s verdict came back immediately: archetypal Infolklore. First serving, first listen. The thing that Conan Doyle and Wodehouse and the war colleges of two continents could not produce, Will produced en passant, in one sentence, on a weekday morning.And here’s my published gloss, word for word. That is perfect Infolklore rapping. It’s what Volia does every day — what all of you do. That one joke is doing three jobs at once. It’s true: the general was really shot. It is archetypal: the mighty man undone by his own appetites is one of the oldest tales our species tells; it’s older than writing. And it’s told by people with everything at stake.In truth, the machine was confirming something already noticed. Back in March I made a recording about one of our own, and its title says it all: Archetypal Infolklore, Mockers. From March 2026. The pattern held every single time a Volia show went in. Every time. The needle that months of literature could not move went straight to the top of the dial for Volia.Think of the company you beat. The greatest detectives in fiction. CNN. Fox News. Every newspaper in the world. Al Jazeera. Anything I could find. YouTube — guys on YouTube. The finest comic prose in our language. And a morning Space with a bad back and a cat, running on donated time, cleared the bar they could not touch.There is a mechanism underneath this, and it earns one more receipt, because it explains how the same war story can be poison in one place and medicine in another. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Ruschists can be Infolklore when told by Mockers — Mockers’ mocking tone. I wrote that in January 2026, in Pensées 126 on Substack. The content can be identical. The kind is decided by the telling: by tone, by intent, by discipline. Which is exactly why this community can retell enemy material all morning and be practising Infolklore, while the original published… And that is you. That is this room.RIA-Melitopol: The Same Verdict, at a CostOne other source had already earned the same verdict, and earned it at a cost none of us here has paid. RIA-Melitopol, the news channel of the occupied city, ruled archetypal Infolklore in May 2026. I had spent the first months of the year of the war reading RIA-Melitopol and trying to amplify their information. I used it as leads when I contributed as the only named main source in the international community’s first report on crimes against humanity and war crimes in Ukraine, which was published on the 9th of April 2022 by the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism mission, commissioned by 40 nation states. And I’m acknowledged as one of the main sources at the beginning, and a lot of the leads I got, I got from RIA-Melitopol — and that entire report, with the exception, really, of the drone safaris, which nobody imagined would come, although some of us imagined such terrible things might arise from an urge to finish off Russia early on, before things like drone safaris arose.But RIA-Melitopol — and I’ve continued to read it now; it’s called RIA-Pivden and it operates out of free Zaporizhzhia city. And every morning, alongside Volia shows, the city of cherries, Melitopol, speaking up under occupation: terse, coded, written by people who can be arrested for writing it.The occupation apparatus told the world what that channel is worth — as did The New Yorker, when it featured a story about it in June 2022. The occupation apparatus told us in March 2022, in its own language, which is the language of hostage-taking: armed men came for the channel’s editor, and when they did not find her at home, they took her 75-year-old father. Then came the offer. Look at what they wanted. They did not try to silence RIA-Melitopol. They tried to buy it. The fake mayor of Melitopol promised its editor a glittering Moscow career in exchange for the outlet. She refused. The channel has trolled and tortured — metaphorically speaking — the occupiers relentlessly ever since.The two kinds of story are the same instrument pointed in opposite directions, and the enemy knows it better than anyone — which is why the enemy tried to purchase the instrument rather than to break it. And the final episode gives that story whole, with the record beside it. RIA-Pivden’s, or RIA-Melitopol’s, morning posts and Volia’s morning shows are doing the same work, and have been doing the same work for years. And neither room knew the other existed. That channel’s practice sits beside Volia’s through this whole series, and in the final episode the two meet.The Scale of the Thing You Have BuiltSo the search ended in this room — metaphorical room, the Volia room — and then the reading began. The numbers first, because you should know the scale of the thing you have built. 1,121 shows. 3,203 hours. If you sat down today and listened without sleeping, you would stand up in the spring of 2027. All of it is now transcribed into a text a machine can read: timestamps kept, the mishearings and mid-sentence repairs left in place.Out of that reading come principles. And a principle at this stage is a modest thing: a practice you actually perform, described plainly, with the receipt attached — the show and the minute where it was done. Not a statistic, not a measured claim: a description offered back to the people who did the thing, for your own judgment. You are the source. You are also the judges. The machine reads at a scale no human can, and that is all it does. It is not, and cannot be, the decider. The noticing came from you, and the judgment goes back to you. If I have described the practice wrongly, you will tell me. Correction will be worn the way this community wears corrections — which is a story for the next episode.Eight Families of PrinciplesSo, eight families of principles came out of the reading of just 400 transcripts — and Firefella’s morning shows, and also Ming, and Awana, and Will, and Yeni, and all of you, with Heather obviously in the background. Heather, and others, who make the whole thing and keep it going. These map the episodes of this mini-series.One. Truth discipline: how this community handles the truth, hardest always on its own side. It gets two episodes, because it earned twice the weight of any other family. The second element in the Code of Positive Trolls is right, ethical discipline. That’s why. First, the discipline you turn on yourselves — the corrections thanked and counted, the good news quarantined, the bad news aired at once. Then the toolkit you hand every listener, because these shows do not just verify, they teach: they teach verifying.Second principle: law and legitimacy. The standard is international law, argued out loud constantly, every show, target by target — and the stated destination of this whole war is a courtroom in The Hague.Third principle: death and dignity. How the dead are carried and named, one ledger for the victim and another for the aggressor, and how memory is defended against the deadliest thing of all: getting used to it.Four: naming and renaming. Absurdistan, the fake mayor, the pseudo-referendum — and what a name can do before a single claim is even argued.Next, the comic register: why the laughter works, where it stops, and the receipts that sit underneath every joke. One flash of it from Mockers this month: traditionally, no casualties, as per usual; so, you know, just to note, that it’s just that terrible debris again.Community and hearth: the daily liturgy, the roll-call of place names with Kyiv always in the roll, the pirate ship, the antiphon said imperfectly and said anyway — the whole vessel that reassembles a scattered world into one room before the first item of news is read. You know the sound. You built the sound.Next principle: generosity. The money, the fundraising, the shotguns bought and driven, the ambulances, and all the work done for all of the people helping on the ground in the war. The rule that the station keeps nothing for itself. As an aside, I regretted that we didn’t have access to the first two years of Mriya Report. But then I remembered: the hosts of Mriya Report determined so much of what we said, and cut us off when we mentioned things like Brexit, or when we criticised things those quite sterile hosts wanted us to say. There was very little Infolklore in Mriya anyway. So Volia managed to free us all from those constraints, and I no longer regret not having access to those data streams.Occupied voice: the register of a city that keeps saying its own name in the present tense. Melitopol is Ukraine. Not will be — is. The series finishes where those last threads join: an occupied city, and a diaspora radio that never met, converging on the same practices from opposite ends of the same war. Different language, different length, different risk — the same rules. When two rooms that have never spoken arrive at the same rules, the rules are telling you something.So that’s the first episode.Episode Two: Hardest on OurselvesIt’s wrong to say I’m impartial, because I’m very partial. I know right from wrong. But you can still report correctly, not put the gloss on things. That was said on the 24th of February, in the marathon episode to celebrate — or commemorate, rather — the anniversary marathon.It’s one sentence long, and it’s the constitution of everything I found in this family of practices. Just the order of it. The side comes first: I’m very partial, I know right from wrong. There’s no pretence of a view from nowhere, no newsreader’s mask — and this is what adulterates every other source, that. In the same breath, the obligation: you can still report correctly, not put the gloss on things. The side is declared, and the accuracy then runs against the speaker’s own interest. That’s the principle.Infolklore: true stories, told with generosity, by people with real stakes. Disinfolklore is the negative pole: stories which communicate meanness to bend our moods, our intentions, our motivations and our attitudes. And the gate between them is the Code of Positive Trolls. Six practices: generosity, which is giving without meanness; ethical discipline, which is keeping the record true; patience; joyous perseverance, or Mana, or energy, which is keeping going and staying glad about it; focus; and insight, the noticing itself. The gate takes all six. Fail one, and the story falls to the other pole. The practice that fails most often out there in the wider world is the second one, ethical discipline, or right. So this episode and the next are about how… The next episode is the toolkit.The Smallest Grain: One Clause CheckedI could throw in a couple of tart comments about late-stage capitalism, but actually… I don’t think that’s accurate, because what Russia is practising isn’t capitalism.The joke was free, the applause was waiting, and it went in the bin, in real time, on air, because it wasn’t accurate. That’s ethical discipline at the smallest grain there is: one clause checked against the world.The Direction of Error RuleNow the second grain, and this is the one I contend is the signature of the whole community. Call it the direction of error rule: whatever flatters our side carries the heavier burden of proof. Good news is quarantined until it develops. Bad news airs at once. Here it is stated as policy, on Accidental Ukrainian: when good things happen for Ukraine, I’m usually slow to talk about them, to make sure that they fully develop; when bad things happen, we talk about them right away. That was from September 2025.Read that against every propaganda operation in history. They all run the other way: their good news sprints, and their bad news suffocates. Here the delight and the quarantine arrive in the same sentence. Listen to Mockers receiving a gift of a story: oh, what absolute golden news, it’s just beautiful — but of course we’ve got to wait for confirmation from everybody and everywhere. September 2025, on Booms and Woe. Golden news, and the brakes go on before the sentence ends.And the community names the trap it is defending against, names it exactly: one of those stories that’s too good to check; when I read it, I believed it immediately. From Accidental Ukrainian, January 2026. Too good to check. When I read it, I believed it immediately. That is the confession of every one of us who’s ever shared a story because it felt right. The difference here is what happens next: the wanting itself becomes the alarm. I mean, for me, I know that right at that point I have to step back, and have to double-check sources, and see — if it is just because I want it to be, doesn’t mean it’s going to be. That’s Accidental Ukrainian, March 2026. Just because I want it to be doesn’t mean it’s going to be. The strength of the desire is the trigger for the hardest verification.And it’s not theory. It fires on air, on the very clips the whole timeline is flying around. And the next episode holds a full specimen: a viral clip that flattered Ukraine, 175,000 views, debunked. The rule even governs the tally of enemy aircraft. A missing man is not a dead man. A self-crashed jet is not a kill. And a friendly success gets capped in the very breath that delivers it: but two out of nine, not brilliant, but not completely useless either. Booms and Woe, November 2025. Two out of nine, not brilliant. Nobody rounds it up.The community knows exactly why it pays this price. The economics of it were stated outright on Ukraine Chat: if you’re proved to be an honest broker and giving honest news, then people are going to continue believing you — rather than if you’re going to be crying wolf all the time, exaggerating all the time, then people are just going to get pissed off and go, you know, I don’t believe a thing coming out of your mouth. That’s from October 2025. Credibility is the asset. Every inflated count spends it. Every quarantined golden story banks it. Four years in, this community is rich.The Third Grain: The Tribe ItselfNow the third grain, and the hardest one: the tribe itself. The audit turned inward, and each host is hardest on their own country, with numbers attached. Here is the specimen, and I give it to you whole, because it’s a masterpiece of the form. We’re total s**t. We’re s**t. We raised $37.3 billion in 2024 to 2025 alone, and we’ve given $1.5 billion in aid the entire four years. That’s dog s**t, Yeni. Booms and Woe, November 2025.That is a host talking about their own country. $37.3 billion raised. $1.5 billion given across the whole year. The numbers are attached. The verdict is unprintable and exact. No enemy gets audited harder on these shows than the speaker’s own flag. And that is what keeps the support credible rather than hagiographic.And beside the inward audit sits its twin, the competence rule. Contempt for the enemy stays moral. It never becomes intellectual. Here it is in one line: so we’ve got to remember that they aren’t f*****g stupid, they’re just b******s. That’s September 2025. B******s, yes. Stupid, never assumed. Because the moment you sneer at your enemy’s brains, you corrupt your own threat assessment, and your information starts working on your moods at the price of your judgment.So the enemy’s real advantage gets named plainly, even when it hurts. A weapon as part of the drone wall is the fibre-optic FPV, and unfortunately the Russians still maintain a very large qualitative advantage in that category. That’s Will, with Grandpa Roy, December 2025. A very large qualitative advantage — conceded without flinching. That sentence protects Ukrainian lives. Flattery on that point would cost them.Corrections Worn as a BadgeSo what happens when the discipline slips? Because it does; everyone errs. And here is where this… Thank you, Daniel. I’m happy to stand and correct it. October 2025. Thanked. Not resisted. Not buried in a follow-up post nobody… Thanked by name, on air. And not just thanked — counted.The show’s own feed announced one episode like this: this includes an on-air correction from Will (his fifth, for those of us who are counting). Booms and Woe, then Will and Ming, October 2025. His fifth, for those of you who are counting. The tally is a running bit, a running joke the whole audience is in on. Fallibility, credibility — converted into a joke, and the joke into a bond.Correction is invited back in the same breath it lands: keep us honest, I really welcome that; yes, I stand corrected. This Week in Absurdistan, then Booms and Woe, May 2026. And the discipline runs even where the correction helps the other side, even into the enemy’s legal position: I just wanted to correct the record, in case, you know, they go after us for defamation. Booms and Woe, October 2025. That is the exact place a proper… A community that has understood something simple, and once said it out loud: changing your opinion when facts and evidence present themselves is not normally considered to be a major fault. January 2026, Booms and Woe.I contend the mechanism here is worth naming. An operation built on deception — so it would violate the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is ethical discipline, or right — an operation built on deception cannot pay out on error. If your operation runs on lies, every admitted mistake is a structural crack. So you admit nothing, and your record silently rots.Remember, I said I trademarked this in February 2020. Anyone can look it up: EUIPO. Look up Positive Trolling and Positive Trolls. And so this philosophy which you follow — you and Volia follow independently, obviously, of me and my influence — but it is the same thing, the same phenomenon, the same aspect of information warfare that I identified in February 2020, that everyone in the Volia community also identifies, has identified, even if they don’t name it, and integrates into everything we say on air.A community running on truth can pay out freely. Each correction costs a moment of pride and buys a permanent record. That’s why a correction thanked and tallied is a ceremony of trust, and not a humiliation. It is the audible sound of the book’s balance.Inside the Single SentenceThe same discipline goes finer still, down inside the single sentence. On these shows, epistemic status travels with the finding, per item, in front of the conclusion. And when something is invented, it is labelled as invention before the sentence can finish its work. My favourite specimen in the whole corpus is a joke interrupting itself: unconfirmed sources — ha ha, this is a joke, this bit — unconfirmed sources point to Steven Seagal. That’s from December 2025. Ha ha, this is a joke, this bit. Mid-sentence. A fabrication offered for laughter inside a sourced segment, and even that must not travel one clause without its label.The official hedges get kept in rather than smoothed out, and the keeping-in gets celebrated. According to preliminary data — oh my goodness, I said it — as of 8.30 this morning local time, air defences shot down and suppressed 58 of the enemy drones. Booms and Woe, then Will and Yeni, December 2025. Speculation carries its own tag: just my fan fiction, June 2026. The source’s reliability is graded in the same breath as the story it carries: it’s uncorroborated, however, it’s kind of a crazy one; I need to look up the exact quote. Sunday Morning in Ukraine, 18th of July 2020. Five words: I need to look up the exact quote.Hope Rationed by EvidenceA lot of people think, oh, it’s going to be okay, we don’t need to do anything now. That’s the problem. Exaggeration breeds complacency. And that’s a bad thing — also on the flip side, obviously, dooming too much. Then people just go, well, what’s the point? And they don’t advocate either. So you have to be grounded. Ukraine Chat, October 2025.Despair demobilises now; euphoria demobilises later, when the promised date passes and nothing happened. Both are avoided. So the war’s trajectory gets described in deliberately unglamorous figures: it’s not going to be a knockout, it’s a strangling motion, it’s a suffocating motion. No date, no knockout. A strangling motion moves morale without writing a cheque it cannot cash.When a forecast gets made, it comes with thresholds, and its working shown: Russia could possibly lose between 8 to 15 brigades in the next 3 to 5 days, and that’s not me being optimistic, that’s not copium, I’m running the numbers. Accidental Ukrainian, September 2025. The threat is conceded: it’s all possible, even the tactical nukes, it’s possible; then there’s a greater-than-zero chance that it will happen this week. This Week in Absurdistan, 12th of June 2027.The Occupied RegisterI want you to hear the occupied register of this same practice, because the pattern this series ends on begins here. RIA-Melitopol, the channel of the occupied city, posting under the aggressor’s guns in February 2023. Germany and Ukraine: Germany handed over generators and medical equipment to Melitopol; together we are preparing for life after de-occupation. February 2023. I remember that. I amplified that text myself.Generators staged for a day the post does not name. That is hope in the occupied register: no date, no promise, just the equipment ready. Preparation spoken in the present tense. Liberation never given a deadline it could miss. Rationed hope is the only kind that survives contact with a long war, and it’s the only kind that keeps perseverance joyous, which the code demands, for years on end. You cannot stay glad on hopium; the crash always comes. You can stay glad on evidence.The Four Practices, Side by SideSo, gather the four practices side by side. Partiality avowed, and accuracy run against interest. Corrections worn as a badge. Uncertainty spoken with the finding. Hope rationed by evidence. One discipline applied at three grains, and the harder check always falls on the flattering side.I’ve listened to hundreds of hours — as all of you have — of all of you, and all of us, doing this, or trying to do this. Not on special occasions: every day, every morning, as routine, the way other stations do the weather. And when I want to hear the whole… I’ll leave it at that for today. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the SorcererSo on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem, the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the sorcerer, and it’s featured in Indo-European stories for millennia.And since early March 2022, Putler’s magical, manipulative powers have been noticeably on the wane. Nothing has gone right for him — even for those who dutifully surrendered to his bespelling needs. I first noted how President Zelensky’s magical powers to curse, outwit and humiliate the sorcerer Putin were growing, in proportion to Putler’s loss of power, by the end of March 2022.And as I wrote then, on the 23rd of May 2023: until recently I had ignored Putler’s apprentice, the Chef, who is now at the height of his powers. Every day since 2012, the Chef’s trolling Disinfolklore has featured across global media. His Disinfolklore even got Trump and Brexit voted in. Only now, instead of the Chef’s Disinfolklore being the concealed trolling output of his St Petersburg Disinfolklore war-magic production factories — the Internet Research Agency — the Chef today is the star of the show himself.Why, and how, has this happened? The answer is simple. So I wrote, on May 26th, or 23rd, 2023: Putin’s Rasputin, this turbulent priest of the St Petersburg underground, is ready to take over the chariot. These days the magician apprentice doesn’t even disguise himself, or his ambition. Just an iPhone and grainy footage, and his every muttered thought — and trolling grandfather glasses — is front-page news across the earth.The Chef Saucerer has sacrificed 100,000 Ukrainians’ lives since 2016. And like every Indo-European monarch for millennia, he boasts of the human sacrifices he’s made. From these sacrifices his power and authority emanates. The magician Chef has vaporised entire cities in central Europe — Popasna, Bakhmut, and the rest. Seventy-five thousand Ruschists have died at his command in six months of Bakhmut. And before this, his Nazi-worshipping soldiers, in his Nazi-branded Wagner Group, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians.Yet the Chef’s power as the Apprentice Magus is such that the New York Times and the rest breathlessly quote, and report verbatim as truth, his every bespelling utterance — like they did before with the butcher Putin of Grozny. Then, now, they do with the Chef. Unknowingly, Western leaders and opinion formers promote the Chef, as before they promoted his sorcerer master, Putin. Every Western website reference eulogising the butcher of Bakhmut, with his trolling grandpa glasses, is echoed back into Ruschist information spaces as evidence that the West respects the Chef and will accept him as the new sorcerer monarch.The Chef’s Internet Research Agency bespelled America and England. That was his time as Putler’s apprentice. Now the sorcerer master, Putler, who created him, cannot destroy the Chef without destroying himself. Nor can Putler promote the Chef while being certain that, once promoted, the Chef won’t destroy Putler. That is the plight of the sorcerer. So: the Chef Saucerer against the Chief Sorcerer.Why I Bring This Up: Two Tellings of One StorySo why do I bring this up? Two summers ago I wrote about Putler’s plight, and it’s the oldest story we have about power changing hands, and Putler was living out its darkest version. Now, in the past few weeks, Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped into the same story. He’s living out the bright one. The two tellings sit at opposite poles of a single tale that is 6,000 years old, and watching them side by side tells us almost everything about the difference between the two countries.Georges Dumézil. A master holds a power, and an apprentice grows into that power. One day the apprentice is ready to make his own way, and the master still needs him. How do the two part without one destroying the other? That is the whole plight, in one question. The young one always rises — that was never in doubt. The only question the story ever asks is whether the rising costs a life.The Mahabharata gives the good answer, and it’s worth holding in mind. The demons free the apprentice from the master’s belly, and they do it without killing the master. Both men honour the bargain. Nobody dies. The power moves, and the two who carried it are both still standing when it settles. That is the rare ending. The plight is dangerous precisely because that ending is rare.The Dark Telling: Putler and the ChefLook first at the dark telling, because you already know it. Putler was the chief sorcerer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chef, was his apprentice — the alchemist who turned mercenaries and African gold into power the master could use. By the summer of 2023 the apprentice was ready, and the master would not let him. Prigozhin forced the question the crude way, with a mutiny: the march on Rostov, a column pointed at Moscow, and for one evening the master submitted to the apprentice in front of the whole world. Then the plight resolved the way it resolves when there is no honour in the room. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell out of the sky — allegedly. The master kept his power by destroying the apprentice. That is what the passing of power looks like when a society is sick at the top: paranoia in the palace, blood on the runway. It is the serpent’s answer to the question. This story offers a far better answer, too.The Bright Telling: Zelensky and FedorovNow the Ukrainian side, and the same story turned to the light. Mykhailo Fedorov — whom I never forget — comes from Vasylivka, which is right on the contact line in Zaporizhzhia. He has stood at President Zelensky’s side for seven years. He built Diia, and the state that fits into a phone. He built the Army of Drones, and he’s the face of the modern, un-Soviet way of fighting this war. Six months ago President Zelensky moved him to defence, and he moved him there to do a hard thing, which was to break the paralysis with the old command. On the 15th of July, President Zelensky dismissed him. The official reason was a cabinet reshuffle. The real reason was a fight that had frozen the top of the war effort, between Fedorov and the commander-in-chief, the last powerful man of the Soviet military generation.And here the ancient story shows its shape, because the people did not accept the dismissal. Crowds filled the squares, three generations deep. Fedorov’s trust rating leapt from 35 to 65 per cent in a single week, and 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the dismissal was wrong. Within days, President Zelensky dismissed Syrskyi instead. Well — the crowds had their scalp. They stayed in the squares anyway, and they remain in the squares, although I look forward to hearing an update from Lexicon, still calling for the young man to be given his seat back.Magister and Minister: The MN Vocabulary of RuleRead that through the old frame, and every piece falls into place. Zelensky is the Magus I have been archetyping him assince the end of March 2022 — the magister, the master. In Dumézil’s map of our societies, the first function is the one who holds the magic and the law of rule. And the ministers — the magister, minister — the ministers serve directly under it. That’s hardwired into our language and into our governance for 6,000 years, since this idea of organising community was formed in Mykhailivka, which is the village about 20 kilometres south of where Mykhailo Fedorov grew up, and the place where Alexey Nikitin’s paper, published in Nature on the 5th of February 2025, put beyond all reasonable doubt the origins of the Yamna, from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate — in that community, on the Dnipro.The words themselves carry the story: magus, magister, minister, monarch, mandate. The whole vocabulary of who may rule carries the MN sound, because that is the sound our language family has carried its idea of sovereignty on since before writing. Fedorov is a minister under the magister. That is not a clever overlay on the news; it’s the story’s own word for where he stands. Fedorov is also the apprentice, and his seat is the warrior’s seat: defence is the strong right arm every sovereign needs and every sovereign fears. He is ready. He is trusted. He carries a power the master cannot make for himself. That is the apprentice of the plight, exactly.The Demons WhisperingAnd the demons are whispering. On the Ruschist side I named them once as the men of the Ozero Cooperative, the grey figures around the throne. On the Ukrainian side they are the wily remnant of the Soviet-era power bloc — and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular; that a minister the people love is not a minister but an heir; that the one who broke the old command will one day break you.And I remind you of Veronica, who runs under the callsign Luna, and whose father was an Opposition Bloc councillor and now, it is reported, serves the occupation administration. Veronica, whom Yermak consulted over the past few years on every major appointment in government, supposedly because he believes in her authority, her capacity as a medium — though some of us might be quite sceptical about a lawyer doing that, and perhaps might suggest, or suspect, there’s a certain amount of tradecraft about it. We’ve now seen the texts between Yermak and Veronica from after Yermak was defenestrated, metaphorically speaking, at the end of the year. She advised him to speak to our friend, President Zelensky, and suggest to President Zelensky that Fedorov, if he takes Yermak’s seat in the presidential administration’s office, might just become the next president of Ukraine. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? Yermak was given these lines by Veronica.So when I say that on the Ukrainian side they’re a wily remnant of the Soviet bloc, and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular — we actually have the texts, in which this very odd character, under the name Luna, is actually suggesting that Yermak manipulate President Zelensky, the sorcerer, in this way. The plight always has the demons in it. Their whole work is to poison the moment power passes, to turn a handover into a killing.The Sorcerer’s True BindHere is the sorcerer’s true bind, and it’s worth being fair to President Zelensky about it. He’s not a tyrant clutching power. He is the master who raised this apprentice, who promoted him on purpose, who wants him to rise. On one hand he wants to hand the reins on. On the other, the same voice says: not yet. He’s not ready. Or the country’s not ready. Or the war cannot spare the fight. This is why the 15th of July was not a Prigozhin moment. It was the master pulling his apprentice back from the threshold at the last second, unsure. The plight is not always the master’s cruelty. Sometimes it’s only the master’s doubt.The Martyrdom Bump: Yemos and the Sacrificed TwinNow, the martyrdom bump in the polls — and here the story goes deeper still. There’s a number the sceptics are right to poke at, and the poking leads somewhere older than the poll. In one week, Fedorov’s trust went from 35 per cent to 65 per cent. The pollsters at Rating asked five days after the sacking, at the peak of the feeling. A cool head calls that a martyrdom bump, and says it’s not a settled new judgment of the man, it’s a surge that comes when somebody is sacrificed. The cool head is right. I share that scepticism, and I want to go one step further with it, not around it.The word martyrdom carries a story our culture has been telling for 6,000 years. The oldest king in the whole Indo-European world is the one who dies first: Yemos, the twin. Born on the Ukrainian steppe, not far from where Fedorov grew up, before our ancestors carried his story out across the earth. He is the sacrificed, and by being sacrificed he becomes lord of the dead, and leads all those who die after him along the road and the path to death. He is Yama in the Vedas, Yima in Iran, Ymir in the Germanic world, and Donn in Ireland. He is Jesus in the Christian religion, and Donn, who keeps the house at Tech Duinn off the western coast — born, according to the mythological record, of the daughter of the monarch of Scythia, that is, ancient Ukraine: twelfth century, 800 years before Nikitin’s Nature paper in February 2025 demonstrated that all living Indo-European languages emanate from there, along with these mythological tales, where they occur in more than one tradition. He is Odin, who hangs on the world tree and gives himself to himself, and takes a day of our week as his fee.In every branch of the Indo-European family the pattern is one pattern. The one who undergoes the sacrifice is not lessened by it. He is crowned by it. His death becomes the road every other death then follows. And beside the sacrificed twin stands the other one, the twin who survives: the lawgiver, Manu, who builds the culture on the sacrifice. His name in India is Manu; in Ireland, Érimón; Mannus in the Germanic tradition — and we, as native English, Germanic-language speakers, even call Germany after Mannus. We’ve already met him in this piece, because the MN is at the root of the whole vocabulary of rule too.So look again at this and last month with the oldest eyes we have. The magister performs a sacrifice. He sets the young man down. The young man does not cling. He’s offered a soft landing, an advisory chair, and he turns it down. He takes the full political death and walks out. And the people do the thing our people have always done at the death of a self-sacrificing lord: they exalt him. The bump is not a polling trick, I contend, laid over an old story. It is the old story. Martyr’s Mana surges at the moment of the sacrifice. It always has.The sceptic and the mythologist end in the same place, which is rare enough to mark. Both of them know the 65 per cent is the martyrdom effect. The only question either of them has left is whether the surge hardens into a real and lasting sovereignty, or fades as the feeling cools. In the old story, it hardens on one condition: the sacrifice has to be honoured, and the lord has to be restored.Where the Story SplitsSo the story splits at the end, and the split is the whole point. Putler’s version ended in Disinfolklore, the poison-telling, where the master survives the handover only by killing — allegedly. Zelensky’s version is not finished, and it can still go either way. If it ends the way the Mahabharata says it should, it will be the bright telling: the apprentice freed and restored, the old bloc set aside without a killing, master and apprentice both left standing, the bond kept, and the people’s will the thing that freed them.I think it will end that way. I think Fedorov does regain his seat; that President Zelensky comes out of this with the strength to push the old bloc aside for good; and that the modern team gets built. If that is right, we are watching the rarest ending the oldest story has to offer: the plight resolved without a death — as just happened in England, and previously with Leo Varadkar in Ireland, and indeed with President Biden in the United States.And notice who does the freeing. In the Mahabharata it’s the demons who free the apprentice from the sorcerer’s belly, and then the apprentice honours the agreement with the sorcerer by using the power of eternal life to restore him. And on the streets of Kyiv, it is the people. That is what a democracy does to this ancient story. The demons become the citizens, and they free the young man — not with mutiny, but by standing in the square until the master remembers he wanted to let him go. That is the whole difference between the two countries, said in one line. On one side the plight is resolved by murder in the dark. On our side, it is being resolved by citizens in the daylight. The same story our ancestors told 6,000 years ago; the opposite ending. It’s still being written in the squares. Let’s watch which way it goes.Outflank, Don’t Rebut: The Architecture of the BookSo I wanted then to go back to the fourth episode of Outflank, Don’t Rebut. Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. So I’m going to give the architecture of the book, and then we’ll go straight into it — straight into chapter one. So, the architecture of the book. Chapter two states the method in a single chapter, so we have it in our hand before we apply it. The method is: outflank, don’t rebut.I should maybe just say: I’m Decoding Trolls. I tweet on X at Decoding Trolls, as Disinfolklore. You can subscribe to my work on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net — and disinfolklore.eu is my main website.So the method is outflank, don’t rebut. The chapter explains why rebuttal amplifies the apparatus, the Ruschist apparatus, and why foundation defence dispossesses it. It’s a methodological introduction that the rest of the book leans on.Chapter three walks us through the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore method, and since you will be meeting this framework for the first time, I will introduce each tool plainly, and use the Cheburashka artifact, the Muslim Emperor artifact, the Europe Projection artifact, and the Mariupol Boat artifact — with Daria Dugina as the star — as the four worked examples that demonstrate each tool. By the end of chapter three we’ll have the method’s whole instrument set in our hands, and we won’t need to take it on credit any more.Chapters four, five and six are the foundation-defence chapters. They’re where I explain the Manuland thesis, the Moon Foundation, the River Substrate, the Trita myth. These chapters have the most linguistic content in them. I’ve written them, I hope, so that a reader who has never read a word of Indo-European linguistics can follow every step. If at any point I’ve failed at that, you can butt in.Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian decolonial voices, principally those collected and analysed by Erica Marat and Aizada Arystanbek. Chapter eight brings the decolonial voice from the place the apparatus can least afford to hear it — not the periphery, but the centre of the wound: Ukraine itself. Larysa Yakubova, in the view from the epicentre. Chapter seven dispossesses the Ruschist apparatus from the east; chapter eight dispossesses it from the centre.Chapter nine names what the Ruschist apparatus is doing at state scale. The three mechanisms are coercive control, the abuser’s playbook, and the system of dual-use moments that cumulatively produce a genocide without ever requiring an individually criminal act. Each is a substantive framework with its own working history, and each will be introduced plainly.Chapter ten is the technical chapter on cryptotypes, where I do the linguistic work most carefully. If you skip a chapter, this is the one to come back to. It’s the chapter that contains the method’s deep-grammar instrument, and it contains, near its end, the specific finding about the apparatus operator signature — like Dugin — that I want a careful reader to register, because that’s the key to outflanking, not rebutting.Chapters eleven and twelve are the constructive chapters. Re-archetyping, which Volya Radio does every day: re-archetyping is the move by which the apparatus’s archetypal claims are not just dispossessed, but replaced. And the production of Infolklore, which Volya does every day — my coinage for the positive counterpoint to Disinfolklore. It uses the same substrate the apparatus parasitises, but uses it in observance of the Code of Positive Trolls: that is, generously, ethically, patiently, mindfully, with focus, and with insight.Chapter twelve asks what the symmetric code means for the 1945 international legal order, for the Geneva and Hague Conventions, for the UN, for the ICC, and for the human rights NGOs. Outflank, don’t rebut — said one more time, with the equipment now to do it. That’s the architecture.The Artifact Read AgainSo let’s look at the artifact again. With the architecture in place, let’s return to Dugin’s Cheburashka artifact. Let’s read those sentences one more time, attentively.Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He’s a toxic mutant, a demon of the moon. His true name is Shed bar Shemot, Shed Satan — the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the Ruschist child. He’s not a bear. He’s not a hare. He’s a rootless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish, though. He’s a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the Russian archetype. That’s Dugin.And when you’ve read them again, ask yourself the following. Is the writer of these sentences a philosopher? Or is the writer of these sentences an actor playing a philosopher, in a production whose script requires that a beloved children’s character be smeared as a Jewish moon demon? Whatever your answer, register that you’ve just made a code judgment. You’ve judged the sentences for the energy they carry. You’ve judged them for generosity, for whether they tell a truth, for whether they show patience. You will, by the end of chapter three, know that you have applied the Code of Positive Trolls, the six-perfections ethical instrument that sits at the methodological heart of the Disinfolklore approach. You will know what you have done. You will know how to do it again. And you will know, the next time you encounter an artifact like this, what to do with it. You will not rebut it. You’ll recognise it, name it, and you will outflank the Ruschist apparatus that produced it. That’s the Disinfolklore approach.The Method: Outflank, Don’t RebutNow, the method itself. Outflank, don’t rebut. A friend of mine, after reading the first complete draft of the Cheburashka artifact, sent me a single line: all right, you’ve made me believe that Dugin is an apparatus operator and not a philosopher — now what do I do about it? That’s the right question, and this chapter answers it. The answer is three words: outflank, don’t rebut. That’s the whole method. The chapter that follows will explain why those three words are not just a soundbite. They are a methodological commitment with consequences. The commitment is the method.Why Rebuttal AmplifiesThe instinct of a well-trained Western reader faced with the Cheburashka artifact at the end of chapter one is to refute it. Of course it is. The Western reader’s training has been, for several centuries, that an argument is met with a counter-argument, that a claim is met with a refutation, that a sophistry is met with careful dismantling. This is the disciplinary instinct of the academy, of the law court, of the editorial page, and of every parliamentary debating chamber. It’s the instinct that the Western intellectual stack is built on. It is, in most of its applications, the right instinct. In the case of the Ruschist apparatus, it’s the wrong instinct — and here’s why.The apparatus’s outputs are not arguments. They’re deployments. An argument is a piece of intellectual work whose purpose is to convince an audience of a proposition. A deployment is a piece of communicative work whose purpose is to produce an effect: to recruit, to demoralise, to confuse, to capture, to corrupt, to terrify, and to elicit the response that licenses the apparatus’s next move. Arguments and deployments look similar on the page. They have sentences, they have nouns and verbs, they make claims, they cite sources. The well-trained Western reader, looking at one of the apparatus’s deployments, sees the surface of an argument and reaches automatically for the counter-argument.That reach is the error. The counter-argument does not engage with the deployment’s actual mechanism. It engages with the deployment’s cover story — the argument-shaped surface the deployment wears. Engaging with the cover story leaves the mechanism intact. Worse: engaging with the cover story transmits the cover story to the engager’s audience. Every Western academic who carefully refutes the Foundations of Geopolitics explains to a fresh audience what the Foundations of Geopolitics says. Every podcast host who patiently dismantles the Fourth Political Theory explains, in dismantling it, what the Fourth Political Theory says. Every Cheburashka rebuttal essay published in the New York Review of Books — and I expect there to be several by the time this book is in print — will explain to a new audience that the apparatus’s senior operator has declared Cheburashka a Jewish moon demon. Most of those new readers will not have known. The rebuttal is the transmission.This is not a Russia-specific observation. The same phenomenon is well documented in twentieth-century scholarship on propaganda. Jacques Ellul, in his 1962 Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, observed that propaganda’s first task is to occupy the mental space of the rebutter. Once the mental space is occupied, the propaganda is doing the work, regardless of whether the occupant has prepared against it. Hannah Arendt observed the same. So did Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Romance philologist whose diaries of life under National Socialism, collected in LTI, are the canonical study of how a totalitarian apparatus colonises a culture’s vocabulary one word at a time. Klemperer’s point — and Arendt’s, and Ellul’s — was that the vocabulary of the apparatus is itself the apparatus. To use the apparatus’s vocabulary, even to refute it, is to extend the apparatus’s reach.The same point recurs in twenty-first century communication scholarship: the legal scholar Danielle Citron’s work on amplification cascades; the Berkman Klein Center’s Network Propaganda, 2019; Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers, 2024 — all converge on the conclusion that the act of rebutting a deliberately constructed disinformation deployment is generally more amplifying than ignoring it. The asymmetry is structural. The original deployment lands once, in its intended audience. The rebuttal lands many times — once for every member of the rebutter’s audience who would not otherwise have encountered the original. The apparatus, in modern attention economics, is paying the rebutter’s distribution costs.The intuition that one must answer falsehood with truth is a good intuition. The intuition fails specifically in cases where the falsehood is structurally designed to elicit the response of truth-telling as its primary distribution mechanism. The Cheburashka artifact is exactly such a case. It’s too grotesque to persuade any Western audience of anything — but its grotesqueness is its distribution mechanism. Western intellectuals will refute it. In refuting it, they will explain it to their audiences. Some fraction of those audiences will register the apparatus’s Cheburashka-is-a-Jewish-moon-demon claim as the kind of thing the apparatus’s primary philosopher says. A smaller fraction will register that something about Russian children’s culture has been targeted by Western liberals, because in their hearing it’s the Western refutation that is most loudly talking about Cheburashka. A still smaller fraction will perhaps drift in the apparatus’s direction. The apparatus does not need a majority. It needs that drift.What Outflanking IsThe structural answer is to deny the apparatus the distribution mechanism it’s engineered for. Don’t rebut. Outflank.Outflanking is the alternative move. It’s the methodological commitment that we will not engage the apparatus’s deployment on its chosen terrain. We will not print that picture of that Russian who’s just been kicked out of France in every tweet complaining about that Russian. We will not reprint Donald’s tweets archetyping himself as God, or Jesus, or who knows what. We will not engage Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics on geopolitical doctrinal ground. We will not engage his Fourth Political Theory on political-philosophical ground. We will not engage his Cheburashka demonology on theological-symbological ground. Engaging on the chosen ground is what the deployment was built to elicit.Instead — and here is the substantive method — we’ll work at the substrate. The apparatus’s deployments depend on, and ride upon, certain symbolic and linguistic substrates that the apparatus did not invent and cannot own: the Indo-European cognitive vocabulary; the river-name family that names the home of the Indo-European language family; the Trita myth, the oldest Indo-European story, the story of the hero who recovers what the serpent has stolen and restores it to the cosmos. These substrates are real. They are old. They are linguistically and archaeogenetically documented. And this is the substantive point: they do not belong to Russia. They belong to the steppe homeland from which the Indo-European language family radiated outward roughly 6,000 years ago, which is broadly the territory of present-day Ukraine and the adjacent Pontic-Caspian steppe.The Manuland ThesisI call this the Manuland thesis. Manu: an Indo-European root that surfaces across the family. In Sanskrit, Manu, the first Vedic king of India. In Latin, manus, the hand that conveys power, or touch, and what it commits to. In Germanic, Mannus, the founding figure named by Tacitus — the Roman historian Tacitus, in the first century AD — as the ancestor of the Germanic people; Mannus had three sons, one of whom is Irmin. In Welsh, Manawydan, and in Irish, Manannán, two preeminent pre-Christian deities of Celtic-language-speaking Wales and Ireland respectively. Manuland, in my naming, is the territory whose deep substrate is held in those Manu, MN, MN sounds, and the words and concepts they write. It is the substrate the apparatus claims for the Eurasianism doctrine. It’s not the apparatus’s substrate to claim. It’s the substrate of ancient Ukraine.Names are not the whole of it. The founding figures of six of eight living Indo-European branches carry the MN sound: Manu, Mannus and Manannán; Iranian Aryaman; Hellenic Minos; Armenian Menua and Manavaz. By Bruce Lincoln’s rule, a feature shared between the Indo-Iranian east and the Celtic west is inheritance from the common source rather than late borrowing. The founder-name pattern reaches back to the Yamna from Zaporizhzhia themselves.The pattern also carries a number. Take every founding figure across eight branches, and ask how likely it is, given how often the MN sound occurs in these languages at all, that this many founders would carry it by accident. On the generous roster — any standard founding figure — seven of the eight branches carry the pattern, at odds of about one in a hundred billion. On the strictest roster, chosen sound-blind by role alone — the primary first man or first king of each branch, whoever that is — three of the eight still carry it: Manu, Mannus, and Érimón in Ireland, at odds of around one in 2,400. One coincidence is one event. Six is a system, and the system has a probability attached.Relocating the SubstrateOutflanking, then, is the move of relocating the substrate from Moscow to where it belongs. The apparatus claims that Russia is the civilisational core of the Eurasian space. The outflanking response is not: oh, but it isn’t, because here are five counter-arguments. The outflanking response is: the substrate the apparatus is claiming is located in present-day Ukraine, and here is the linguistic and archaeogenetic evidence. Once the relocation is in the reader’s hand, the apparatus’s claim collapses without rebuttal. There’s no claim to rebut. The claim was always parasitic on the substrate. Once the substrate is correctly located, there’s no claim left to engage with. That’s the central move of the method, and everything else in this book serves it.Chapter four shows us the MN substrate. Chapter five, the DN substrate, the river-name family — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Danube — the family that the Indo-European family named the home territory with. Chapter six shows us the Trita myth at work, which we see every day in Ukraine. Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian voices that say Eurasianism is not a heritage we share, it’s a colonial fiction imposed upon us. Once those four chapters have been read, the apparatus’s substrate claim has been outflanked from the north, from the centre, from the east, and from the actual evidence base. There’s no substrate claim left for the apparatus to deploy.The deployments themselves — Cheburashka, the Muslim Emperor, the Europe Projection, the Mariupol Boat, the Amnesty report, Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear — every fresh artefact the apparatus produces continues to surface. But without their substrate, they surface as the apparatus’s improvisations, not as the recovery of ancient ground.Name the Deployment, Then Do the Substrate WorkThe reader who has read this book, and who is countering the next deployment, recognises what they’re looking at. They register the move. They strip the Mana. They don’t rebut. They do not transmit. They do not amplify. They name the apparatus’s improvisation for what it is, and they move on with their work.A natural objection to don’t rebut is: are you saying I should ignore the apparatus’s deployments? Are you saying I should let the Cheburashka artifact circulate unchallenged? Are you saying I should pretend the Eurasianism doctrine does not exist? No. Outflank is not ignore. The two are opposite moves. Ignoring is the choice to act as if a thing is not happening, to refuse to acknowledge it, to bracket it out of analysis, and to leave it to other people. Outflanking is the choice to deal with the thing thoroughly, but to deal with it at the substrate level rather than the surface. Outflanking takes more work than rebuttal. Rebuttal is one essay. Outflanking is a whole methodological apparatus.I quoted it in full at the start of chapter one, and at the end. I named it for what it is: a tender object of childhood affection recoded as a hidden enemy, by means of antisemitic coded vocabulary, an invented pseudo-Hebrew etymology, and an attempted hack at the foundation metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate, invoking the moon to justify the hack. I did not rebut a single word of it. I named what it is, and moved on to the substrate. That’s the move. Don’t argue with the apparatus’s claim. Name what the deployment is doing, then do the substrate work.The substrate work is this book. The reader who finishes this book has acquired, by the end, the linguistic and historical and methodological equipment to do the substrate work themselves. The next Cheburashka — and there will be one soon — is to be met by them with the same move. Name the deployment. Name what it is doing. Decline to engage on its terms. Direct the reader’s attention to the substrate. Watch the deployment lose its purchase.The Amnesty International Report, 4 August 2022The first long-worked example I will give the reader, of outflanking applied to a real case, is the Amnesty International report of the 4th of August 2022. That report — issued by the world’s most august human rights organisation, founded in 1961, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 1977, 38 national sections, three million members — claimed the Ukrainian armed forces, by stationing their military personnel and equipment near civilian objects, were putting civilians at risk. The report deployed the same structural move as Daria Dugina: the provocation logic.The Amnesty Ukraine team resigned almost immediately. They issued a public letter explaining that they had not been consulted, that the report’s methodology was unsound, that the report misrepresented. The report was lightly amended in a follow-up statement. The substantive position was maintained.Over the following nine months I wrote on Twitter a great deal about this report. I tried at first the generous read. Amnesty, I argued, was a well-governed organisation that had made a serious mistake, and well-governed organisations correct serious mistakes. What one was looking at in August 2022 was a serious but recoverable governance failure. I held that read for a long time. I kept holding it until it became clear, by June 2023, that the institutional response was not going to be a correction: senior management was going to defend the report; the Ukraine team had been sacrificed; the institutional capture was visibly, in the institution’s own behaviour, complete.In June 2023 I wrote: what destroyed Amnesty’s brand wasn’t the initial issue, amplifying eight-year-old false Russian Disinfolklore that Ukraine purposefully lures Russia into attacking schools. It was the institutional inability to get to grips with the mistake. So Amnesty sacrificed its local staff, while keeping those who had fallen for Russia’s Disinfolklore, and then misrepresented international law.There is the outflanking move applied at institutional level. I do not, in that paragraph, rebut the Amnesty report. I name the deployment. I name the institutional pathology. I refuse to dignify the deployment by treating it as a debatable position. I cite the discriminating evidence — the resignation of the Ukraine team — and I name the falsifier of the generous read, the institutional non-recantation, and I move on.The Amnesty case is, in technical terms, the same provocation-logic deployment as Daria Dugina’s Mariupol boat artefact. The same line, the same structural move, the same code-failing logic, deployed by an ostensibly neutral Nobel laureate NGO instead of by the family member of the Russian apparatus’s senior philosopher-operator, stroke actor. The structural identity is what matters. The deployer class is interchangeable. The apparatus’s deployments have the same shape across the captured NGO, the captured electoral party, the captured podcast host, the captured academic. The book’s whole point is that the deployment is the unit of analysis, not the deployer.What Amnesty headquarters refused to do — the recantation that would have restored its standing — is the institutional move that the symmetric code in chapter twelve prescribes when an institution discovers that it has deployed Disinfolklore. Recant immediately. Name the deployment. Restore the Ukraine team. Retract the report. The institution that does that survives the deployment. The institution that does not is captured by the deployment. Amnesty’s Secretariat, in 2022 and the years following, chose institutional capture over recantation. The book is not pleased to say this, but the book has to say so. Naming the institution’s capture is part of the outflanking move, applied at an institutional rather than an individual level.And I’ll leave it at that for this week. Thank you so much for listening.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on linguistics, which is amazing. But I’m going to turn back to the first character, really, in this entire story. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m aware that for the first thirty episodes I mentioned this bridge a lot. I’m equally aware that for the past thirty episodes I haven’t mentioned it a lot. And it’s a really important character in the story. The story of Disinfolklore, and the story really of anywhere anyone you know exacts a toll. Whether that is an emotional toll or a literal toll.We see the structure of the toll troll at the moment in the Strait of Hormuz, in a geographical location. But we also see the structure of the toll in anyone we know who is, basically, a lot of work. Anything you have to do to get through that resistance in order to do your job, or get the cats out, or get the children to school. This is the structure of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.Of course, I didn’t arrive at this understanding straight away. It’s taken me years and years and years. As some of you know, I was a diplomat there, working for the international community, between 2015 and 2018. And the bridge at Stanytsia was a real bridge and a metaphorical bridge. On one side were the Russian occupiers, the bridge trolls. On the other side were the Ukrainian defenders.So I’ve been doing this series, one of the several series I have ongoing here, which I started a few weeks ago. We’ve gone through three episodes so far, and this is the fourth. It’s called The Bridge at Stanytsia.The bridge at StanytsiaRussia’s occupation administration in Luhansk cast itself as a kindly guardian of a broken bridge it had helped break. And that inversion of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper posing as protector, is how a crossing gets used to rewrite who you are when you walk across it.There is a bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, and for years it was the only legal way to cross the contact line into Luhansk region. A long wooden walkway, part of it blown out, with steps and ramps that pensioners climbed in the heat and the cold to reach the other side. I stood on the bridge. I filed reports from it. So when I tell you what was done with it, I am not reading you a theory. I’m telling you what I watched. And then I’m going to show us the words that were published about it by the occupiers.The old story comes first. In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and it demands a toll. A riddle, a coin, a piece of you, before it will let you pass. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and it does not own the river. It simply controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place it controls everything. Whoever holds the bridge holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Are you a refugee or a returnee? A citizen or a separatist? You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it.And this is the position, for example, both Donald and Netanyahu find themselves in. Donald launched this illegal war against Iran thinking that he was the bridge troll. And now it turns out that the Iranians are much more experienced, with millennia of experience and understanding of this essential structure. The bridge Donald wants to cross at the moment is simple. He just wants the war to be over, because it is an absolute catastrophe, for all the reasons most of us know. I think the figure is something like thirty billion dollars’ worth of American materiel destroyed by Iran in the last two weeks, according to satellite imagery that was released by Iran but taken from China. Because, again, Donald has exacted a toll on Planet Labs. Planet Labs grew out of an entrepreneurship project at my business school in Oxford, around 2010, when someone had the idea of building shoebox satellites. It was incomprehensible a year ago that this satellite imagery would not be available to the world. But it is unavailable to us. We can’t see it. The Chinese have helpfully released it.And so the toll which Iran is now exacting on Donald, as they escalate with perfect tempo, works like this. They know Donald is desperate to get this war over with. But every time he is ready to pay a price, the toll goes up. And he gets trolled. The arch troll gets trolled into doing another action, bombing somewhere. Yesterday, bombing Iraq with Saudi Arabia. And then the toll goes up. This is an essential archetypal structure in international relations. And it plays out in the micro and the macro.Here in Stanytsia Luhanska is how that archetype was actually used.In June 2018 the occupiers’ own news outlet, Luhinfo, ran this story, and I’m quoting it. The Luhansk Folk’s Republic, this is the fake occupation authority, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, as it did successfully, “urges to restore Stanitsa bridge, as people are dying of heat in queues at the checkpoint.”And believe me, it was extremely hot there, many times, all through the summer. I stood there. I patrolled the one and a half kilometre stretch between the government-controlled checkpoints, across through this beautiful forest, on a path where spent munitions were scattered. Mostly older women and children crossed, and had to walk that one and a half kilometres of no person’s land to reach the bridge, and then the other side of the bridge. And the winter is ridiculously cold. This is part of the toll the Russians erect. They’re experts at this. They did it in Moldova. It is the concretisation of their occupation, part of the techniques they take out of a box whenever they occupy a territory. You see it in Georgia, in Abkhazia, as well. When I see photographs of what goes on there, it reminds me so much of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge.So this is a news article in the Russist propaganda media in June 2018. And they quote their so-called negotiator, this guy who archetyped himself, he looked like Trotsky, I’ve spoken about him before. “We spoke about the two people who have died at the checkpoint outside Stanitsa Luganskaya because of the heat on June 24th, on the Ukrainian side. They are mostly elderly people who cross the contact line to receive pensions.”Because the Russists paid a tiny allowance to people in occupied Luhansk, and then people would cross the bridge to collect their pensions. Under Western pressure, Ukraine was forced for a long time to pay those pensions. Which in turn enabled the occupation, and encouraged people to stay inside the occupation when really they should have left, however horrific it would have been to leave everything behind them. Because it has only gotten worse.Two people died in the queue on that date. That part is true, and it is terrible. But look at who is speaking. The administration that fronts the Russist occupation, the side whose forces are dug in at one end of the broken bridge, has stepped forward as the grieving advocate of the people crossing it. It urges restoration of the bridge. It frets about the elderly in the sun. It points across the river, at the Ukrainian side. The troll under the bridge has put on a red cross armband and is weeping for the goats.That is the bridge troll inverted. And the inversion is the whole trick. The gatekeeper does not stop you with a club. It stops you, and then tells you it is the only one who cares that you were stopped. The toll it collects is not a coin. It is your understanding of who broke the bridge.Here is a second piece, from two years earlier. March 2016, the Russist outlet Riafan. Headline: “OSCE members headed by Hug fled from the Luhansk Folk’s Republic after receiving complaints.” The monitors, I was one of them, are walking from the occupied side towards the government side, and a civilian appeals to them. This is where the Russians stage events, where they shoot at people and blame the Ukrainians. And to set that up, they get people to speak on camera, in front of people like me. A real grief, someone did die. And again, pointed in exactly one direction, at exactly the moment the monitors are about to cross to where they could see for themselves. Stay on our side of the bridge. Do not cross. In one sense they are saying, don’t leave us, don’t abandon us. But in the other sense they are saying, if you abandon us, the Ukrainians will start shooting. And this did not happen in reality. The gatekeeper does not only control who passes. It tries to control where the witness looks.This is folklore-shaped storytelling, built on archetypes we already trust, turned to capture us instead of shelter us. And the thing about an archetype is that the same figure can be turned either way. Donald on the bridge is the bridge troll protecting Americans from all the criminals coming from abroad. From another perspective he is the uber bridge troll, until he met his match in the Iranian trolls. A curse on all of their houses. A guardian of a crossing can genuinely protect the people who cross it. Or it can pose as that guardian while it is the one holding the gate. You cannot tell from the costume. The costume is identical. You tell by what it actually does. Who blew up the bridge? The Russians. Who keeps it broken? The Russians. Who profits from the queue? The Russians.That is why the Luhansk operation worked so well. And I mean worked. It was so complete a piece of stagecraft that for eight years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation. Look at the outlets’ own language. The occupiers’ press names the occupation almost never. Somewhere between nothing and three in a hundred mentions across the whole period. Even the Ukrainian side climbs only to about a third by 2018. The word for what was happening lagged years behind the thing itself. That is what a good bridge troll buys you. Not the bridge. The name.Most of us have learnt, for instance, that Russia was occupying most of eastern Europe after Yalta. But still, I have this experience of having to explain it to friends. This was a military occupation, of most of the countries that constituted the Soviet Union too.And here is what seeing this gives us. The moment we notice that the one expressing the most tender concern for the people in the queue is the one standing at the gate, that is the moment the spell loosens. You get to ask the question the costume was built to stop. Who controls this crossing? What does it do, not what does it say? Ask that on every bridge, real, rhetorical or metaphorical, that you are asked to cross. The troll only collects the toll for as long as we agree to pay in the only currency it accepts, our belief that it is on our side. We can stop paying. We can name the crossing for ourselves.So that is the bridge.The kindness of the captorThis little story is about the kindness of the captor. It reads the merciful sovereign archetype through a plain test. Protection can shelter you or capture you. And you tell which by what it does to your freedom, not by how kind it sounds.Here is a sentence from a man who, by his own account, wanted only the best for the people of Luhansk. December 2017, the occupiers’ own news service, lug.info. The head of the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, Pasechnik, is at the Alchevsk steelworks, restarting a blast furnace that had stood cold for most of the year. He congratulates everyone, and he says the main task of him and his entire team is “to raise the well-being.”Raise the well-being. It is the kindest line you can imagine. A leader who feeds you, who lights the furnace, who wants your children warm. That is exactly what a good sovereign sounds like. And that is the problem we are going to sit with today. Mercy is not the tell. Mercy is genuine, and it is common, and we should not become the kind of person who flinches at kindness. The trouble is that the very same act, protection, can shelter a woman or it can capture her. And you cannot tell which by how kind it sounds. You tell by what it does.So let us hold Pasechnik’s furnace next to a second item. May 2018, a Ukrainian outlet asks who will treat the schoolchildren being taught to shoot at a military range in the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The report, sourced to the occupiers’ own military commissar, says 150 pupils of the tenth and eleventh grades, fifteen and sixteen years old, were taken to a firing range and put through initial military training. One hundred and fifty children, learning to shoot.And I went to some of these places. When the part north of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge was de-occupied in July 2014, after MH17 and the sanctions, the Russians had to withdraw. They just didn’t have enough soldiers. They left this vast swathe of Luhansk unoccupied. And a Russian colleague brought me once to one of these children’s camps. I’ve been thinking about it this week because of the troll going around from Balitsky, which ABC covered in America.So, the same word. Protection. He raises the well-being. He also puts children on the range. The furnace and the rifle are the same governance, wearing the same kind face. The protector who shelters your town is preparing to spend its sons.And this is why the word never came. Across those years, the people running the occupation almost never called it an occupation. Their outlets reach for the word almost never at all. That is the lag of the whole story in the archive, and the merciful sovereign is a large part of why. A power that lights furnaces, runs victory parades, pins medals on its men and sends sick children to hospitals does not look like an occupation.So we need a test that mercy cannot fool. And it is not, is this kind? It is, after the kindness, is she freer or more bound? Can she decline it? Can she leave? Can she vote it out next year? Did the child come home, or go in deeper? Run it. The furnace warms the town. She cannot leave. The training warms no one. It sends her son towards a line he did not choose. Protection she cannot decline, cannot walk away from, cannot vote against, is not shelter. It is a wall with a warm side.And to be fair to the test, watch it clear a real protector. January 2016, the Ukrainian TV channel 112. An advisor to the Security Service of Ukraine says they are ready to release all detainees.And this is what I will leave us with on this front. No credentials are required. When a power is kind to you, do not argue with the kindness. Let it be kind. Just ask the one question the costume cannot answer. Am I freer now, or further in? Can I say no to this? Could I leave? You do not need to be an analyst to ask it. You only need to remember that protection is judged by what it does to your freedom, not by how it sounds. Keep that question in your pocket, and hand it to the next person who tells you they only want the best for you.Back to Outflank DuginSo, back to Outflank Dugin. We’re close to the end of the first chapter.Let’s look again at the Cheburashka artefact. A small, big-eared puppet is a demon of the moon. A children’s character has a true name in invented pseudo-Hebrew. A puppet who could not be more obviously a child’s friend has no parents and no nationality. He is, and the sentence is verbatim from Dugin, “a rootless cosmopolitan.” He might be Jewish, though. He is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. Those are the words of Dugin. Cheburashka is sent to destroy the Russian archetype.The thing that is happening here is not the writing of a philosopher. It is something much older. It is the Russist apparatus, through one of its named senior operators, doing what the apparatus has always done. Taking a tender object of childhood affection and recoding it, in its audience’s mind, as a hidden enemy.The word cosmopolitan in Soviet political writing does not mean what it means in English. Anna from Odesa has written about this as well. Cosmopolitan is the code word Stalin’s apparatus used in its rootless cosmopolitan campaign of 1949 to 1953, the campaign that arrested and executed Jewish writers, doctors, intellectuals and party members across the Soviet Union, under the pretext that they were cosmopolitans, loyal not to the Russian motherland but to Jewish or Western or deracinated interests. And when I write that russophobia has its origins in antisemitism, this is yet another example of how anyone they want to other becomes branded, archetyped, as Jewish or Western or against them. The word is not innocent. It has had its head turned in Russian political language since the late 1940s. Anyone who uses cosmopolitan of a children’s puppet in 2026 knows what it means. The phrase Dugin uses, Cheburashka “might be Jewish, though,” finishes the sentence the word cosmopolitan began, just in case you didn’t get it. Then the demon naming finishes the paragraph. Then the moon finishes the whole.The moon. And here I will start the technical work that the rest of the book elaborates, how we will outflank.The moon is not a random target. I’ll explain why properly in chapter four. For now I’ll only say this. There is a deep grammar at the bottom of the Indo-European languages, the family that contains English, Welsh, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian and seven other living branches. And one of the rules of that grammar concerns the moon. The moon, in the deep grammar, is the foundation metaphor of the mind. The Indo-European cognitive vocabulary, mind, meaning, manner, an old word for power, human, monarch, mandate, mantra, money, moon itself, all reach back to one ancestral root. The root that meant moon in the language spoken on the Ukrainian steppe roughly six thousand years ago. The Indo-European speaking world has, since then, treated the moon as the master metaphor for the medium that transmits meaning. The meaning of one word shines through another word, like light shines through the moon. As our minds shine through our bodies, so the moon shines through the sun’s light. I’m asking you to take on credit, for one chapter, the assertion that the moon is the foundational metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate. Chapter four does the work.For now, register what it means about the artefact I read you. The apparatus’s senior operator chose, of all loci, the moon. He did not invent a demon of the rock. He did not invent a demon of the wheat field. He did not invent a demon of the iron ploughshare. He invented a demon of the moon. He chose the foundation. He chose the deepest possible substrate to try to hack. And that is the proof. The very fact that the apparatus’s manufactured philosopher reaches for the moon, of all things, to legitimate a fake demonology of a children’s cartoon character is itself evidence, at the level of the apparatus’s own selection behaviour, that the moon is what my framework says it is. The foundation of the mind. The hack reveals the cryptotype it tries to hack. Hackers select targets that matter. Dugin chose the moon. That choice gives the game away.I call this principle, with a deliberate echo of the medieval mystics, as well as of the phenomenon in data analytics that powers artificial neural networks today, reversion to the mean. The reversion to the moon-based metaphor. It is my arch play on words, referencing that phenomenon of data analytics where mean itself emanates from the moon-metaphor semantic signalling system too. The apparatus reverts to the moon foundation whenever it needs depth.The phenomenon is not new. It is what every prior fake and real religious doctrine production in the Indo-European adjacent cultural space has done. From Akhenaten’s brief solar monotheism in fourteenth century BCE Egypt, to Ahriman in the fifth century BCE Iranian Avestan reform. From the Druj, the Lie, carved in stone in the sixth century BCE Persian rock relief at Behistun, which I’ve spoken about before, to the Inquisition’s witch trials in seventeenth century Catalonia. The technique is the same. The locus is the same. The moon is the place the apparatus reaches when it wants the patina of ancient ground.And I’ll just mention, en passant, as I have before, that Yermak’s medium’s call sign on Telegram was Luna. And we all saw that thing a few weeks ago, where the fake Russist security services operative releasing the video called himself Lunan. It wasn’t his real name. He chose this name. What I’m talking about here gives us lenses to decode what we are seeing in our information space, and to make decisions about how we react to it. Because this tell, this use of the moon as the substrate, will come up again and again. And when it reaches for the moon to justify terrible things, you know what you are looking at.And so Putler made his speech this week, and he’s going back a couple of centuries. When I talk about outflanking Dugin, not rebutting, what I mean is this. Let’s not enter into discussing what happened in 1733 or 1833, or Stalin this and Stalin that. It is all just nonsense. You outflank them. And because of the degree of complexity of the nonsense they spew, from Putler down to Dugin, down to what they teach in Russian schools, and Will gave a good discourse on that this week, you really have to go quite far. That’s where I go. Six thousand years ago, to the village of Mykolaivka on the banks of the Dnipro, where that Nature paper last year by Nikitin determined that all the living Indo-European languages emanate from there and from around it. So if we’re going to outflank Dugin or Putler, then let’s start with the real word for the moon.The wise counsellorI want to turn now to the Dugin-as-archetype observation I made last week. The archetype the Russist apparatus has cast Dugin into is the wise counsellor, the figure who stands at the elbow of the monarch and tells him what to do. In the Indo-European inheritance he goes back at least as far as Merlin to Arthur, Aristotle to Alexander, Chanakya to Chandragupta Maurya, Nathan to David, and the Brahmin court priests to the Vedic kings. The role is honoured. The image is silver-bearded. The associated vocabulary is wisdom, depth, tradition, mystery, ancient knowledge.That archetype is the role Dugin has been cast in by his apparatus. The casting was not subtle. From the late 1990s, when Foundations of Geopolitics was distributed inside the Russian Academy of the General Staff, his apparatus began establishing the image. Orthodox priestly robes for ceremonial appearances. A studied manner of speaking, with theatrical pauses. A vocabulary that reached at every opportunity for the deepest available references. Heidegger, Schmitt, Guénon, Evola, Plato, the Vedas, Sufi texts, the Orthodox liturgy. A theatre of Tradition, capital T, deliberately invoking the right-wing Italian and French esoteric currents he had read while resident in western Europe in the 1990s.The Western press, when he was introduced to it, treated this casting as if it were real. Profiles in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere, from the late 2010s forward, described him as Putin’s Rasputin, Putin’s brain, Russia’s most influential thinker, the philosopher of the Kremlin. All archetypes. Tucker Carlson, sitting opposite him in Moscow in February 2024, introduced him as the most famous political philosopher in Russia. Each of these framings is the apparatus’s own marketing copy, lifted into Western respectability discourse by Western interviewers who did not, evidently, pause to ask whether they were reading the costume rather than the man.The casting director’s masterstroke was the family business construction. The senior philosopher-operator does not stand alone. His daughter, Darya Dugina, was raised inside the Russist apparatus from the start, trained as an English speaker, deployed as a co-presenter on Russist state television. In the early months of the full-scale invasion she was sent on apparatus tours of Mariupol where, in a boat off the fallen city, where the state she was defending had just murdered up to one hundred thousand native residents, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, she delivered to camera the Ukrainians-bombed-themselves line, which I’ll dissect in chapter three. She presented Russist state messaging, this actor, speaking fluent English to international audiences like us, while her father provided the metaphysical depth on the home channels. They were not two operators of the same apparatus by accident. They were one household operation, with two specialised members carrying complementary apparatus content. The English-language audience encountered a young, articulate, beautiful philosophy graduate daughter, whose existence alongside her wise, bearded father established the franchise as something more than a single man’s project. The Russist apparatus, when it captures a philosopher, captures the family line.Her death, en route from a literary festival outside Moscow in August 2022, then permitted the apparatus to install the next image layer around the surviving father. The bereaved philosopher. The targeted intellectual. The martyr-adjacent figure whose tragic personal loss was somehow taken as evidence of his philosophical importance. Tucker Carlson reached for the line directly in his promotional copy. The Ukrainian government, he alleged, murdered his daughter. The casting director, which is to say the apparatus, had built him a halo.What matters about all of this is that the philosopher framing is a production. It has a casting director. It has a costume. It has a backstory. It has a daughter who served as a supporting character. It has a sanctioning state and an interviewing state. It has, in Carlson’s promotional copy and in dozens of similar Western pieces over twenty years, a marketing strategy. None of these elements is evidence that the man at the centre is a philosopher. All of them are evidence that the apparatus around him is in the business of manufacturing the appearance of a philosopher.And this is the central claim of the chapter, and indeed of the book. The wise counsellor archetype is being manufactured in real time, by a state-deployed apparatus, around an actor who is playing a role to the apparatus’s specification. That is my opinion. I’m entitled to it. My opinion is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The role exists because the apparatus needs it. The apparatus needs it because some thinking head needs to appear attached to the Russist apparatus’s serial enterprises, so that those enterprises do not look like the brutal, acquisitive violence they actually are. The role’s content is incidental. A children’s puppet demonology is fine. A pseudo-Hebrew etymology is fine. Lenin’s body removed from the mausoleum and replaced with a sarcophagus for the still-living president, surrounded by the flags of conquered European states, is fine. What matters is that the actor keeps producing the appearance of philosophical depth, while the apparatus keeps doing what the apparatus does. Murder. Genocide.The wise counsellor production is not assembled from nothing. The Russist state apparatus draws, for its metaphysical alibi, on a specific twentieth century intellectual lineage that the Western reader is rarely shown. There is the Russian cosmism tradition of Nikolai Fyodorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Alexander Bogdanov. There is the noosphere doctrine of Vladimir Vernadsky, the Ukrainian-born geochemist whose vocabulary the apparatus has gradually annexed across the past half century. And most directly there is the painter-mystic Nikolai Roerich’s tripartite pneumatic, psychic, hylic hierarchy of human types, a Theosophy-derived schema in which a spiritual elite is licensed to direct the lives of the less awakened masses. Theosophy was invented by Helena Blavatsky, who was born in Dnipro. I have visited her house in Dnipro. And again, I remind you, this is about outflanking these people and their nonsense. The Dugin-Surkov apparatus did not invent the substrate it operates from. It appropriated a hundred-year-old Ukrainian and Russian mystical infrastructure of pneumatic elite metaphysics, and grafted onto it the security services apparatus that produces twenty-first century deployments. The wise counsellor archetype is being installed inside a building that was already standing.And for those who read the Veronika story, the medium with the Luna Telegram handle who was directing and advising Yermak, this will all seem very, very familiar. One of her posts published this week concerned Fedorov. She advised Yermak, this was all over the question of who should succeed, to go to our friend, I think she referred to President Zelensky, and suggest that Fedorov would make a great successor, or words to that effect. Basically, to manipulate President Zelensky into not appointing Fedorov. Of course, the whole thing backfired when Fedorov was appointed defence minister. And so again I see the footprint of an operation where everything they touch goes wrong.The reader who wants to see where the apparatus’s metaphysical confidence comes from should read Roerich, though I wouldn’t advise it, Vernadsky, the cosmists, or the Dnipro-born Ukrainian Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. And don’t get me wrong. She was pretty amazing. She saw many things which we still haven’t quite sorted out, and I don’t downplay her or what she achieved at all. However, she did make up a lot of stuff about Tibetan Buddhism. She didn’t have access to what we have access to today. And she made up a lot of stuff about the Egyptians. The reader who has these books will recognise, in every Dugin output, the lineage the output is drawing on.Don’t rebut. Outflank.So what I’m asking us to do is to stop refuting him. We don’t need to write an essay explaining that Cheburashka is not actually a Hebrew-named moon demon. The artefact rebuts itself. The point of the artefact, for the purposes of this book, is to establish the apparatus’s nature beyond any need for further argument. After chapter one, you will not see the philosopher frame the same way again.What I’m asking us to do instead is to start noticing where else the apparatus shows up. The Russist apparatus’s outputs are not limited to Dugin. They appear in the writings about archetypes of Surkov, the ex-deputy prime minister of Russia, which I’ll analyse in chapter ten. They appear in the slogans of European populist movements that have absorbed and re-exported the fourth political theory framework. The Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear deployment reads as if it had originated in the same source as Dugina’s Mariupol speech. Which of course it had, structurally, if not by traceable transmission. They appear in the speeches of the Russist Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, in the editorial line of Russist Today, in the briefings of the Russist foreign ministry, in the daily output of half a dozen named Telegram channels, and in the comment-thread persona fleets that argue every Western news article into the ground.And once you have read the Cheburashka artefact and registered what it actually says, you will start seeing the others. The apparatus’s signature is not subtle. The phrase don’t poke the bear is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase legitimate Russian interests is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase one cannot reduce a complex situation to good and evil is the apparatus’s signature. Multipolarity is the apparatus’s signature. Civilisational sovereignty is the apparatus’s signature. Traditional values is the apparatus’s signature. You will start, slowly, to find the apparatus. The apparatus is more present in Western intellectual life than we had previously noticed. This is not a paranoid conclusion. It is an empirical observation. The apparatus has been working at the Western intellectual stack for at least twenty years, and has in places succeeded. This book’s task is to give us the equipment for noticing the signature when it appears, the manner in the mean, and for what to do when it does.I’m not going to argue with Dugin. The book is not going to argue with anyone who repeats the apparatus’s signatures. It is not going to set out a polite both-sides account of Eurasianism, as if Eurasianism deserved an even-handed treatment. The point of don’t rebut is don’t rebut. We will not rebut. We will outflank. And it is not going to be neutral. I’ll not pretend in this book to be neutral about whether the Eurasianism doctrine is an imperial fiction. It is an imperial fiction. The Central Asian scholars whose work I draw on say so plainly, from inside the region the apparatus pretends to speak for. The Marat and Arystanbek text from Kazakhstan that I lean on for that chapter is published by Cambridge University Press. Cambridge is not, generally, where one looks for the firebrand position. The firebrand position, in this case, is the position of the responsible scholarship.And the book is not going to refer to the apparatus’s spokespeople by their full diplomatic-register names every time. Druidey Don, Duncey Putin, Sorcerer Dugin, Chief Sorcerer Putin, Chef Saucerer Prigozhin, Maid Maryon Simonyan, the bridge troll, the wise counsellor, the philosopher. These are the working monikers I have used in my Decoding Trolls writing across some 67,500 original posts since February 2022, and they will recur here. They are not childish. They are mana-stripping, and that is the technical term I’ll explain in chapter three. For now: when you remove a public figure’s gravitas vocabulary and substitute a comic working name, you remove the figure’s symbolic energy. You strip them of mana. You make the apparatus harder to deploy through them. This is part of the outflanking method, applied at the level of vocabulary. We see it when people archetype Donald as a clown. We see Iran doing it to Donald, to great effect.And don’t get me wrong, I’m not on the side of Iran in this, the mad mullahs. A plague on all their houses, on MAGA and Donald and on Iran. This is a classic tragedy, foreseen and inevitable. Inevitable because of Donald’s personality and the wiliness of the Iranians. Foreseen because of understanding that psychology, understanding the bridge troll, understanding how easy it is to provoke Donald. And understanding that Iran’s strategic objective is not only to concretise its alliance with China and bring China into the Middle East, but to destroy American power in a way that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were not able to do. Knowing these things, this is the absolute catastrophe we are living through at the moment. But let’s focus on outflanking Dugin, and those around him, and those in our lives who deserve to be outflanked rather than rebutted.Where I write this fromAnd I’m not going to be impersonal. I’ll tell us what I know from where I know it. I worked on that bridge, in the grey zone. I left Ukraine before the full-scale invasion because I had read the situation, it turned out, correctly. My father read it correctly too, and advised me in early December 2021 that the invasion was going to happen. He had no access to secret sources. He read the tea leaves and parsed the data. And I judged that the evacuation in the aftermath of a full-scale invasion would be a disaster. So it proved, for the OSCE. I worked from the OSCE office in Dnipro from 2018 to 2022, covering Zaporizhzhia and the surrounding oblasts, watching the Russian imperial apparatus being assembled. I’m now in the information space what I would call a pseudo-combatant. And I take that word literally enough to register that someday my work might be noticed. I tell you all of this so that you will know I’m writing from a position of personal stake, not from a position of intellectual entertainment. The discipline matters because I have lived inside the rooms the apparatus operates in. And the disciplines of the framework, the Code of Positive Trolls, the symmetric ethical instrument I’ll introduce in chapter three and explore in chapter twelve, are not academic instruments. They are the disciplines I’ve used to keep my own mind from being captured in the same rooms.This book is, in a real sense, the manual I wish I had been given when I crossed the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in 2015 and started reading what the apparatus was pouring out of occupied Luhansk every day.So I’ll leave it at that for this week.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

It’s Amazing What Regular People Can DoFor six months now I have been training a neural network to build the training data for a local language model. The model’s job, when it is ready, will be to read wartime information and sort it the way I do: into Disinfolklore, Infolklore, and Neutral. I have been working extremely hard on this and the progress has been remarkable.One challenge sits under everything. We are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce.I developed both concepts, starting from the propaganda that flooded Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine from 2015 onwards. Disinfolklore is the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds. It works on their intentions, their motivations, their attitudes and, importantly, their moods, without their ever knowing. Infolklore is its opposite: the tale that feeds the well we all who listen daily to @Volya4UA on Twitter spaces drink from instead of poisoning it. Most of us were together in the Mriya Report days, and while you were watching the war I was developing these ideas from the very material we all looked at each day.Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy. Everything we hear from Strelkov will do: we are going to kill you all, basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. We have spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes. Even, and Ming will appreciate this, P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster.Great thanks to James and Wendy for hosting Decoding Disinfolklore every Wednesday. We’ve been going now for fourteen months every week!Three sources lit the instrument up.The first was written by a friend of the show. John Spencer jointly wrote the definitive account of the battle for Kyiv, a nine-thousand-word study. The moment I fed it in, the model recognised it as the best match for Infolklore it had seen.The second is a channel that still publishes every day: RIA Melitopol, now RIA Pivden, working out of Zaporizhzhia city while Melitopol is temporarily occupied.The third is Volya. In particular Will and M’ockers. In particular M’ockers, who wears her archetype on her moniker. Her whole method is: well, that will teach you to invade Ukraine. It is the complete opposite of the dark well.So a couple of weeks ago I recorded one of the Volya shows and put it through the method properly. It was the episode where the tanker fella told the whole history of the alumina campaign which his fellow Tanker Fella @realLangerDan had begun. And I am not really writing about that campaign here. I am writing about the pattern he was describing: a small group of people moving together, creating a great campaign, and the campaign moving monsters.The Trita patternThat pattern has a name. Most of us in the pro-Ukraine space carry an archetypal model of how the world works, and it works by the small person being victorious. There is another pattern, the Vritra pattern, the serpent who holds the waters back and always wins. Both patterns live in every Indo-European language culture. Celtic, Armenian, Iranian, Indic. In England it is St George and the dragon. In India and Iran the hero is sometimes called Trita, and every Hollywood happy ending is the Trita pattern working out.It is not mysterious. You do not have to have read about Trita. You just carry the pattern. Most of us on the pro-Ukraine side recognised from the very beginning that Ukraine was going to win, because there is no other choice. There is not a world in which Russia wins. Our certainty through the long struggle becomes clearer when one reads about the Trita pattern, which I came across in the work of one of the foremost Indo-European specialists, Bruce Lincoln, while researching Disinfolklore.So here is my analysis of what the tanker fella and everyone on that show were doing that particular day.On day one of the full-scale invasion, one man posted one question. Why is our country still shipping alumina to Russia when there is a war on? Nobody important answered him. He just tweeted, like all of us small people do, into the blackness. Three years later there was an investigative journalist on the story, more than thirty MEPs signing declarations, a government investigation and a vote in the European Parliament. And a couple of weeks ago the show told the story in its own words. The first line of the episode was the best summary anyone could write. “It’s amazing what regular people can do, isn’t it?”The moment I heard that, I knew I had my perfect case study.The two acts of namingAs all of you know, I study wartime stories. As all of us do. We have become experts in it. I had to laugh this week when M’ockers chimed in with “did you see that?” about some particular explosion somewhere, and the tanker fella was able to describe it immediately. This is the kind of knowledge most of our friends in the real world would balk at. They have no idea any of this is going on.I have spent years building a method for reading these stories. The method has a simple engine: two acts of naming.The first act: name the story. Not the topic, the story. Wartime information runs on story patterns far older than any of us. Some are older than writing. When you name the pattern correctly, the noise drops away and you can see what the piece of content is actually doing.The second act: proof it. Take the conduct the story carries and hold it against the standard our grandparents wrote down after 1945. The UN Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Law of the Sea, the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Story plus standard gives you a verdict. Either the tale feeds the well we all drink from, and I call it Infolklore. Or it poisons the well, and I call that Disinfolklore. Or it is neither, and the method says so and moves on.When I teach a computer to do this automatically, this is the structure I give it. It loves it.First act: Trita against VritraStart with the alumina story, because it fits one of the oldest patterns we have. In the Rig Veda, the oldest long text in our whole language family, there is a serpent called Vritra. His name means “the coverer.” He coils around the waters and holds them back. The rivers stop. The world dries. He produces nothing. He only withholds. Against him the tradition sets a hero. In the oldest layer of the story that hero is Trita, which simply means “third”: after Manu, the human, and Yama, the twin, comes the third brother, the younger one, the one nobody bet on. He has no army. He frees the waters anyway. And the seven rivers of ancient India run.The campaign story has the same shape. A flow that should move was being held. Not the alumina, which flowed freely, too freely. What was being held back was the truth about where it went, and the sanction that truth demanded. Around the flow sat a coil of reassurances. Don’t worry, it’s only for tin cans. Don’t touch it, the jobs. There’s an investigation, wait for the investigation. A hundred days and counting. That is the Vritra conduct. Nothing created. Everything covered.Then the third brother turns up. One tanker watcher with a tweet. Then a website. Then a handful of listeners. Then M’ockers and her enthusiasm for the campaign from the very beginning. Then journalists, the Irish Times and the OCCRP, who found the receiving smelters’ military contracts. Then the public lobbying register, which anyone can read at lobbying.ie and which showed the scale of the pressure from the other side. Then thirty MEPs.The campaign called its own method “polite persistence.” I cannot improve on that name. It is exactly how the third brother fights. He does not become a serpent to beat a serpent. He keeps asking for the waters until the waters move.Second act: proof it against the standardThis is where the campaign shines, and I do not think we even notice it ourselves while it is going on.Someone said on air: you have to have a solid argument, you have to base it on facts. That is the first mark of the bright side. Fabrication is the serpent’s tool, never the third brother’s. The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ethical discipline. We do not get anywhere by lying.Then somebody (@willthiel) in the community pointed the campaign at the Genocide Convention. I think that was Heather, as ever just behind the scenes, suggesting it to M’ockers. The duty of every country to prevent genocide arises as soon as it becomes aware it is involved. A group of ordinary listeners, on a medium most of our friends do not even know exists, reached for the post-1945 legal order as their spine. Not for a conspiracy theory. Not for rage. For the charter world our grandparents built. In my method, that is precisely what separates the two kinds of story. The verdict writes itself. This is Infolklore, and it is anchor-grade Infolklore.There was one more line in that segment that bears repeating. You don’t need to be well-funded. You don’t need a big lobby group. You just need people. The old Indo-European world had a word for the power that gathers in a community when it acts rightly. Our cousins in the Pacific still use it. Mana. That sentence is what mana sounds like in an Irish accent.The troll under the bridgeInside the campaign story sat a smaller, nastier pattern, and the show displayed it perfectly. The jobs line: touch this export and the jobs are at risk. Every folklore tradition in Europe knows this figure. It is the troll under the bridge. He does not own the bridge. He did not build it. He just sits at the crossing and demands a toll. The toll here was silence. Leave the export alone or your neighbours lose their livelihoods.The method asks one question of every toll. Is it fair? This one was not. And Volya answered it, not by shouting, with facts again. Over half the output going to a single buyer whose war economy must eventually collapse. Guinea planning its own refineries upstream. Dell leaving Limerick overnight in 2009 because somewhere else was cheaper. In other words, the real threat to those jobs is dependency itself. You do not pay the troll. You show the bridge-crossers the toll is a lie.The lifeboatsNow the moment in the episode that delighted me most, and it lasted more than a minute. One of the tanker watchers described something he had noticed across many strikes on shadow-fleet tankers. The Ukrainians always leave the lifeboat untouched. The bright orange boat and its launch ramp, always clear, so the crew can get off. Then he named the standard: “they know how to respect international law and the law of the sea.” Then Will gave his verdict: “good on them.”He said all this about ships actively helping the Russian war effort, and he praised the restraint anyway. That is my entire Disinfolklore method performed by instinct, by non-lawyers, live on air, by someone who has probably never read a word of my work. Name the conduct. Proof it against the law. Give the verdict, even when the target is your enemy’s shipping. Especially then. Ukraine’s discipline is a story that feeds the well. Will’s telling of it feeds the well twice.Two from the Russian sideTwo quick ones from the Russian side of the episode, because the show handled both correctly.Solovyov complained that Ukrainian strikes have plunged the Russian population into hysteria. M’ockers caught the trick immediately: he does not care that Russia has done exactly this to Ukrainian families for years. The old name for this move is accusation in a mirror. You charge your victim with your own crimes. It is one of the most dangerous patterns in the whole catalogue, because it is how atrocities get pre-justified. The counter is exactly what the show did. Hold up the mirror’s frame and say plainly whose reflection is in it.Then Putler’s fuel meeting. He insisted there is no fuel crisis, then spent an hour ordering people to fix it. Meanwhile veterans in one district were promised a one-time bonus of 10,000 roubles, and the payment was cancelled because there was no money in the budget. Wartime Russia runs on a story pattern I call the Merciful Sovereign: the ruler whose care for his people is boundless and whose word makes things so, like in all the fairy tales that were read to us, if we were lucky enough to have someone to read them. An empty shelf refutes Putler better than any editorial. Mercy that exists only on Veterans Day posters is not mercy. A sovereign who denies the crisis he is commanding people to fix is not sovereign over very much. The show put the two images side by side and let them detonate. That is the right craft.One caution for our own sideA method that only ever convicts the other side is not a method. It is a mirror of our own. So here is the one moment where my instrument declines to bless us. Talking about politicians who abstained, the show wondered aloud: were there Russian threats? The question stayed a question. But the shape of the move is: loud support proves a guilty conscience. That reasoning can never be falsified. I have a corpus of 10,000 propaganda items from occupied Luhansk, and that shape is in every one of them. So the method’s verdict on that minute of the show was: not poison, nothing fabricated, but not the bright side either. Unproven. Neutral. Set it down and return to the facts, which were doing all the work anyway. The abstention record is public. The lobbying register is public. The waters move on facts.I flag it precisely because the rest of the episode proofs so well. The verdicts on the campaign, the lifeboats and the mirror are worth something because this one was not free.And one last thing the method did: it left most of the episode alone. Elmo the cat coming through the cat flap is not Infolklore or Disinfolklore. He is a cat. The banter, the coffee, the lifeboat anecdote, the instrument reads all of that as Neutral and passes over it in silence. A method that codes everything is not an instrument. It is a hammer. The silences are how you know the verdicts are real.So that is what the two acts of naming heard in one ordinary episode, of the hundreds that have been produced. A three-thousand-year-old serpent story enacted and won by regular people. A troll’s toll refused with facts. The law of the sea applied on instinct. A mirror caught mid-trick. A sovereign’s mercy weighed against an empty shelf. One caution for our own side. And a cat.The bright-side stories in these recordings, the ones that proof clean against the standard, are precious. They are the material we need to teach both people and machines to tell the two wells apart. And clean examples of the bright well are far rarer than you would think. In that one show, where the archetype is enacted rather than narrated, there were at least 45 to 60 codable units. In an earlier show I fed in, Will was telling the tale of the Russian general shot in a lift while visiting his mistress, and he interjected that you could say the man died of a lack of family values. That is perfect Infolklore wrapping. It is what Volya does every day, what all of you do, and what I do to a very small extent.The second episode: we are the oceanHere is another episode I ran through the method, and some of you will remember it because it was only a couple of days ago. I think Yeni was definitely there.There is a proverb our two warring neighbours share. Each of us is a drop in the ocean. In Russia it means: I am insignificant, I can do nothing. In Ukraine, as the Madyar’s Birds team put it on their page last week, and as Volya read out on air, it means the opposite. Together we make millions of drops. We are the ocean. Same words. Same image. Two entirely different spells cast with us.Most wartime stories come at us alone, and we have to reconstruct what the bright version or the dark version would have looked like. Here the two versions arrive side by side in the same nine words. The Russian casting installs powerlessness. You are a drop, so stay home, pay your taxes, look away from the window when the refinery burns. The Ukrainian casting installs the opposite. You are a drop. And so is she. And so is he. And together you are the thing that ships cannot argue with.One of us added the coda live on air, and I wrote it down with delight. This is from M’ockers. “The ocean is very corrosive. There is not a lot that stands up to seawater.”The word for the power that gathers in a community acting rightly is mana. I used it about the alumina campaign, which incidentally carries the M-N-, that phonosemantic frame, in its own name. Here it is again, and notice where each casting puts it. The Russian version locates all the power in the state and none in the person. The Ukrainian version locates it in joined hands. When I proof the two against the post-1945 standard, the verdict is not close. One casting serves a machine that needs its people inert. The other built the protests the same episode described. Huge crowds, the anthem, and then everyone picking up every piece of litter so the square is left spotless. Democracy performed so cleanly it confuses Muscovy. The Russists watched those protests and thought: revolution. They could not read them, because in their casting of the proverb crowds only gather when the system has failed. In the Ukrainian casting, the crowd is the system working. The show illuminated this.Displaying the dark well without drinking from itFor several minutes the show did something that looks quite risky, and did it exactly right. It read out at length the prison writings of Igor Girkin, convicted for MH17, the man who helped light this war in 2014. His latest lament: Ukraine’s strikes are clear, logical, effective and unstoppable, our leaders are mediocrities, and without urgent measures the damage to our military economy will be ominous.Reading out the enemy’s words is dangerous work. Repeat a story often enough, even to mock it, and some of it sticks. So the Disinfolklore method asks hard questions of any segment like that. Why display the payload at all? Who is holding the frame while it plays?Here is what I heard. M’ockers held the frame the entire time. She said the quiet part out loud: he is a mass murderer and we should not really give him a platform. The reason his lamentation earns one anyway is that he is impotent, and his misery documents the failure of the machine from inside it. Then she corrected his falsehoods as they went past. He claims Russia has not been fighting for real. She answers: Russia has been fighting for real since 2022, they are simply not the army they think they are. He claims massive strikes on Ukraine’s military industry. She answers: every time they hit a shopping centre or a Nova Poshta depot, they call it a NATO facility. The payload never travelled one sentence without its correction riding alongside.And you would not believe how rare this is. It is completely absent from the New York Times and Washington Post articles that repeat the Russist side but do not refute it. That both-sides habit actually serves to brainwash people. What M’ockers does is refute in the moment, so the correction happens in real time and the listeners finish the job. I know Alan and Chuck and Will are open about part of the reason they do this: to give all of us lines we can use in our offices, at parties, at school, wherever anyone comes to us with Ukraine questions. We are well briefed. We are like ministers in a government. Whatever someone comes up with, we have an answer.There is a lazy story that floats around our own side, not Moscow’s, that Girkin is a seer. The one truth-teller in Moscow. The military genius who would have won the war if only the fools had listened. That story is a troll, and Lexicon dismantled it with a single remembered fact. She is on fire these days. If he is such a genius, why was he moaning in 2014 that he could not find even a thousand men willing to rise up with him against Ukraine? A seer might have read that empty recruiting table and understood what it said about the whole project. He did not. Ten years on, the penny still has not dropped. And when the conversation drifted towards calling him merely a critic of corruption, Will quietly put the conviction back on the table: no, he was indicted and convicted over MH17. All of us know that. We need reminding at just the right moment.The same way we need reminding whenever someone wonders whether a Nova Poshta depot was carrying something for the army, or whether a McDonald’s stood near a military facility. I had to reply to some human or machine today claiming exactly that. It does not matter. Article 51 of the UN Charter gives Ukraine the right, once its strikes are proportionate, to hit Russia anywhere: in Ukraine, in Siberia, anywhere Russia’s war machine sits. Russia, prosecuting an illegal war under the very charter it signed, has no right to strike Ukraine anywhere. No Russian strike in Ukraine is ever legitimate. So “that’s not a military facility beside that McDonald’s in Kyiv” is not the answer. You don’t refute. You outflank.Some people see in Girkin a genuine dissident who went too far. I contend he is something else. He is a security-services character, like Dugin, whose role is to voice the permitted critique. The shape of his complaints across a decade tells you. In March 2022, with the invasion already a catastrophe, his line was: this is a disaster, we must fight more brutally. It is always that. It is never: this is a disaster, we should withdraw and save ourselves. The critique walks up to every line except the one that matters, and stops. Volya used the right phrase for it almost en passant: he has been used as a pressure valve. A valve looks like an opening. Its function is to keep the boiler intact. The method names this pattern the captured critic. The licensed grumbler whose fury makes the system look debated while guarding its one non-negotiable premise: that the war itself must go on. So when we enjoy his misery, and I do enjoy it, we should be clear about what we are reading. M’ockers, when she reads it, does exactly that. He is not a prophet. He is a gauge on the side of the boiler, useful precisely because the machine lets him tell us the pressure.The whole segment, payload, frame, corrections, and the listeners’ dismantling of the seer troll, is a masterclass. This is how you display the dark well without drinking from it.The judge, the cemetery, and the disciplineLast time the moment that delighted me most was the tanker watcher praising Ukraine for never touching the lifeboats and citing the law of the sea, one of the most epic pieces of international law humanity has ever passed. It took decades to get signed, and it codified centuries of practice. This episode produced that moment’s big brother.This week brought the strikes on the Wildberries warehouses, with the usual chorus crying war crime. One of the regular listeners answered by doing something almost nobody on the internet ever does. He ran the actual legal test, step by step, out loud. Is the target military? He walked the evidence: the ownership change after the 2024 merger brought the company close to the Kremlin, the shipping policies changed, the network carries components that only belong on weaponised drones, and it is a major channel supplying the war. Is the harm proportionate? Strike some warehouses at night and, in his words, you are killing virtually nobody relative to the value. Then the comparison the critics never make: the same week, Russia put three anti-ship missiles into a Turkish grain carrier near Odesa and killed six crew. And his verdict, delivered like a judge who knows he can be appealed: if I’m the war-crimes evaluator here, I’ll allow it under the Geneva and Hague conventions.You can disagree with his conclusion. That is fine. What you cannot deny is the conduct. He stated the opposing argument fairly, tested the facts, cited the standard and showed his working. That is the second act of naming done in the wild, at full length. When I say the Volya community has been practising my method for years without the name, this is what I mean. And of course it is not just my method. My method is influenced by listening to Volya.Now the third treasure, and the most uncomfortable one, because it teaches the discipline that keeps the method from becoming a flag. A Russist propaganda crew went to a cemetery to film a glorification piece over the war dead. One local woman wrecked it. Our Putin got us involved in a war, she said. They did not come for your men, they came for our men. Her wounded nephew had to buy his own body armour because the issued kit can be poked through with a nail. It’s a drone war, he told her, and we’ve not seen a single enemy soldier. She stood in front of the graves and called them what the state will not: this is our future lying here. Truth spoken at cost, into a camera that wanted lies.And then, in the same breath, the same woman turned to complaining about Uzbek migrants and women who dare to cover their hair. Sixty seconds and she went from witness to racist.So what is the verdict on her? The method’s answer is that there is no verdict on her. Verdicts attach to pieces of speech, never to people. And her testimony is harder than it first looks. The war she is critiquing is an unlawful war. When she importunes the Russian authorities to provide better body armour, she is asking them to prosecute a genocidal war more effectively. In my book that is Disinfolklore, or at least that is how I teach the computer to recognise it. This is the same problem we have with the Navalny crew. If your project is to make Russia’s war machine less corrupt, you are on the wrong side of this war and the wrong side of international law. Her racism proofs the other way too. The moment we start certifying people instead of proofing their speech, we have a flag, not a method.The same discipline touched our own side this episode, so I will keep last week’s habit and say where. There were moments when the delight ran past the targets and warmed itself on the manner of a killing, or wrote off an entire people as selfish by nature. Nothing poisonous. Nothing invented. Nothing all of us don’t half believe. But not the bright well either, and the instrument stays silent rather than blessing it. I flag it for the same reason as last week. The verdicts on the ocean, the evaluator and the cemetery are worth something because these ones are not free.And what the method left alone: the cats, the coffee, the numbers read out each morning like a small liturgy. Neutral, and recorded as exactly that. And what it found: a proverb that carries two opposite spells, and a community that knows which one it lives by. A prisoner’s lament displayed at length and never once allowed to stand uncorrected. A listener felling the seer myth with one fact from 2014. Thank you, Lexicon. A vernacular judge running the Geneva test out loud, in real time. A woman in a cemetery who was witness and warning in the same minute. Babushkas sweeping up market glass while the Iskanders are still slamming in, still dying under billboards that say Unbreakable. A community that shames its own members for posting anything that could cost a battery its position, while the other side races to publish its own damage for the world’s analysts to harvest.Two episodes, and the finding is the same both times. This show has been brewing Infolklore for years. It has an Infolklorist in chief and did not know the word. The archive is a library of the bright well, recorded daily. I would love to read all of it and make it machine-readable.We are the ocean. The ocean is very corrosive. Ask the boiler how the pressure is doing.The actor, not the philosopherLast week I used the Cheburashka example to demonstrate that Dugin is not a serious philosopher. He writes earnest texts about a cartoon character. Kant did not write about Mickey Mouse. Plato did not publish solemn treatises on Asterix. This is a Russist state operation, and taking it seriously is what the operation is for.The spine of the book I have written is one sentence, and you will be glad to know I will not repeat it every two thousand words. It simply operates underneath everything else. Dugin is an artificial creation. He is an actor, like Putin. They are actors whose role is to justify repeated, genocidal, murderous enterprises and to give them a patina of philosophy and respectability.There is a temptation, especially for the well-trained academic reader and the experienced policy reader, to treat the writings of a man with a doctorate as though they constituted philosophy. And this is where our security services, our militaries and our journalists are, speaking generally, outclassed. The Russian milbloggers are linguists. They studied combat propaganda and linguistic technique as part of their degrees, as Zarina Zabriski has documented. Dugin did too. Facing them is a journalist who went to J-school at Columbia and learned about objectivity, this way to report and that way to report. But to understand what the other side is doing, you need linguistics.The temptation is to assume that anyone who writes books needs to be answered with books. That anyone who claims tradition must be argued with on its own terms. That anyone who has appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show or in Foreign Affairs must be a serious interlocutor and therefore seriously rebutted. The temptation, in short, is to engage him.Engaging him is the failure mode. It is precisely what the Russist apparatus around him is designed to elicit. They have a vector for every mind. Every Western intellectual who sits down to refute Foundations of Geopolitics, every analyst who carefully outlines the architecture of the fourth political theory, every podcast guest who patiently dismantles his account of the multipolar world, is doing the apparatus’s marketing. The apparatus does not need its philosopher to convince anyone outside Russia. It needs Western interlocutors to engage him as a philosopher. The moment they do, the apparatus has won the only thing it wants from the West. Engagement transmits the archetypes the apparatus needs in circulation. Engagement is the harm.The opposite move, the right move, is to outflank. To go underneath the figure and name what the Russist apparatus around him actually is: a security-services-built justification machine, of which he is one component, deployed in the wise-counsellor archetype to dress mass killing in respectability. Stating this once and then proceeding will, I hope, free all of us from the trap of feeling we must keep refuting him. I will not refute him. I will go around him.Analyst Zarina Zabriski has documented in detail what she calls Russia’s cynical use of Eurasianism as imperial strategy, and its patsy, the Russian intelligence operative Dugin. She has been doing this work for years, and she is doing the work of her life in Kherson now. May God protect her. I have written about the actor Dugin since 2022, across some sixty posts, using words like sorcerer, know-nothing, patsy, intelligence operative, fake Orthodox religious philosopher. Then once, in a moment of clarity I cannot now improve upon: Actor. Philosopher of Ruscism. That last one is the phrase I want us to keep.The man is an actor in the dramaturgical sense, playing the role of a philosopher in a security-services-staged play whose dramaturg-in-chief was, for many years, the political technologist and former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, a theatre-studies graduate who got his first break as a bodyguard for Khodorkovsky, staged the theatre of post-Soviet Russian politics. In the structural reading my book builds, Surkov is the apparatus’s director. Dugin is the apparatus’s wise counsellor. Putler plays the sovereign. Each plays the role the apparatus has cast him to play. Neither controls the apparatus he serves. The apparatus is the production.Prigozhin funded the bot farms and the Wagner contractors. Thank you, Nelly, for that. Margarita Simonyan reads the lines from the Russia Today anchor desk. Sergei Lavrov translates the lines into diplomatic register. Bezsonov-style propagandists under twenty different aliases run the daily liturgy on Telegram, created by the Russian security services. Each is a specialised component. The apparatus is the whole. Dugin’s specialism is producing the long-form metaphysical alibi that lets Russian-speaking audiences interpret the apparatus’s serial enterprises, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, Syria, the full-scale invasion, the Wagner deployments across the Sahel, as destiny rather than crime.The British government took the same view, formally, when in 2025 it added Alexander Dugin to the United Kingdom’s sanctions list, alongside the Russist Ministry of Defence’s media front, the Telegram channel Rybar, the Russist Fund for the Support and Protection of Compatriots Abroad, PravFund, the Centre for Geopolitical Expertise (there is an oxymoron) and the pro-Russist propaganda sites Golos.eu and Euromore.eu. Italy’s parliament took similar steps the following month. Sanctioning a thinker because of his thoughts would be a free-speech outrage. Sanctioning a security-services-deployed influence operator, alongside the propaganda channels he operates beside, is intelligence-led action against an apparatus. It is the latter the UK did.I have read his English-language books, the ones the Western audience knows him by: Foundations of Geopolitics, The Fourth Political Theory, Putin vs Putin, and the running output of his Telegram and Twitter channels. I am not engaging them on their own terms, because the point of the book is to outflank, not rebut. But I have read him sufficiently to recognise what they are, who he is, and who is writing his content. My opinion, which I am legally allowed to hold, is that they are the standing script-work of a security-services-deployed archetype operator.I listed the apparatus’s enterprises in a sentence above. I did not pause to argue about whether they were enterprises. I did not stop to debate whether Georgia in 2008 was a provocation, or whether Crimea was spontaneous. I listed them. That is the outflanking voice. It refuses the apparatus’s debate bait and proceeds with the substantive work.Next episode:Continued from: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

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I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galaxy, such as MAGA, Iran, Ruschia, Italy, wherever. I am going to read three today. Then I will start another new series: Outflank Dugin. Don’t Rebut. Outflanking enemies in the information war - the battle to free our minds from manipulative Disinfolklore-borne brain-washing memes. That is one of the main tactics I deploy. It’s why, for example, I go as far back and deeply into the past 6,000 years of Indo-European culture as possible. When arch manipulators like Modi, Putler, Donald or Dugin (or even local characters in our own lives deploy mysticism and superstition to gain power, one way to understand what they’re doing and to defeat them is: Outflank. Don’t Rebut. This new series gives everyone the tools to do this.1. The Word That Wasn’t ThereI am talking about a word that was not there in the context of Russia-occupied Ukraine. I would like us also to think about the word that was never there while Muscovy was occupying most of Europe after 1945. It is the same phenomenon. Many people did not see it in the context of Russia-occupied Luhansk. They also did not see it in the context of that massive military occupation of Czechoslovakia, Poland and all the rest of it between 1945 and 1990. And I include myself in that, until relatively recently.For eight years, the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk was missing from almost everyone’s mouth. The word is occupation. It was missing from occupiers and Ukrainians alike. This episode teaches us to read the silence. The thing that is not said is sometimes the operation.Here is a strange way to catch a disinformation operation. Do not listen for the loudest word. Listen for the word that should be there and is not.The setting is Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, from 2014 to 2018. These are the years before the full-scale invasion. Russia has taken a chunk of the region and stood up a fake country there. It is the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, the LFR. I spent time on the contact line at the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, doing monitoring work for the OSCE. That is the European security body that oversaw the so-called ceasefire. I read thousands of items of propaganda during those years. The thing I want us to notice is what nobody was saying.Listen to the occupier’s own outlet, the Lugansk Information Centre, in February 2017. The LFR, it reports, “demands”. Demands. It demands “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as it calls it, on a contractual basis. This means the power to conclude contracts.” Read that again. Notice the word that is not in it. Two parties. A contract. Coexistence. This is the vocabulary of one state talking to another. It is not the vocabulary of an occupier and the people under its boot.Or here is the same outlet in 2016, on the LFR’s so-called border guards. They patrol 274 kilometres of the so-called border with Russia. A border. A state has borders. A fake republic is dressing itself every single day in the costume of a country. That is the operation’s foundational move. It works by what it leaves out. Say republic. Say border. Say minister, parliament, ten thousand times. Never once say occupation. And the missing word starts to feel like it was never true.Now here is the part that should stop us. The other side left the word out too. Look at how Ukraine’s own news agency, Ukrinform, described the fighting in January 2018. “Events in the anti-terrorist operation, the ATO, zone.” The ATO, the anti-terrorist operation, was the official Ukrainian name for the war for years. For all the years I was in Ukraine. Think about what that name quietly does. It frames a foreign invasion and occupation as a counter-terrorism problem. It becomes something a country handles inside its own borders, against criminals. It is a true description of a real fight. But it is not the sentence. The sentence is: a foreign army is occupying our land. The word still is not there.You can watch the word arrive in slow motion. In 2017, the phrase “temporarily occupied territories” starts creeping into the Ukrainian wires. In 2018, Ukraine renames the war from the ATO to the JFO, the Joint Forces Operation. Still an operation. Still not repelling an occupier. If you measured across the whole archive of ten thousand propaganda items, the occupier’s outlets called it an occupation almost never. Under four per cent. And the Ukrainian side climbs from about three per cent at the start to a third by 2018. The word everyone now uses without thinking was, at the time, the word almost no one reached for.I will give you the cleanest measurement I have. It is myself. I studied international law at Cambridge. I did monitoring work on that very contact line. And I did not call them occupiers. Not in my own head, until the tanks rolled in 2022. I was inside the frame they built. That is not a confession. It is data. If the frame can hold a stranger who has read law and stood at the bridge, it is a very good frame.In my framework, I would call this Disinfolklore. It is folklore-like storytelling built to capture you rather than shelter you. Usually we hunt it by the characters it deploys. The Nazi bogeyman. The merciful sovereign. The saintly grandmother at the checkpoint. Those are loud. This one is silent. The archetype here is not even a character at all. It is a shape with a hole in the middle. Like a shell hole in a fairy-tale kindergarten, of the kind Victoria Amelina wrote about.So let me give us the tool, because it is a small one and we can carry it everywhere. Call it reading the absence. When we meet any account of a contested thing, a war, a firing, a closed factory, a vanished neighbour, let us not only weigh the words that are present. Ask the quieter question. What word would honest description put here, and is it missing? Who benefits from its absence? A border instead of a front line? An operation instead of an invasion? A republic instead of a seizure?Here is what seeing it gives us. It is the only reason any of this matters. Once you can hear the missing word, you cannot unhear it. The silence stops being neutral. It starts pointing, at every turn, on every side, to the thing someone needed you not to name. The frame only works while the word stays gone. The moment you supply it yourself, the operation is over. It took us collectively eight years and a full-scale invasion to say occupation out loud. We do not have to wait that long next time. We can learn to hear the hole in the sentence and put the word back ourselves.I think about the reporting this week on Venezuela, and the occupation by the United States of Venezuela.2. The Republic of LiturgyThis piece is about how a fake state’s ordinary rituals made occupation feel like the weather. A parade. A foreign minister. A children’s hospital transfer. And it is about what naming the liturgy hands back to us.Here is a small thing that could stop us. In the spring of 2017, an outlet called the Lugansk Information Centre put out a notice that the OSCE would be coming to a parade. The Lugansk Information Centre is the in-house news agency of Russia’s fake republic in eastern Ukraine. The OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In those years it ran an unarmed special monitoring mission along the front line. The observers were people like me, whose whole job was to watch and report neutrally. Here is what the fake republic’s spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Marochko, said about them on the 10th of April 2017. “They said that they will monitor the event.”The event was a Victory Day parade. It is the most sacred date in the Soviet calendar, the 9th of May. It was staged in occupied Luhansk by an entity that does not exist in international law. And the monitors allegedly agreed to come and watch. I want us to see how ordinary that is. It is not dramatic. It is not a battle. A parade, with observers RSVPing. That is the whole trick of this episode.This is about archetypal Disinfolklore. It is disinformation that works the way folklore works, by archetype and repetition rather than by argument. An archetype is just a familiar character, or a familiar shape, that a story slots into without us noticing. The one we are reading today I call the fake-state liturgy. Liturgy means the ritual you repeat. The parade. The holiday. The ministry doing its dull rounds. The tell, the thing that gives it away, is not the lie. The tell is the boredom. The fake state performs competent, tender, normal government.Watch it perform diplomacy. In February 2017, the same outlet quoted the republic’s acting foreign minister, Natalia Nikonorova, talking to the Russian news agency TASS. In her words, she spoke of “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as they call it, on a contractual basis.” A foreign minister of a thing that is not a country, conducting foreign affairs on the record, in the register of any chancellery in Europe. You read it and your eyes slide right past it, because it sounds exactly like statecraft.Watch it perform care, which is the most disarming face of all. An LFR-controlled newspaper in occupied Stakhanov reported, in April 2016, that the LFR Ministry of Health had transferred sick children for treatment. Stakhanov is not the town’s name. Kadiivka is its proper name. Now, those children are probably real, and we should want sick children to be treated. But notice the sentence is doing two things at once. It is moving children, and it is conferring existence. A Ministry of Health did this. Repeat that phrase enough. Ministry of Health. Ministry of Interior. Department of War. State TV and Radio Broadcasting Company, with its own Director General. A town quietly renamed from Krasnodon to Sorokyne. And the republic stops being a claim you could agree with. It becomes the water you swim in. In the context of America, a republic stops being a republic and becomes a monarchy.That is what liturgy does. Not one ritual. The whole repeated calendar. The parade. The press briefing. The hospital transfer. The school graduation. So statehood is not asserted. It is simply assumed, every single day, in the grammar of ordinary news.Here is the measure of how well it worked. This is what makes it evidence and not just a story I am telling you. I went through this whole archive, 2014 to 2018. The occupiers’ own outlets almost never reached for the word occupation to describe what they were doing. Somewhere between zero and four times in a hundred. Even the Ukrainian side only climbed from about three in a hundred at the start to about a third in 2018.So what does seeing this hand back to us? Just this, and it is plain, not very grand. Once we can name the liturgy as liturgy, the spell loosens. The parade is a parade staged by an occupier. The Ministry of Health is an occupier moving children. Forcible transfer. Genocide. And it is conferring itself a name in the same breath. You get the word back. You say occupation on the first day, not the thousandth.The opposite of Disinfolklore is the work of seeing clearly and naming truly. We call it Infolklore. It does not need a counter-parade or a louder anthem. It needs only this. When the fake ministry issues its next dull, competent, tender little notice, we notice the boredom and we say what it actually is. That is a thing any one of us can do from anywhere today. The water only stays invisible while no one names it.3. One Drum, Many HandsThe fake Luhansk Folk’s Republic banged one siege drum. You are besieged. The republic protects you. It banged that drum across every outlet at once. You only see the coordination, and get your agency back, when you line the outlets up side by side.Here is a small experiment we can run with our own eyes. Take a single news headline. Then go looking for it on a second outlet, and a third, and a fourth. Watch the same words come back on the same day in the same shape. Not similar words. The same drum, struck by many hands.Let me show you the drum first, because it is wonderfully boring. On the 8th of March 2017, the Lugansk Information Centre published this. The Lugansk Information Centre is Luginfo for short, the press service of Russia’s fake Luhansk Folk’s Republic. It published: “Kiev forces violate ceasefire 11 times over 24 hours. Kiev forces shelled LPR people’s militia positions 11 times over 24 hours, the republic’s defence authorities said.” That is the whole story. A number, a direction, and a reassuring little phrase. The republic’s defence authorities.Now here is the thing. That is not one story. That is a metronome. The week before it was 18 times. Another week 13. Another 11 again. Same headline frame, same source. Just like Donald’s on-off Iran war until the land invasion. The republic’s defence authorities said. A different number dropped in like a date on a calendar. You are not being told what happened on the contact line. You are being told, over and over, in a rhythm. You are besieged. And the republic shields you.This is an old, deep archetype. The scholar Georges Dumézil was a Frenchman who spent his life mapping the older stories our cultures tell. He noticed that societies keep a special place for the protector, the one who holds the wall while you sleep. It is one of the most loved figures we have. We want a shield. That wanting is exactly the handle a disinformation operation grabs. Disinfolklore is the word I use here. It means folklore-shaped lies that move because they ride an archetype we already trust. It does not invent the besieged feeling. It supplies a shield, and asks us to love the hand that holds it.But watch what the shield is defending. In June 2016, an outlet calling itself the LFR Ministry of State Security ran the arrest of a Ukrainian journalist, Olga Svorak. The charge, word for word: “the criminal case was opened due to espionage activities to the detriment of LFR’s security.” The security of a thing that is not a country. A made-up republic, with a made-up ministry, jailing a real journalist for endangering the safety of the fiction. The shield is real enough to put someone in a cell.Think about these so-called elections, too. Consider the idea of elections in Russia. There have never been free and fair elections in Russia. Not in 150 years. Never. Not once. Yet the more times that word is used, the more it works on us. It is a sacred word in most of our cultures, thank God. Its function is to persuade us, in little tiny increments, that there is such a thing as an election that matters in Russia. And in the context of the LFR, the thing the shield defends does not exist.The drum keeps a beat. By May 2018, the same spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Marochko, on the same outlet, says a Ukrainian unit has arrived. In his words, “their main task is to mine lands along the contact line, carry out provocative shelling, carry out terror acts in neighbouring villages.” Terror acts in your villages, from them. The shield needs a sword on the other side of the wall. So one is supplied every week, on schedule.Here is what you cannot see from inside any single one of these stories. You only see it when you line the outlets up side by side. Luginfo. The Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of State Security. Or whichever talking heads are on CNN. The coordination is invisible at the level of the story. Each looks like a local report. It is glaring at the level of the pattern. That is the tell. When a worry arrives everywhere at once, in the same shape, on the same day, the worry was not gathered. It was issued.The same shield can be turned two ways. A genuine warning says: there is shelling, take cover. It wears the very same clothes as the manufactured siege. You cannot tell them apart by how protective they feel. Both feel protective. That is the point. You tell them apart by what the shield is actually defending, and what it asks of you. A real warning hands you agency. Here is the danger. Here is the door. The manufactured one hands you a custodian. Stop looking. The republic has it. Love the hand. One opens your eyes. The other closes them and calls it safety.So this operation worked. It worked so completely that for years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation until 2022. Not even the careful watchers. The siege drum had done its work. It kept everyone looking at the wall and never at who built it. This is why lining up the outlets is not a clever trick. It is how you get your agency back. I note that ground.news does that. It lines up the outlets and gives us an opportunity to adjudicate between how they represent the news. The drum only governs you while you hear it one beat at a time. Put all the hands in front of you at once. It stops being a siege you are trapped inside. It becomes a thing someone made, on a schedule, for a reason. And a thing made can be set down.So next time a single worry reaches us from four directions at once, wearing four different faces, do the boring experiment. Put them side by side. There is the speculation about getting rid of the Ukrainian defence minister. There is that guy, Christopher Miller, who spent years chasing mythical Nazis in Ukraine while not mentioning Russia’s Nazis. He is promoting all of this stuff about Fedorov at the moment. There is that guy, Rob Lee, who keeps popping up on my timeline. I thought he was in good faith at the beginning of the war. Yet everything he reports, 99 times out of 100, reflects badly on Ukraine. I do not know whether he is in good faith or not, whether he is doing it on purpose. Or whether he is just psychologically incapable of the self-awareness to understand what he is doing, and the negative vibes he promotes, all in the guise of being a truth-teller.So the next time a single worry reaches you from four directions at once, wearing four different faces, do the boring experiment. Put them side by side. Find the metronome. That is the operation showing you its hand. The moment you can see the hand, the drum is just a drum.So that is that. I will come back to those next week. They are quite short and pithy.Outflanking Dugin — Don’t RebutThe next thing I wanted to start is something I have been working on for a very long time. It all came out of a tweet I wrote in 2023. The tweet was about outflanking Dugin, not rebutting him. This is one of the keys to the entire method itself, which I have spoken about before. You outflank. You do not rebut. You do not show the picture of the quite fetching French-Russian propagandist when you are trying to criticise her. By showing the picture, you promote her. And just because you wrap that promotion of her picture with a critique, you are keeping the energy of the troll going. So you outflank. You do not rebut.So this is called Outflanking Dugin: Don’t Rebut. It is a short book about a long apparatus.Two words in that sentence carry the weight of this book. They will recur on every page. So let me define them before we begin.The Rashist apparatus is what I will call the apparatus. It is the Russian state’s genocide-justification machine. It is the security services’ built network of operators, channels, archetype-handlers and metaphysical scriptwriters. Its function is to dress repeated genocidal enterprises in respectability, and to industrially export that respectability across borders. The apparatus has been running at industrial scale since at least 2014. That is when Russia’s folklore-archetyped “little green men” and “polite people” began their brutal, genocidal military occupation of parts of Ukraine. The apparatus has done, and continues to do, substantial damage to many countries. By writing this book I hope to help us get our eye in to all the apparatus’s operators, not just to Dugin. Its named senior operators include the man this book is named for, Alexander Dugin. But the apparatus is the whole machine, not any single operator inside it. I will use the word apparatus in this technical sense throughout.Disinfolklore is the analytical name I gave, on the 15th of February 2023, to the narrative form the apparatus runs on. Disinfolklore is folklore-like archetypes weaponised against rational cognition, democratic alliances, and the integrity of the audience’s mental continuums. The word is a portmanteau. Disinformation married to folklore. The marriage matters. The apparatus’s product is not merely lies, the lies of the surface. Beneath the untruths, the apparatus is reaching for six-thousand-year-old narrative structures. The bridge troll. The wise counsellor. The mother and the maiden. The trickster. The apparatus deploys these archetypes to do cognitive work that ordinary disinformation cannot execute on our mind-screens.This book takes the reader inside that mechanism. It supplies the instrument with which to counter it. The instrument is a method I call Disinfolklore Analysis. This book proposes a particular way of using it. Not by rebutting the apparatus’s outputs, which transmits them, but by outflanking them, which dispossesses them. The method is twelve tools in a six-element ethical code. It is built from comparative mythology, cognitive psychology, Buddhist ethics, international law, and my seven years of frontline observation in Donbas. Some of that time was spent in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, as a diplomat. That was just as the apparatus had begun to brainwash Ukrainians, using propaganda at a scale, intensity and sophistication more powerful than any used before on any community.The reader does not need any prior acquaintance with my earlier work to follow this book. Every technical term is introduced from zero, in plain English, with concrete examples, the first time it appears. Every M-N cryptotype. Every meme. Every archetype. Every ancient story. The opening artefact does most of the work the book has to do. Stick with me through chapter one. After that, the apparatus collapses on its own.Chapter One — The Wise Counsellor Archetype: A Manufactured PhilosopherIn January 2026, the man whom the Western press has long described as Russia’s primary philosopher sat down and wrote about a children’s puppet. The puppet’s name was Cheburashka. He is small, brown, round-eyed, with two ears the size of his face. He was conceived by a Soviet children’s writer, Eduard Uspensky, in a story published in 1965. He was animated for television in 1969. Across the former Soviet space, in Russian-speaking households from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, from Mariupol to Minsk to Yerevan, three generations of children have grown up with him. He is, by any sensible measure, a beloved character. He is shy. He is gentle. He is a friend.In January 2026, the Russian state’s senior philosopher wrote about him. Its primary philosopher. Its most named. Its Tucker-Carlson-interviewed. Its most-translated-into-English. This man chose to publish, on his Telegram channel and his social-media accounts, the following account of who Cheburashka really is.Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He is a toxic mutant. A demon of the moon. His true name is Shirdbar Shemot Shirtatan, the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the Russian child. He is not a bear. He is not a hare. He is a ruthless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish. He is a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the Russian archetype.The author of those sentences then continued, in the same artefact. He claimed that the image of Cheburashka was created on the basis of “ancient pentacles, reproducing the symbolic features of the moon demon, Shabart Ashamat Shirtatana.”But that demon does not exist. The pentacles are imaginary. Invented. The name is created. It is dressed in pseudo-Semitic phonology to look like a recovered ancient demonological etymology. The whole thing is fabricated. The demon. The pentacles. The etymology.That artefact deserves a moment before we do anything else with it. Three generations of Soviet and post-Soviet children loved that character. He is the country’s Mickey Mouse. The country’s Pingu. The country’s Paddington. He was the mascot of the Russian Olympic team at four Olympic Games. A 2023 live-action film of him sold nine million tickets at the Russian box office and earned its creators around five billion roubles. He is gentle. He is small. He has big ears. He is not very bright. He is precisely the kind of figure a culture invents when it wants to teach children that you are loved even if you are not strong.This is no fringe figure. Tucker Carlson flew to Moscow in February 2024 to interview him as the most famous political philosopher in Russia. Carlson’s promotional copy called him so dangerous that the Ukrainian government tried to murder him, and so dangerous that Amazon will not sell his books. Steve Bannon has translated him. J. D. Vance’s intellectual circle has cited him. His 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, is taught at the Rashist Academy of the General Staff. And this man, in 2026, sat down at his desk and wrote that Cheburashka is a Hebrew-named moon demon, that he might be Jewish, that he has been sent to destroy the Russian archetype.If you want a single piece of paper that ends the question of whether Alexander Dugin is a serious philosopher, this is it. I am not going to spend much time in this book rebutting Alexander Dugin. I am going to spend the book outflanking him. By the end, we will have a method for doing so to anyone like him.There is a single word in that artefact that matters before we do anything else with it. The word is in the closing line. He is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. It is the line itself that matters. Not the demonology. Not the pseudo-Hebrew etymology. Not the anti-Semitism. The line is: I am here to destroy a Russian archetype and replace it with the right one. The clue to the right one is in the rch sound in archetype itself. That is the apparatus’s project, stated by its own senior operator, in his own keyboard-typed words. It is the most important admission in the artefact. Most readers slide past it because they reach for the anti-Semitism.An archetype, in the sense this book uses the word, is a recognisable narrative role with a deep structural history. It is a cognitive figure the human mind already knows, because it has been carried by stories, songs, rituals and language for thousands of years. Archetypes live in our minds like tuning forks. They are silent until a stimulus at the right frequency strikes them. Then they ring on their own. The bridge troll. The wise old counsellor. The mother and the maiden. The wicked stepmother. The heroic soldier. The sovereign mother. The trickster. These are not stereotypes, which are flat external caricatures one imposes on a real group. They are narrative roles that anyone can be cast into. A person. A country. An institution. A children’s puppet. And the casting is what the apparatus does for a living.Once an archetype has been activated in the mind, it determines which facts the mind is able to see. Fact-checking does not fix this. The archetypes live deep inside stories much older than any facts. Platform moderation does not counter it. Archetypes do not need platforms to pass between minds. Media literacy does not neutralise an archetype. It entrenches it. The archetype is not a medium. Archetypes are structures immanent in consciousness. The apparatus’s work is at that structural level. This is why it cannot be undone by surface refutation.Dugin’s last line reads: Cheburashka is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. There is, in his sentence, an existing archetype called Russia. It is a narrative role the word Russia already carries in the audience’s mind. Dugin is announcing the apparatus’s meta-project. It is to destroy the existing archetype of Cheburashka, so that a new one can take its place. The new one is the one the apparatus is installing. It is the apparatus’s preferred Rch archetype. Right. Reich. It is from the same set of words. It is a Russia that is, in the apparatus’s own preferred vocabulary, Tradition with a capital T. A catacomb against the modern world. A civilisational core standing against the demon of the moon and its presumed-Jewish cosmopolitan footmen.We will return to this. The rex sound. The consonant skeleton in archetype. Monarch. Oligarch. Patriarch. Reich. Right. Writ. It is a powerful cryptotype across the Indo-European language family, and I will come back to it in chapter ten. For now, hear it ringing in archetype. And indeed in Donald’s arch, his triumphal arch.Dugin’s own work is precisely to redefine the content of the archetype of Russia. Donald’s own work is to redefine the content of the archetype of a republic, a constitutional republic, by installing an arch on the ceremonial axis of that republic. The apparatus’s whole undertaking is, at its deepest structural layer, an archetype-replacement project. Dugin’s specific function in the apparatus is to write the metaphysical material that supplies the new content.Cheburashka is the test artefact. He is a beloved figure whose existing archetypal content is innocent child, gentle, friend. His new content, in Dugin’s keyboard-typed instruction, is toxic, mutant, rootless, cosmopolitan, possibly Jewish, post-humanist, saboteur of the Rashist child’s innocence and potential. The replacement of the right content of the archetype is happening in front of the reader. The artefact demonstrates the meta-project on the page by performing it on Cheburashka.This book is the field manual for noticing the replacement of the Reich element in archetypes, as it is implemented in the information space. It is a handbook for those of us who refuse to be co-opted, through our subconscious, into the apparatus’s many murderous projects.Here is the spine of the book in one sentence. I will not repeat it every two thousand words. It will simply operate underneath everything else. Dugin is an artificial creation of the Rashist security services, an archetype of a “philosopher” and “wise counsellor.” There is a temptation, especially for well-trained academic readers, and we will get to that next.Continued: Episode 2: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. The first episode:For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova — from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, an expert on the Holodomor — it reflects the imagery and the archetypes that she uses.I’m Decoding Trolls. I write on disinfolklore.eu, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe, and powerofmana.net — and also on X, as Disinfolklore and as Decoding Trolls.Here’s the claim in this final episode. The beast is not answered with a better argument. It is answered with a truer image. Some of you who follow my work will understand why I’m so attracted to Larysa Yakubova’s Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss — because she works in archetypes. Episode 2:It is answered with a truer image, and this is also what I try to do in my work consciously, and what many other people, like Mockers, and many of you, do also unconsciously — in the sense that it’s not a purposeful strategy — when you’re talking about Infolklore.The whole turn of the series, and the whole turn of Larysa Yakubova’s book, is to answer the beast from the abyss with a truer image. Don’t reflect the image it produces. Don’t share memes that have photos of the people you are critiquing, because that’s how we keep these memes alive; that’s how we reward these Ruschists with amplification. The small part we can play in stopping the spread is this: if we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out — like I do, I scrub it out in red, if I need to, so that you hardly see anything of it — but I also try to offer opposite images, Infolklore.She spends 300 pages of Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss naming a horror with a forensic patience that would frighten us, and then, on the last pages, she does something the Ruschist apparatus can never do. She does not merely refute the nightmare. She replaces it. She holds up a different picture of the world and says: this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.Episode 3:Behistun: Arta and the DrugeMany of you will know, in many of these broadcasts, I’ve spoken about the truth. I’ve spoken about Darius, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, 600 BCE, and his inscriptions on the Behistun Rock in Iran, where he talks about how he engaged against the usurpers — the druge, the Lie; druge, dragon; the Lie. We see today Donald tweeting and speaking against the inheritors of Darius’s great empire in Iran — the mad mullahs of Iran, whom Donald archetyped as liars. We see, from the rocks at Behistun in 600 BCE, where the truth — Arta — is archetyped as the rightful power, the rightful sovereign, the rightful speech, against druge, the Lie. Larysa Yakubova, as does President Zelensky, gets this intuitively as well. She holds up a different picture of the world to that of the Ruschists, and says this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.Adjudicating the Claim to RightThe most common thing I get from people is: oh, but the Russians say this. I say: yes, but then we have to adjudicate it. That is a claim to right, and therefore we adjudicate that claim to right. When it comes to occupied Ukraine, they are the usurpers, they are the dragon, they are the serpent, they are the beast entering another people’s land — and whatever they claim is a lie is the druge. We adjudicate. It’s not ‘both sides’; both sides are not equal. Both sides have a claim to right, and then we adjudicate which is the correct claim to right, and we use the post-World War II legal order to determine that.In defence of Ancient Ukraine:Once we have that as a means of adjudication — and I use it in the Code of Positive Trolls; it’s completely integrated into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, but it also works on the micro level and on the macro level — once you have that, you have the Refugee Convention, the Genocide Convention, the laws of war, the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, where countries commit to removing discrimination on the grounds of sex or political views or other protected criteria.Tool 6, Generosity, and the Grave-DiggersThe move she makes, Larysa Yakubova, is covered by Tool 6 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, the 12-tool way — and Tool 6 is generosity. She’s been generous to the beast from the abyss. The move the whole series has been climbing towards is re-archetyping, which, as you know, is part of the 12 tools on disinfolklore.eu. The product of re-archetyping reality is Infolklore. It’s what Mockers does intuitively every day on her show, and Will too — both really fluently and excellently.By the end of this, I want us to think of Larysa Yakubova not only as a diagnostician of the beast from the abyss, but as one of its grave-diggers — her own word. The act of grave-digging she performs, and all of us who listen to Volya all the time, and participate, and who host — we are digging the grave of Ruschism. Larysa performs an act of re-archetyping so complete that it leaves the Ruschist apparatus with nothing to stand on. First, though, her condition — because she’ll not let us climb out of the abyss on cheap terms, and neither will any of us.Her Condition: Call Things by Their NamesLarysa Yakubova offers hope, but it is a stern hope, and we have to earn the right to it. Her condition for escape from the abyss — for the Ruschists — is the same condition this whole mini-series has been built on, and it’s the same first move the Disinfolklore framework teaches: you must call things by their names. Once you recognise the Mana, the energy in a thing, in a phenomenon, in a meme, then you call it by its proper name. You adjudicate. You call it by its proper name. The Ruschists call whatever Mana they produce by its improper name.The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal Clock:I want to be precise about what she promises and what she refuses to promise. She does not promise rescue for the Ruschists — they’re beyond rescue. She does not promise that naming the evil dissolves it. What she offers, in her own grim arithmetic — in paraphrase, but the shape of it — is this: calling things by their true name buys only a meagre chance for at least someone to find their way out of what she calls, again in paraphrase, the mirror hall of perfected evil, which is where the Ruschists are living. It’s a meagre chance for at least someone out of a hall of mirrors.The Meagre Chance and the Mirror Hall of Perfected EvilThis is not sentimental. She is a scholar of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, writing under the salvoes that interrupt her writing and her research, because she’s been bombed. They’re trying to kill her; they’re trying to murder her. The beast has come out from the abyss and is launching missiles and Geran drones to kill her. She will not sell us a happy ending. She’ll sell us a door — narrow, half-open, with no guarantee on the far side, but a door.Here she says: here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe instead. Notice it is the exact opposite of her condition. The Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe that names don’t matter, that it’s all just narratives. How many of us have heard this? How many of us have heard ourselves saying this, or thinking this? Even if we haven’t heard of postmodernism, we’re imbued with it; it’s imminent, it’s in the air. Someone like Donald Trump would never have read a book on postmodernism in his life, and yet he manifests it in almost every sentence he speaks. Names don’t matter; it’s all just narratives; it’s all just framing; one side’s terrorist is another side’s freedom fighter; who’s to say?“Names Don’t Matter”: The Bridge Troll of MeaningRegister the Mana in that move before you register the argument. It is fatigue dressed as sophistication. The feeling it installs is: why bother, it’s all spin anyway. Name the archetype underneath, and the voltage halves. This is the bridge troll of meaning itself — the keeper of the threshold who charges us our own clarity as the toll for being allowed to feel worldly.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. The claim that names are arbitrary is itself the most useful lie the beast tells, because the thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot resist. Is it generous? No. It robs the target of the one instrument that costs nothing and cannot be confiscated. The relativism that says naming is naive is itself Disinfolklore — the apparatus protecting its own camouflage. Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is the refusal of that toll. She names, and in naming she does the first thing the Code of Positive Trolls asks of us. She gets her eye in, and she’ll not look away.Metanoia and the RebootHere is where Larysa Yakubova gets sterner still, and where she saves us from the earliest, easiest mistake of all — the mistake of mistaking a costume change for a transformation. She draws a hard line between two kinds of change. Remember, she’s writing in 2023, before this peace-process nonsense. A costume-change peace — ‘I want peace’ — a costume change, but underneath it, no change.She uses her own word for a real one: metanoia. Again, an MN word — not the Greek of the seminary by accident; she means it precisely. Metanoia, in her usage, is a root-and-branch change of mind and of values. How do we denazify the Ruschists? How do we denazify the 90 million people left living in the Ruschist Federation? A root-and-branch change of mind and of values — a turning so deep that the person, or the people, who come out the other side is genuinely not the same as the one who went in. That is the real thing. That is escape. Metanoia — not just a naming, but a turning so deep that the people, the Ruschists, who come out the other side are genuinely not the same as the ones who went into the full-scale invasion.Against this she sets the counterfeit — again, my paraphrase of her argument, not her phrase: the reboot. The machine switched off and switched on again, the operators the same, the slogans updated, the flag perhaps even repainted. The Ruschist empire: the czars, killed; then so-called fake communism; then Yeltsinism; then Putinism. The slogans updated, the flag repainted — turned upside down, a Dutch flag turned upside down — while the Ruschist apparatus underneath grinds on exactly as before. A reboot leaves the machine intact. Metanoia dismantles it.The Reboot Wearing the MaskThe beast’s favourite tactic, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. This piece is helping to prepare us for what is inevitably coming. We all see it coming. It’s Russia’s retreat from Donetsk, or from Luhansk, and the beast will try to keep their hands on Crimea, or perhaps bits of it, and then it will say it’s a reboot. They’ll get rid of Putler, they’ll hand him over to The Hague, and the people who haven’t been watching closely — the people who have no bone in this fight, or the people who have a bone in this fight because they’re being tortured by Geran drones each night.A friend of mine in Ukraine wrote to me about his elderly mother in Dnipro, and her heart — she’s practically having a heart attack every night as she watches these Geran jet drones go over her house, knowing they’re going to kill someone or destroy something.We’re waiting for this. The beast’s favourite trick, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. New management; lessons learned; a fresh start; let’s open a McDonald’s — so that the substrate survives the show of contrition. We’ve already seen this move in the framework. It’s the deepest form of the lie: the Ruschist apparatus has spent a century learning that the most durable way to keep a thing is to perform its abolition.Yakubova’s distinction is not a theological nicety. It’s a detection rule. When change is offered, ask which kind it is: does the mind and the value at the root actually turn, or is the engine merely idling, waiting for the cameras to leave? Here is what the apparatus wants us to think at exactly this point: people don’t change, nations don’t change, it’s naive to ask for metanoia, settle for the reboot and be grateful. Register the Mana. It’s cynicism sold as realism, and it’s the precise pressure designed to make us accept the counterfeit. Name the archetype: the merciful sovereign in his most seductive register — the one who says ‘I have changed, trust me, take the deal,’ while the boot stays exactly where it was. Is it true? It is a reboot wearing the mask of repentance. It is Disinfolklore.The Iran Forecast and Ukraine’s StrategyNote: it is exactly a year since I was speaking on these podcasts about Iran and the war in Iran, which will inevitably — I forecast then, and I forecast today — lead to an absolute catastrophe of American troops on the ground. We’ve just gone through a second phase. We went through it first last summer, and then we went through a second phase of Donald rebooting every single day, everyone going ‘oh, peace, yes, I want peace, it’s going to be peace,’ and then we hear it again today. This is one of the issues of our era.In the context of Ukraine and Russia, and specifically Russia: how do we make Russia change? How do we force it? What is Ukraine’s strategy? What’s the thinking at the top of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences? Ukraine has to perform wanting peace. Ukraine has so many people, like my friend’s mother, who are being tortured every night — but they know that, unless this is the final war, we’re all going to be going through this again and again.Larysa Yakubova has now given us both halves of the stern hope: the condition — name things truly — and the standard — demand metanoia, refuse the reboot. Everything in this mini-series has been the first half, naming the thing, the beast from the abyss, Ruschism. Now, finally, her framework gives her the second.The Door for the Deep FolkHere is the heart of the finale, and here is where I think the Disinfolklore framework completes Larysa Yakubova’s sternness — not by softening it, but by giving it somewhere generous to land. There is a question that a book as unflinching as hers leaves hanging, and an honest listener will have felt it through all five previous episodes. If the beast is real, and the Ruschist apparatus is what we have said it is, then what about the people inside it? What about the deep folk I described back in episode two — the ordinary millions pickled in the nightmare, fed the combat propaganda from the cradle, made into the substrate the apparatus runs on? Are they simply the beast? Is there a door for them?The Code of Positive Trolls answers, and it’s a generous answer, even to the adversary’s own population. Tool 6 does not ask whose side you’re on. It asks: is the meaning generous? A meaning that writes off an entire people as irredeemable fails its own first test. The Code holds a door open even for the deep folk — and that’s why I do use the word Ruschist. Ruschist is a subset of the Russians. If we use ‘Ruschist,’ then it cannot not describe that subset of the Russians who are part of the beast — but there are Russians who are not part of the beast, and the Code of Positive Trolls holds a door open even for them, for that part of the deep folk, and especially for them, because they are not the authors of this nightmare. They are its first and largest victims — the ones pickling the world in a horror that was poured into them before any of us.This is the move the Ruschist apparatus structurally cannot make and cannot fake. The beast offers no door to anyone, not even its own. It needs its deep folk locked inside the hall of mirrors forever, because the day they climb out is the day the machine loses its substrate. Here is the asymmetry that wins. Disinfolklore must dehumanise to function. Infolklore must refuse to dehumanise, or it stops being Infolklore. The generous door is not weakness. It is the one weapon the Ruschist apparatus has no counter-move against, because the only way it could close that door is by becoming us.Generosity Is Not the RebootDo not mistake generosity for the reboot. Holding the door open is not the same as accepting the counterfeit transformation. Larysa Yakubova’s two disciplines run together here: you demand the metanoia, and you hold the door open for the one who might walk through it. The door is held open precisely so that a real turning has somewhere to go. That is the Code of Positive Trolls working at full stretch — stern on the standard, so metanoia, a complete and utter change of everything, a complete turning; but generous on the threshold, and that is Tool 6, generosity, at its limit.Re-archetyping: The Move That Completes the SeriesNow watch what Yakubova does with it, because she does not just describe the door — she walks through it, and she shows us what is on the other side. Re-archetyping the beast: the move that completes the series. Let me name it cleanly before I show it to you in her own images.Re-archetyping is something I’ve been talking about all year — for over a year, since Wendy’s first co-hosting show, and my first show as, I’m not quite sure what I am, host, guest, whatever, participant. Re-archetyping is the act by which we do not merely dispossess the Ruschist apparatus of its archetypes; we replace them. It’s not enough to strip the beast of its costume — a stripped beast is still standing there in the dark. We have to replace the image, the way water reaches for the sea.The product of that act — when the rival image is proofed clean against the Code, generous, true, patient — is Infolklore: the same deep narrative grammar the apparatus parasitises, turned instead to the service of life and the post-World War II legal order. Same folklore, same deep machinery, opposite Mana. The Ruschist apparatus rides the old stories down towards death; Infolklore rides the very same stories up towards life. That’s the whole game in one sentence.Now, Larysa Yakubova does exactly this, and she does it at the largest possible scale. Her title is already the first move. She takes Russia — which spends untold billions performing itself as the guardian and guarantor of civilisation, the so-called third Rome troll, the katechon, the holy sovereign — and she re-archetypes it as the beast from the abyss. That is re-archetyping in three words. She has not argued Russia out of its self-image; she’s replaced the image. She has put the beast in the throne room, and once you’ve seen it there, you cannot unsee it.The Madonna in the CellarThis is the part that takes my breath, and it did when I first read her in the first weeks of the war. An article that she wrote appeared in the newspaper in Dnipro, and I tweeted it straight as soon as I saw it. I’ll repost it after the show so you can see it — I can’t do it right now, because it’s on my Decoding Trolls account, but I’ll do it afterwards.She re-archetypes Ukraine as the resurrection — not as the beast’s mirror twin, not as the counter-beast. Some of you might remember I used to talk about counter-Disinfolklore. I don’t talk about counter-Disinfolklore any more; I talk about re-archetyping. Not as a counter-beast, but as the figure the beast was built to counterfeit and could only ever counterfeit: life that rises. She takes the deepest folk grammar there is — death and rebirth, the buried seed, the rising god — the very grammar the beast uses, and she turns it, fully proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls, to the service of the living.Listen to how she does it, in her own words, her own verified words, because this is Infolklore on the page. She gives us the Madonna in the cellar. The quote, verbatim: the Kiev Madonna nurses the newborn hope of the future Ukraine. Dozens of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson Madonnas give birth in cellars beneath the salvoes and bear witness: life is indestructible.Feel what that does. The apparatus deals in the mother and the maiden as a weapon — the grief of mothers conscripted to license the next strike, the way we traced through this series, and all of my work, since I first discovered the Russians used the mother and the maiden on that fateful day in eastern Ukraine that I’ve spoken about a lot. She re-archetypes it into the true form: not grief weaponised, but life that the salvoes cannot reach. They’re in the cellars, giving birth. Same figure, opposite Mana. The mother, in her hands, is no longer a key the Ruschist apparatus turns. She is the witness that the beast cannot kill what it is trying to kill. That is re-archetyping. That is Infolklore.The Ukrainian PrometheusesShe gives us the heroes who carry fire — the Ukrainian Prometheuses, verbatim: those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity. Those are her words. We’re thinking of the emergency workers helping to rescue the mothers giving birth while they’re being double-tapped. Those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity.The apparatus offers the merciful sovereign, who hoards all light and doles it out as a favour. Yakubova answers with the opposite figure — the one whose whole nature is to give the fire away: Prometheus, to spend himself igniting dignity in others. Generosity, Tool 6 of the Code of Positive Trolls and the 12-tool way on disinfolklore.eu, rendered as myth. The sovereign hoards; the Prometheus pours. She has not argued against the sovereign; she has put a truer fire-bearer in his place.Grave-Diggers and CornerstoneSo we arrive at the last words of the series, and I want to give it to Larysa Yakubova, because she has earned it by writing this masterpiece across 300 pages of looking the beast in the eye. She calls Ukraine, verbatim, the grave-diggers of Ruschism, page 280 — and in the same breath, the cornerstone of the world of the future, page 282. Hold those together: the grave-diggers of Ruschism, and the cornerstone of the world of the future.Hold those two together, because that pairing is the whole framework. Grave-digger and cornerstone: the hand that buries the beast, and the stone the next world is built on, in the same people, in the same act. You do not get to be the cornerstone without first being willing to dig the grave, and the grave you dig is not for revenge — it is to clear the ground for what rises. Diagnosis and re-archetyping, the two halves of this mini-series, named in five words by a woman writing under fire.Her final image, verbatim, is the resurrection itself: genuine Rus resurrects; the false one expires. We go back to Behistun. I have no idea whether Larysa Yakubova knows who Darius is — probably she does; maybe she doesn’t think about it all day, the usurpers and the truth — but she gets it intuitively, as most of us do. Genuine Rus resurrects — the druge, the Lie, the dragon, the druge — the false one expires. Ukraine and the world at the beginning of a new historical epoch. Glory to Ukraine, she ends.Read that as the framework reads it: the false one, the counterfeit, the reboot wearing the mask, the beast performing the holy, expires; the genuine resurrects. That is not a better argument against the apparatus. The apparatus is immune to better arguments — it eats them, it turns them, it accuses you of the very thing you’ve proven. What the apparatus is not immune to is a truer image. That is the generous door.Closing: Become the LightHere is the thing I most want us to carry out of these six episodes. The door is held open not because the beast deserves it, but because we would cease to be ourselves if we closed it. Yakubova names the beast with forensic mercilessness, and then she holds the door open even for the deep folk pickled inside it, because the resurrection she is writing is large enough to include anyone — anyone willing to undergo metanoia and walk through. Stern on the standard, generous on the threshold: that is the Code of Positive Trolls at full stretch, and it’s the only thing that has ever defeated an abyss.The beast tells us there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Yakubova’s answer, and ours, is not to argue the point. It’s to become the light, and hold it until the tunnel can no longer pretend the dark is all there is. See the archetype, name it — and then, when we have named it, do the harder and more beautiful thing the Ruschist apparatus can never do: put a truer image in its place.I’m Decoding Trolls. See the archetype, name it, halve its power. That’s the end of the Larysa episode. Out.Previous episode:First episode in the Beast from the Abyss mini-series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

It’s a reflecting pool. So we’re talking about accusation in a mirror which is Donald’s main tactic as well (just as we were talking about before) using an arch in the ceremonial axis of the Republic to install, archly, an archetype of right (which is in fact the opposite of right, an insurrection). So the structure of these - the magnetism of the - words reveal everything really. I marvel and find it astonishing that we can be going through this complete saga over the reflecting pool. If you described it to anyone even a year ago they would not believe you. 10 years ago they would not believe you. That this is going on is a marvel to be sure. We the people are installed inside this disinfolklore galaxy where the script and the stage is right there. The words reveal it, every sentence. Without these revealing words - Monarch, arch, ballroom,… the archetype could not be installed. The monarch installing the monarch with all this gold, visiting Versailles and all of this stuff. This is kind of what I was talking about before, which Surkov talks about. Part of the act, part of the stage play is to reveal it and in there is the supreme act of manipulation. I happen to believe from my work on Dugin and on Surkov and on Donald that the the playing of the monarch archetype is part of the stage play. In order to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes over what is actually happening, which is more closer, not to a monarchy, but an oikarchy. Where you have the directors and a whole group of oligarchs rinsing the Muni out of our Community, rinsing the Mana, the energy, the money out of our community. The clothes it is wearing are the clothes of Donald playing the monarch. And the reflecting pool, the triumphal arch, these are all parts of this stage play. It fits this same pattern, the symbolism of knocking down the east wing and installing a ballroom, a monarchical ballroom. Underneath it is the Mafia state. Concealed by waffle about the czar and Donald’s tweets about wanting to be a monarch. The phrase, “you couldn’t make it up,” doesn’t apply because it is disinfolklore. It is made up. The disinfolklore galaxy is a purposefully created instrument. It’s a disinfolklore galaxy made up of these ingredients, which are so obvious. They’re obvious on the level of linguistics, language and symbolism to the simplest minds. Because everyone - the simplest minds- read fairy tales with ballrooms, mirrors, arches, inner/outer realm switching. Yet the archetypes are being installed in every story about the reflecting pool and these arrests and they have these real world impacts which are changing people’s lives… We fight on.Poland and Ukraine: The Shape of the StrategyThe shape of what is happening now between Poland and Ukraine fits exactly the pattern Vladislav Surkov himself talks about. I spoke about this before in the context of Ukrainian historian, Tetiana Boryak’s work.The Ruschists’ strategy is to take archetypes of national consciousness, invest new meanings into them, and create divisions in society using this tactic.MAGA; Brexit; what we saw with Law and Justice in Poland after it was elected, initially in the wake of Russia’s carpet-bombing of Syria from September 2015; the Fidesz Party in Hungary; entities in Ireland, and all over the place. It’s devilishly difficult to spot, because it’s wrapped, always, in every jurisdiction, in patriotic sentiment. And by its very definition, this strategy — and it is a strategy rather than a tactic, because it’s one of the main means Russia uses, again, in Surkov’s own words, because the Russians can’t help themselves articulating this, which is part of the thrill and part of their creation of power — is to wrap itself in patriotic clothes, in whatever’s to hand.They just don’t care whether you’re in Poland, with this history between Ukraine and Poland; in Ireland, between Britain and Ireland; or MAGA, Make America Great Again, between liberals and conservatives. They’ll just take this division everywhere. The shape of this — as indeed the shape of the truck protesters in Poland that we all remember, and all the rest of it — has this same shape of the Russian strategy. That’s how I see it.We did have this miracle where Duda, the former Polish president who presented President Zelensky with the award, continued the government policy that had been established under Solidarity when they took over in the early 90s: the two-track policy of defending Poland’s patriotic and national interests publicly, but in private doing everything they could to promote and give Ukraine opportunities to anchor itself in the minds of the German leadership and the great powers as an independent state. We all remember Bush’s Chicken Kyiv speech as a marker in the ground — that it wasn’t inevitable that people would accept the inevitability of Ukraine becoming a sovereign and independent state.So we’re lucky we have someone as sophisticated as Sikorski, who, as I’ve mentioned, understood — he was in the Maidan in February 2014, negotiating a truce between the demonstrators and Yanukovych’s government, which thankfully failed when Yanukovych fled, with Manafort there. We’re lucky we have him there, and Donald Tusk, and hopefully everything will die down.The Golem and the Grand InquisitorI was going to continue with Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. Last week I had just told you about how she was describing the use of this arcane, esoteric Ruschist so-called philosopher who was resurrected by the mafia regime in Russia in the 1990s. So the title of this is The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor.I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mostly on Twitter as Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, but also on disinfolklore.eu, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net, and disinfolklore.net, where you can subscribe. The title of the book Larysa Yakubova wrote is Rashism: The Beast from the Abyss. She’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, and this book was published by them in 2023.Now go past the title to the doctrine, where Yakubova stops being a critic and becomes a coroner. What did the Ruschist apparatus actually buy when it bought Ilyin? Not subtlety. Strip the prose, and you find one idea worn smooth by handling: the absolute, sacralised, all-powerful state, to which the human being owes everything and may demand nothing. Yakubova has a figure for this — again, her argument. She reads Ilyin as the apologist of the golem: the worshipper of the man-made monster, the giant of clay animated to serve its makers that instead devours them. And she reads the moral posture beneath it as that of the grand inquisitor: the one who takes freedom away for people’s own salvation, certain they are happier without the burden of choosing, and who will burn them to keep them safe.The Brothers Karamazov and the Third RomeThis week I wrote a post about the fraternal brotherliness of the Soviet archetype, which was used to shoehorn Ukraine and Belarus into a union with the Soviet Union, and was made manifest even in families, where it was all about brotherhood — and this is just an archetype. I referenced The Brothers Karamazov, where, for some of us who have read it — I’m assuming not everyone here has — there are basically three brothers, like three folkloric brothers. One of the brothers, Ivan Karamazov, received some of his education in the West and comes back to Russia and finds it really difficult to reconcile his Western ideas with his Eastern ones, with the ideology of the deep folk. They have a brother, the saintly Alyosha, who is the representation of Russia’s Third Rome troll — its idea of itself as the Third Rome, as some sort of really spiritual, ascetic state, which obviously most of us today would find laughable. Ivan wants to disabuse Alyosha of his saintliness and of his belief in the good.So Ivan tells him this story, which is the Grand Inquisitor episode, which some of us actually might have read. I read it as a postgrad at Georgetown, as part of my intellectual history. In it, basically, a Jesus figure comes back, and he’s gathering all his followers, and eventually he is arrested; and just before he is executed, he meets and has this conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who is, in effect, Pontius Pilate. So that’s the literary reference here — in which the Grand Inquisitor says: well, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think we were going to welcome you with flowers? Look what you’re doing out there. The people love you. But you’re promising them an idealism that just doesn’t work in this world. And you were told not to come back to us. And now you’ve come back, and the inevitable will happen. And this will always happen when you and your idealism come back to us.So that, as an archetype inside the Ruschist consciousness, as voiced by Dostoevsky in such great art, is still immanent in the monarchist, in the czarist approach to governance and their idea of themselves. This is one of the reasons I decided to feature Larysa Yakubova’s book, because it’s so brilliant and everyone should be reading it. They shouldn’t be reading people like Mark Galeotti, or all of these Russian journalists who go to Moscow for 10 years and then write a book — escape from Moscow, and how Putin hates them, and all of that nonsense. They should be reading Ukrainians, as all of us spend time doing, because Ukrainians were part of Russia — as we understood the Soviet Union to be — until 1991, and they understand what makes Russia tick on a really deep archetypal level.If you want to understand what to do about Russia, and what Russia is, Larysa Yakubova is the person to read — not these people in RAND, or former central bankers working for think tanks in the US. Because Yakubova understands, like me and my insights about Disinfolklore, that if you really want to mine how a people think, and how a people can be manipulated, and how the Russians are manipulating us, you need to look at the archetypes — not least because they’re driving what they do, but also because they give an insight into all of our minds, this substrate that, as far as I’m aware, not very many people have looked into before. I love Larysa Yakubova’s work because she was doing this around the same time I was, when she published this book after I had conceived of Disinfolklore.The Grand Inquisitor and the “Mythical Deal”So that trope we often come across — oh, Putler, the Russian people have decided to exchange prosperity for freedom, and this was a deal they made — that’s a little story. It’s a fairy tale, and we hear it from pro-Ukrainians as well, because there’s no consent to this. It’s not a democracy. Immanent in that fairy tale is Disinfolklore itself. Even when people are trying to say, oh, today there are all the petrol queues, and therefore the Ruschists believe this mythical deal they made with the Russians — they never made this deal, because there’s never been a democratic election in the history of Russia where they could have made it. It was never on the table. But there’s an idea that there’s a deal, and that takes on the patina of truth, and it’s promoted, and then it’s taken on board into the minds of Russia experts who decide to try and explain this to us.So Larysa Yakubova is getting right underneath, undermining these immanences — these archetypal myths that are governing all our experts, many that we see on Twitter. The archetype of the grand inquisitor — the one who takes freedom away for people’s own salvation, certain they’re happier without the burden of choosing, and who will burn them to keep them safe. It’s so clear whenever anyone is talking about this mythical deal that supposedly happened after the 2009 elections: immanent in that is this archetypal identity of the grand inquisitor. Not invented by Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, but written out because that was what was going on around then. They were the stories the servants told him about the Tsar, and it was a reflection, which he just happened to record in writing. I don’t attribute genius to him for being a stenographer, but it is a recording of this archetypal identity immanent in the Russian mind that we still see on our timelines — every time a Russia expert tells us about this mythical deal that was made with Putler: you stay out of politics. There are a few iterations of it, but it’s the same mana, the same energy in it.The Trap Inside the Flattery: Outflank, Don’t RebutHere is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think. This is profound. This is a serious diagnosis of the chaos of liberty, the loneliness of the modern soul, the need for order in a strong hand. Disagree if you like, but engage with it as philosophy, meet it on its own terrain. And I’m making fun of this, because I was one of those people. I sat in the seminar room at Georgetown and we talked about the Grand Inquisitor as a piece of great art — which indeed it is. But we also meet it in the trenches and the meat assaults, and this is what it leads to.Register the energy. It’s the pull towards debate — the flattering invitation to treat the doctrine as a worthy opponent and argue Ilyin footnote for footnote. And here’s the trap inside the flattery. The moment you agree to argue him on his own terms, you have conceded the only thing that mattered: that he is a thinker with a position, rather than an apparatus with a job. Name the archetype — the same one, in a deeper layer of costume: the captured philosopher in his theological disguise, the absolute state dressed as sacred, and the inquisitor dressed as shepherd.Here I do the move this whole miniseries is built on, which is: outflank, don’t rebut. That is one of my main strategies throughout all of my work — which Wendy will have noticed I did with her question about Poland, because I don’t want to in any way fan the flames of the fire. So I kind of outflanked it. I appreciated the question, and one day we will live in freedom and I’ll be able to answer that question without any risk of fanning the fires. But now is not that time. I do not stand inside Ilyin’s cathedral and argue the architecture.And everything I’m saying here stands for Dugin as well. This guy Ilyin stands behind Dugin. Dugin is the modern face for this pastiche he produces, and the costume he wears — the actor, an actor as a philosopher. I do not stand inside Ilyin’s cathedral and argue the architecture. I name what the building is for. The golem worship and the inquisitor’s mercy are not a philosophy of order. They are a permission structure for a security state — a way of telling the men with the truncheons that their truncheons are holy.Outflanking Dugin: The Ancient Ukraine DiscoveryAnd what you said, James, I really appreciated — about my “In Defence of Ancient Ukraine.” I wrote this on Twitter, which is where a lot of my first ideas appear, in 2023, in the context of Dugin. I said: our strategy for Dugin must be to outflank him, which means understanding the true history of Indo-European society, and the true history of the linguistics, and of this space. And it was in the course of educating myself to outflank him — and all of that nonsense we hear from Putler and Ilyin and the rest of them about the history of the Russias — that I discovered this most amazing thing ever: that not only is Ukraine entitled to parity of esteem alongside all other states, like Israel, like Germany, like Ireland and the United States, but that, given that it is actually — linguistically and genetically, as demonstrated by the latest peer-reviewed science published in the premier journals of human culture, and Nature — the origin of our entire culture and religion and mode of thinking, and the structures of our thoughts and ideas, then if we’re going to give esteem to Rome and to Greece, once we discover, as I did to my amazement (and that’s why I proselytise it), that these are daughter cultures from ancient Ukraine, then we should stay modest in society.I wrote, and I believe, that someone like Dugin — possibly, or some of the people around him — do understand this, and this is one of the reasons why they’re annihilating Ukraine. And if you argue with them on their nonsense terms — like Cheburashka, this darling cartoon character that Dugin has now declared his sole goal is to undermine, the archetype (again, he uses the term archetype; Dugin uses the term archetype), that Cheburashka is there to undermine the archetype of Russian identity — then we can have this very scholarly debate about a cartoon character. And I can try to prove to you that actually Cheburashka isn’t Jewish, he’s not a moon demon, his name isn’t etymologised into a fake pseudo-Semitic etymology, which is what Dugin argues. The Cheburashka: I outflank him.My Power of Mana project looks at why the MN sound — in mana, and in energy, and in immanent, and in meaning, and in all of this key Indo-European governance vocabulary, monarch — and tries to understand what’s going on there. I believe it comes from the moon, Meh₁not, which was bespoken by the first Indo-Europeans. The point is, I can argue that through kosher, PACA, gold-standard linguistics, published by Oxford University Press. I’ve got all the citations that Meh₁not was the word for moon that the ancient Ukrainians used. And when we see this guy Lunin, for instance — this fake FSB-operation walk-in that we’ve seen this week — yet again, they’re appealing to the moon, which is the fundamental substrate you use, and that the Russians appeal to, when you’re trying to justify ancientness. And for the Russians, it’s like a reflex. That’s how you outflank them.I mean, it’s quite involved, and you have to spend a lot of time. But if you start arguing over whether Cheburashka really is a moon demon or not, you won’t get anywhere, because you’re falling for the troll and you’re getting involved in their language. The same applies to Ilyin and this troll about the grand inquisitor.So I proof this. The golem worship — the worship of this monster — and the grand inquisitor, who keeps us enslaved but it’s better than being free: it’s a permission structure for a security state. That’s its immanence, that’s its mana, that’s its energy — a way of telling the men with the truncheon that their truncheons are holy. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? No — its first premise is that you owe your existence to a machine that owes you nothing. Does it deepen understanding or flatten it? It flattens the human being into raw material for the state’s glory. So this is Disinfolklore. And the counter is to refuse the cathedral entirely. Do not become the philosopher’s sparring partner. Name his function — he is an actor, a justificatory function for the security state — and walk out the side door. The function was never to think, which is what philosophers do. It was to make the golem, the monster, respectable.The Quote Book MethodNow the operating mechanism — the part of Yakubova’s reading I most want to carry out, because once we see it, we will see it everywhere, in every thoughtful defence of every atrocity for the rest of our lives. How does the Ruschist apparatus actually use this captured philosopher? Not by making us read him. Almost no one reads Ilyin. He’s unreadable, and the Ruschist apparatus is counting on that. It uses him as a quote book. It takes the whole contradictory, century-dead body of a man’s writing and renders it down into a curated quotation bank — a few dozen burnished lines snatched from their unreadable pages and dropped into speeches and textbooks. Remember, Putler himself oversaw the removal of Ilyin’s body from a grave in Switzerland, where he spent most of his life in exile, and his reburial in Russia.The quotes are dropped into speeches and textbooks exactly where a blessing is required. Yakubova’s point — her argument, not her words — is that nothing distorts reality quite like a quotation torn from its context. The quote arrives wearing the dead man’s authority and none of his hesitations: the philosopher with everything inconvenient sanded off. Here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants you to think: but these are his own words, you can look them up, so how can it be propaganda? It’s a primary source.Register the energy. It’s the smug confidence of the person holding a citation — the feeling that a quotation is a kind of proof, that the footnote ends the argument. That feeling is the exploit. The Ruschist apparatus has learned that a fragment in quotation marks bypasses our judgment the way a uniform bypasses a checkpoint: you wave it through because it is quoted. Name the archetype: the captured philosopher, reduced to his most weaponised state — no longer even a man, just a dispenser of pre-loaded blessings, like an ATM, a vending machine of gravitas.And here is the contemporary instance, the one the apparatus runs now, the way it ran Ilyin in the last century: Dugin. Alexander Dugin is Ilyin’s living successor in the wise counsellor’s role — the bearded sage produced for export, handed to credulous Western interviewers as Putin’s philosopher, Putin’s brain, the deep Russian mind you simply must engage with. Same archetype, same function, same quote-book method. He’s not the source of the Kremlin’s appetite. He’s the costume the appetite wears to the lecture hall — an artificial creation, an actor in the role of a thinker, with the beard and the robes to add credibility to the role he’s playing. His only job is to give murderous enterprises a patina of respectability, and to make you feel unsophisticated for noticing.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The quote-book method is a lie at the level of form, before you reach the content: it presents a curated fragment as a whole, an apparatus output as a man’s mind. Is it generous? No. It’s engineered to make atrocity feel like the conclusion of a syllogism. So this is Disinfolklore, and here is the only counter that works. Read the whole, never the curated fragment. Name the function, not the credential. When a beautiful, terrible quotation arrives to bless a war, do not look it up to check if it’s real — of course it’s real. Ask instead: who assembled this quote book, and for what purpose? The fragment is real; the frame is the lie.Three Keys, One LockSo step back. The three moves are one move. The state digs up a thinker and crowns him, so reverence does the disarming. It buys his most absolutist doctrine and dresses it as sacred, so you are flattered into debating it instead of naming it. It grinds his heritage into a quote book, so a fragment in quotation marks can wave any cruelty through the checkpoints of our troll radar. Reverence, debate, citation: three keys, one lock — and the lock is our respect for thought.So here’s the single thing to carry out of this. The most dangerous archetype is always the respectable one. Philosopher disarmed scrutiny, exactly as Brother did in episode one, and for the same reason: both arrive as friends of something you love — kin in the one case, thinking in the other. Both are the apparatus. Larysa Yakubova named the whole monster with three words I can give you verbatim, because they are her title and they are exact: the Beast from the Abyss. The philosopher is one of the faces the beast wears to the surface — the calmest, the most credentialed, the one who does not roar. See the robe, look under it for the function; and where the curated quotation arrives to make the killing sound profound, read the whole, and name what the fragment was assembled to bless.The Mirror: Accusation in a MirrorIn the next part I’ll look through the Kremlin’s eyes. Now I want to teach us to catch a thief who has already convinced the room. That’s the claim, stated up front the way I try to state these things. The single most powerful move in the whole combat-propaganda playbook is not a lie about the future or a smear about the past. It’s a mirror. The apparatus commits the crime, and then, loudly, first, before the dust has settled, accuses its victim of exactly that crime. And paired with it is a second device, quieter and even cleverer, that exists for one purpose: to make sure the true accusation can never be spoken at all.Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is an answer to a question that sounds almost too simple. How did the West miss this? How did serious people — diplomats, scholars, editors — watch the beast form year after year and not see it? Her answer is the spine of this part. The West, she argues, spent more than a century learning Russia and Ukraine from books written to one centre’s specification. It read the region in translation, and the translation was the centre. It was the Kremlin. In her foreword she puts it with a historian’s bluntness: by looking at Ukraine through the eyes of the Kremlin, the West missed the birth of its ontological enemy. Sit with that phrase — missed the birth. The thing was being born in plain sight, and the West did not see the labour, because it had been handed a map on which that corner was simply blank.My anchor here is Tool 2, the troll radars — the mental gatekeeping that works in both directions, which you can find on disinfolklore.eu in the 12 tools. The incoming radar that screens what enters your mind, and the outgoing radar that governs what we ourselves send out. The specific failure Yakubova diagnoses is a troll-radar failure: recalibrated over generations to the enemy’s own frame, so that it could no longer register the threat sitting in front of it. We proof every move against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and we name the archetype, because once you can see it operating you can’t unsee it, and recognition halves the mana.Here’s the move in its purest form — and James’s question about reflexive control, which sparked that series of five or six programmes, looked at this as well, so you see how immanent it is in my work. The Russian apparatus carries out an atrocity. Then, before any forensic examiner has reached the site, it points at the people it has just attacked and says: they did this, they did it to us, we’re the ones who suffer here, we’re going to get blamed for this. We have a public name for this, and it’s the oldest move there is: accusation in a mirror. You perform the violation, then you hand the violation to your victim. You hold up a mirror so that the world sees your face on their body.Yakubova folds this into a larger argument about what she calls anti-truth: a propaganda mode that does not merely bend the facts but inverts them, so that the aggressor occupies the chair of the wronged. I’m paraphrasing her there — those are my words for her idea, not a quotation — but the mechanism she describes is the one I’ve been tracking through all of these shows for over a year now, and indeed all of my work since I worked out accusation in the early part of the full-scale invasion, having spent years thinking about what this provocation logic was all about: the soldiers on the bridge saying, oh, it’s a provocation, that side’s provoking us.So here’s what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think: we are the genuine victims, the defender is the aggressor, the blood on the ground is what they spilled, and look how they slander us by saying otherwise. Register the energy, the feeling before the thought. The energy of the mirror is wounded innocence — a great power performing the small, trembling posture of the abused. And the dangerous thing is that the posture is contagious. You start to extend it your sympathy, that injury owed, before you’ve checked who injured whom. That sympathy is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it, and the voltage drops. This is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets: the documented author of the harm, wrapping himself in the mourning cloth of the harmed, so that the next blow can be dressed as self-defence.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The mirror cannot survive the question, because its entire architecture is the swapping of true position — the doer named as the done-to. Is it generous? No. It spends the suffering of real victims as currency to purchase the next attack. Is it patient? No. It must move first, must accuse before the evidence is in, precisely because the evidence, given time, would convict it. So this is Disinfolklore, and it is the Ruschist apparatus’s single cleverest defence, because a mirror does not argue with you — it just shows you a face, and trusts you not to ask whose it is.The counter is the decolonial troll radar Yakubova is really arguing for: name the crime in your own tongue, in Ukrainian, on the evidence you can stand on. The question the apparatus needs you never to ask is not “can you disprove their version of this one incident?” It’s the older, sturdier one: who has been doing this as a pattern for years now?The Preemptive Troll: RussophobiaThe second move is the more elegant of the two, because it does its work before we even open our mouths. Suppose the mirror is not enough. Suppose someone does manage to gather the evidence, stand on solid ground, and prepare to name the crime plainly. The Ruschist apparatus has one more device, and it’s aimed not at the accusation, but at the accuser’s nerve. It is the single word: Russophobia. The instant you reach to name a Russian crime, the device fires, and it reframes your naming as bigotry.I’m paraphrasing Yakubova’s reading here, in my own words. She treats this device as one of the Ruschist apparatus’s load-bearing instruments — the thing that has long preempted honest Western description of what the state was doing. This is exactly a troll-radar problem, and I want to be precise about which radar. Our incoming radar screens what others send at us. But we also run an outgoing radar, the gatekeeper that governs what we ourselves transmit. And that’s what I was trying to use in my answer to your question, Wendy, about Poland — I was trying to proof my answer against my outgoing troll radar, and not fan the flames. And I understand you weren’t asking me to fan flames; you were just asking me a very interesting question, and something I’ve written about as well. But anyway — the internal check that asks: am I being fair? am I being decent? is this beneath me? That outgoing radar is the better angel of an honest mind. And Russophobia is engineered to reach past everything else and corrupt that gate specifically.It does not try to win the argument. It makes the act of arguing feel like prejudice, so that our own conscience, our own decency, jams our own signal before it ever leaves us. The apparatus turns our scruples into a bodyguard. Here is what the apparatus wants us to think: to name what Russia does, to name the manner of what Russia does, to gather all the patterns and name them, to label them, to designate them — to name what Russia does is to hate Russians. A fair-minded person, a person who is not a bigot, holds their tongue. Our discomfort is our conscience telling us to stop.Register the energy. It’s self-doubt wearing the mask of fairness — that hesitation a good person feels at the edge of a hard word, hijacked and pointed back at them. Name the archetype: this is the reverse victim, the perpetrator who preloads the charge of bigotry so that any future naming detonates it instead. BLM, woke — same trick.There is a real lineage here, and I attribute it carefully — not to Yakubova. The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, in its January 2024 report, traced the term Russophobia’s modern career back through Soviet usage to a 19th-century pedigree, and to a dissident-turned-nationalist, whose name I won’t try to pronounce, whose own work carried open anti-Semitism. I mention it only to say that this is not a neutral word the Ruschists happened to overuse. It is, by documented descent, a manufactured shield. It’s an anti-Semitic trope. It was used against Russian citizens who happened also to be Jewish, to say that anything they said in criticism, or in trying to improve things, was an act of Russophobia. And what that instantly did — which is what the entire Russian state and constitutional architecture did — was to reduce Russian citizens who happened to be Jewish to having a different nationality, which is textbook anti-Semitic: to allocate to Jews some loyalty to a state which is not their own. In fact, they are just as Russian as any other Russian, in any definition we would accept in any other country. By branding them Russophobes, they were at once removed from the Russian society of which they formed a constituent part, and scapegoated. And then that Russophobic meme is used against any of us who label what Russia’s crimes are.So let’s proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. It answers no factual claim. It’s just “you’re Russophobic.” It changes the subject from the crime to the motive of the one naming it. Is it generous? It’s the opposite of generous. It weaponises the listener’s own decency against the truth. Is it patient? It’s pure preemption. It fires before we speak, which is urgency turned inward. So this is Disinfolklore: the preemptive troll, the device built so that the accusation can never be made.The counter is the hardest discipline on the troll radar, and it’s the one his whole book performs: do not let the word confiscate the word. When you have done the work, when you can source the crime, you name it as a crime, by its name, in your own language. And you do not surrender that naming to a label designed to make you flinch. Refusing to flinch is not bigotry. It’s the outgoing troll radar working exactly as it should: passing the true signal, declining the manufactured shame.The Kremlin’s Eyes: The Outer-Realm Monster as FrameThere’s a place in Yakubova’s argument where she arrives that I’m not going to soften, because this whole series on her book has been climbing towards it. When the West sees a region only through the eyes of the Kremlin, it does not simply make an academic error. It surrenders the ground on which the crime could be named at all. And that surrender is what let the Ruschist apparatus grow unseen, until it was strong enough to put the world before a stark choice.Larysa Yakubova frames that choice in existential terms — and again, I give it as my paraphrase of her, not as her quotation in Ukrainian. The beast forces a decision between subjecthood — peoples and nations with the standing to speak, to name, to be authors of their own story — and totalitarianism, in which one centre dictates the frame and everyone else reads from the script it wrote. There is no comfortable middle. To keep borrowing the Kremlin’s eyes is slowly to choose the second.Here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think: there’s no neutral ground to stand on, so you might as well stand on ours; our frame is just the way things are; resisting it is eccentricity. Some of us will remember that guy who was the first governor of fake Novorossiya, saying: if you don’t want to be ruled by us, we’ll kill you, we’ll kill millions of you; if we have to kill five million of you, we’ll kill five million of you. That’s this imperialist, extremist viewpoint.And register the energy in that, because it’s subtle, and it is fatigue — the weariness that says: who am I to insist on my own words against the established account? Name the archetype. This is the outer-realm monster in its largest form. The mirror and the preemptive troll were tactics; this is a dramatising frame that wants to be mistaken for the horizon itself, so that stepping outside it feels not like courage but like madness. They serve a world in which only one centre, the centre Moscow, gets to say what is true.Proof it against the Code. Is it true? No. It presents a manufactured frame as a natural order, which is the foundational lie beneath the other two. Is it generous? No. It asks every other people on earth to surrender their own tongue. Is it patient? It has been patient for a century, which is its most frightening quality — but patience in service of an inversion is not the patience the Code of Positive Trolls means. It’s a long con. So this is Disinfolklore at the largest scale — such a large scale that so many people can’t even conceive of Disinfolklore at this scale.And the counter is the one I’ve been building to: the decolonial troll radar in full. Refuse to see through the Kremlin’s eyes. Take our own eyes back. Name the crime in our own language. Don’t let one word, Russophobia, confiscate another. Choose subjecthood — yours, ours, and every targeted people’s — over the frame that wants to be the only frame. That refusal is not a small act of editing. In Yakubova’s telling, it’s the whole fight.The mirror and the preemptive troll — i.e. Russophobia — are the two cleverest defences Disinfolklore owns. They are clever for the same reason: neither of them argues with you. The mirror shows you a face and trusts you not to ask whose it is. Russophobia reaches past the argument entirely, so our own decency does the silencing for free. Both of them win by getting inside our gatekeeping, recalibrating our troll radars to the enemy’s frame, so that the threat reads as the victim and the honest word reads as the bigotry. Which is why the counter is not a better argument. It’s a better radar. The troll radar that refuses the frame is the whole answer. We do not adapt our seeing to the Kremlin’s specification. We keep our own eyes. We name the crime in our own tongue — which all of us do on Volya Radio. We can do it on Volya Radio. We can do it on Twitter. Amazing. And we do not let a manufactured word confiscate a true one. That is what Yakubova means when she says the West, looking through borrowed eyes, missed the birth. The eyes of the battlefield: take them back, and the beast loses its best cover.ClosingNext time, in the final episode, I’ll talk about the final part of her book, which answers the question: is there light at the end of the tunnel? And at the risk of ruining it for you — yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But I think you wouldn’t be listening to Volya Radio if you didn’t believe there was a light at the end of the tunnel. So I’ll leave it at that for tonight. That went really quickly for me; I hope it went quickly for you. Out.Next episode: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it.Say ancient Greece, and nothing in you objects. Say ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, ancient China — all of them slide past without a snag. Now say ancient Ukraine, and for a great many people, something catches: a small resistance, a raised eyebrow, sometimes a flat correction. “But Ukraine is a modern country.” That catch — not the linguistics, not the archaeology, just the catch itself — is what this is about. Because of all the things worth defending about this work, the plainest is the right to use two ordinary words.Part of what people feel here is simply correct. Modern Ukraine is a modern state. Its present borders, its flag, its seat at the United Nations are 20th-century phenomena. The herders who lived in the Dnipro Valley 5,500 years ago did not call themselves Ukrainians. They did not know the word, and could not have pointed to a country on a map that did not exist. All of that is true. But notice that every word of it is just as true of ancient Egypt.The people who raised the pyramids did not call themselves Egyptians. That is a Greek word, Aigyptos, laid on them long after. And the people who live in Egypt today are, for the most part, Arabic-speaking Muslims, whose language and faith and much of their ancestry arrived more than a thousand years after the last pharaoh — about as discontinuous from the pyramid builders as a population on its own soil can be. By that same standard, ancient Egypt should be an outrage. But it troubles nobody. It troubles no one because everyone already understands, without being told, what an anachronistic name is for. Ancient Egypt does not claim that the modern nation descends in an unbroken line from the pharaohs. It names the ancient people of that land using the land’s modern moniker, because the land’s modern moniker is the handle we have.Ancient Britain does the same. The modern English are largely descendants of Anglo-Saxon incomers, not the people who raised Stonehenge, nor the Celts — the Pretani tribe — who, after being eradicated by the Romans, then the Germanics, and then the Normans, survive as a rump in Brittany in France and in Cymru, which is Wales, in the west of the country. No one accuses a book on ancient Britain of bad faith. Ancient Greece names the Hellenes, who never called themselves Greeks at all; Graeci is a Roman’s word for them. Every single one of these is a modern label thrown backward over a people who never wore it.Naming a People by a Country They Would Reach a Thousand Years LaterIn fact, we go much further than naming the ancient people of a land by that land’s modern name. We routinely name an ancient people by the modern name of a different land — one their descendants would reach only a thousand years later. Consider the Sintashta culture, dug out of the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan.When the Sintashta graves were discovered about 20 or 30 years ago, deep inside them were the exact copy of burial customs and funereal feasts that had been written down in the Rig Veda in India around 1100 BCE. Archaeologists and experts had assumed that these burial practices and funereal ceremonies, written down in the Rig Veda from around 1200 to 1100 BCE, had been invented. And then we find, thousands of kilometres away, the exact facsimile of them from 2000 BCE.Every account you will read calls these people the first Aryans, or Indo-Iranians, and the names are borrowed wholesale from India and Iran — lands the Sintashta themselves never saw. Remember, 2000 BCE; but their customs do not appear in India, or we have no evidence of them appearing in India, for another 900 years. Iran and Aryan as identities did not exist in their time. They arose, as I have noted elsewhere, from a religious reform by Zoroaster that came along long after the Sintashta culture had risen and passed. Zarathustra — Zoroaster — is about 1400 BCE, so about 500 years between the Sintashta and when the Zoroastrian reforms came in and the whole idea of the Arya, meaning the centre of a community, arose.From the Sintashta’s own standpoint, there was no Iran, no India, no Veda; it was 2000 BCE, no Zoroaster — only the grass and the chariot and the horse. But we call them Aryans anyway, reading the rich later record of their descendants — the Vedic hymns, the Zoroastrian fire — back into a preliterate people who would have found every one of those words meaningless. It is, in my own phrase for it, anachronistic yet defensible. And it is defensible: the back-propagation is sound because the descent is real. We have the archaeogenetic evidence of it. We have the archaeological evidence of it. And we now have the textual evidence.“The first Aryans” for the Sintashta is the loose kind: it names the people of one place by the later name of a country their great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren would build somewhere else. We accept the loose kind without a murmur. Ancient Ukraine only ever asks for the tight kind — the easier, safer, more literal move. If we grant the harder courtesy to the steppe of Kazakhstan while refusing the easier one to the steppe of Ukraine, that is not a principle. It’s a preference dressed as a principle. If the naming rule is the same for everyone, why does ancient Ukraine alone catch the throat?The Catch Is a Lag, Not a PositionThe reason is not about Ukraine at all. It’s about us, and what we happen to have read. We grant the back-propagated name confidence, evidently, wherever a dense later record makes the deep past feel anchored. Egypt has its monuments and its hieroglyphs; Greece its Homer; Rome its libraries; India and Iran their scriptures. The Dnipro homeland left no writing, and the knowledge that it is the homeland is genuinely recent. It arrived in force only with the archaeogenetics revolution after 2015, when the reading of ancient DNA — together with the linguistics, the archaeology, the comparative mythology, and the isotopes, the strontium locked in ancient teeth that tells us where a person grew up — converged on a single answer.So the hesitation over ancient Ukraine is not a considered position. It’s a lag. The moniker has not yet caught up with the evidence. Most of us still carry the mental map we were handed in school. That map is out of date, and the correction is not a fringe claim. Multidisciplinary scholars have known since 2015 that all Indo-European language, religion, and culture — all living Indo-European languages, from Ireland to India — go back to the Yamnaya of the Dnipro Valley around 3600 BCE: the herders of Mykhailivka, from whom the ancient DNA now traces every living branch of the family.And I note — two days ago the Russians destroyed a Russian colonial-era mansion which I visited in a village near Mykolaiv, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Some of you might have seen the pictures of it. Another war crime by Russia. But anyway. I’m with the linguist Don Ringe, author of the definitive study on the origins of the Germanic languages, including English, on the location. In 2006 he wrote that it was the rivers and valleys of Ukraine that made the most sense; and then in the new edition, 2017, he said the evidence strongly points there. Nikitin et al.’s Nature paper, which I’ve spoken about before, from the 5th of February 2025, establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that the Yamnaya, and Mykhailivka village on the right bank of the Dnipro, was the centre of the Yamnaya community from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate.Steinmeier, the Nebra Sky Disc, and “Southern Russia”So what kept the answer from being heard for so long was not the absence of evidence. Some of you might remember, around the beginning of the war, I tweeted a lot about Steinmeier, who is currently German president. On my way back from Ukraine — I left Ukraine on the 29th of January 2022 with my cat, and we drove over the border into Poland, anticipating the invasion — I visited an amazing place called Halle in Germany, because I wanted to see the Nebra Sky Disc there. They have this most amazing museum in Halle, which I stopped in on my way back from Ukraine, and the exhibition catalogue had an introduction by Steinmeier.The exhibition I’d gone to see was about the Corded Ware culture from this part of Germany. And Steinmeier — who had spent eight years trying to troll Ukraine into accepting the Steinmeier formula, which was allowing Russia’s so-called elections in Donetsk and Luhansk in exchange for a later promise to give Ukraine back control of its borders — Steinmeier, who clearly had engaged with Ukraine, like myself, a lot, was still referring to this area of Ukraine as southern Russia in this catalogue.That gives you an idea of what I now call the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin State: that they could not refer to the homeland as just steppe ancestry, or Pontic-Caspian steppe, or southern Russia. They couldn’t see it as being Ukraine — as having just the same status as ancient Greece, or any of these other cultures I mentioned.Ukraine Is Not One More Culture — It Is the SourceHere’s the part the catch hides, because it stops people at the threshold. Ukraine is not one more ancient culture among many asking to join the club. It’s the source. Greece, Rome, the Germanic North, the Celtic West, the Indo-Iranian East — the papers in all of my work in Finding Manuland trace them one by one, based on PACA, peer-reviewed, gold-standard archaeogenetic, isotopic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence. And every one is a daughter, a branch carried downstream from the same upper Dnipro River. Much of what we love best about ancient Greece and Rome and Germany and Ireland was forged first on the Dnipro.I say this without taking anything from these daughter cultures. They are the glory of what the family became out in the wide world. The recentering is not a demotion of them. It’s a recognition that they share a cradle, and that the cradle has a place on the map.So set the practice we already keep against the one case we balk at. We grant ancient Egypt to a land whose modern people are largely discontinuous from its ancient ones. We grant the first Aryans to a Kazakh culture, by the name of a country far away and centuries late. We say ancient Germany, though the first unified German state dates only to 1870 — I’ve spoken before about Herder’s call in 1873, or 1875, or 1876, one of those dates; Herder, who said “where is our Shakespeare? We must unite the Germanic tribes, and to do this we need a collective culture, something to rally around, like England has Shakespeare.” That began the folklore-collecting movement that Goethe and the Grimm brothers and eventually Wagner used to create a sense of a German identity. We say ancient France, though France is younger than the United States. We even have the Belgians reaching back to a pre-Christian chieftain, Brennus, whom I’ve spoken about before, and to the Menapii, to furnish a 19th-century nation with a deep past.We project backwards all the time. As I’ve put it, affording parity of esteem among all the great cultures that have achieved statehood requires an equitable allocation of anachronistic and teleological names. Was Bismarck German? Was Napoleon French? Of course we say so, and of course we should. But they weren’t, when they lived. There was no Germany before 1870, for most of Bismarck’s life. There was no France for Napoleon — there were the Franks, the Germanic aristocracy who had taken over France. And the only culture from which we withhold the courtesy is the one with the best claim of all: the source. There’s no principle that grants the name to every daughter and denies it to the mother. There’s only the catch.There is, in fact, a continuity case for Ukraine too — the branch that never left the homeland, treated in its own paper, which I’ve written. “Ancient Ukrainian” is a territorial name, like “ancient Egyptian.” It names the ancient people of this ground, and that alone is enough. With Egypt, Greece, and the Aryans laid side by side, a real question is left standing. If the rule is the same for everyone, and the evidence for Ukraine is in fact the strongest of all, then why does the resistance fall on this one word, ancient? The rule is enforced in exactly one direction. Ancient Egypt passes without a word. Ancient Ukraine alone catches. That asymmetry is the tell, and naming it is where all my work begins.The Data-Resistant Archetype and the Potemkin StateIn my study of Disinfolklore, I call a certain kind of mental model a data-resistant archetype: an idea planted so deep that it no longer updates on the evidence. Such an archetype digests and processes all the data about it, and the output is always the same. It is, in plain terms, impervious to truth. There is a specific archetype at work on Ukraine, the one I call the Potemkin State. It is the picture of Ukraine as hollow, fake, accidental — a country without real depth or history.That picture, crucially, is double. The Potemkin State is both the actual brittle thing across the border, and the mental state — the thing propaganda installs in our own brains. So when a thoughtful, decent person accepts ancient Egypt without a blink and bristles at ancient Ukraine, they’re not reasoning. They’re reporting the archetype. The catch is the archetype speaking. Most of the people who feel the catch are not ill-willed. They have simply inherited a map, and the map was drawn in part by an interested hand. For a century or more, the deep past of this region has been narrated through a Russian and Soviet lens that had every reason to keep Ukraine shallow: to file the homeland as southern Russia, to treat the Ukrainian nation as an emerging thing, a province, a recent administrative line. The catch you feel at “ancient Ukraine” was, to a real degree, put there.Why the Deep Past Is a Field the War Is Fought OnIf this were only a quarrel about nomenclature, it would not be worth your time or mine. It is worth it because the shallow picture of Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainians are the same picture, doing two jobs. The Russian state does not merely dislike Ukraine. It denies, as a matter of doctrine, that Ukraine is a real state and that Ukrainians are a real people. “Ukraine, never a real state; Ukrainians, not a real people” — that is the propaganda’s own words.That denial is not rhetoric idling. It’s the legal and psychological precondition of the crime. I trained as a lawyer, and the point is not subtle. When a state announces that another nation has no right to exist, and then kills that nation’s people in a war to denationalise them, it has supplied both halves of genocide: the intent and the act. Denial of the existence of a protected group is, in the language of the United Nations, a specific indicator of genocide. Denationalising a country is genocide. The erasure of Ukraine’s past and the erasure of Ukraine’s present are one motion. And the premise is false on its own terms anyway, because Ukraine signed the United Nations Charter as a founding member, and that is the only test international law recognises. It has been a state all along — longer than many other states.So the deep past is not a sideshow to the war. It is one of the fields the war is fought on. To insist, gently and accurately, that there is an ancient Ukraine — that the people of this land were not latecomers to the human story but stood near its Indo-European beginning — is to take back a piece of the ground that Russia’s lie depends on.Re-archetyping: Use the WordsThe picture in our heads is not fixed, and that is the hopeful part. An archetype can be replaced. The work I call re-archetyping — the conscious effort to disrupt, alter, and reconstruct our existing mental models — has a task here: to catch our monikers up with where the scholarship has already arrived, and to do it across the whole university at once: in archaeology and linguistics, in archaeogenetics and isotopic analysis, in the study of religion and comparative myth, in how the deep past of Europe is taught to our children.It is happening. The historian Timothy Snyder has moved, since the beginning of the war, the start of his history of Ukraine back from the first Greek colonies on its coast around 700 BCE to the Yamnaya era, two and a half thousand years before that, from whom the first Greeks emanated. The Economist has lent its voice to decolonising what we still call prehistory. The data-resistant archetype, as I keep insisting, is not invincible, and it is our work to defeat it. The smallest, most available act of re-archetyping is the one anyone can perform today, at no cost: use the words. Every time we say ancient Ukraine, and mean by it exactly what we mean by ancient Greece or ancient Egypt — the deep past of a real land and a real people — we recenter the map a little, and we repopulate the world.This is what my paper on the Turkic takeover of Anatolia does to the idea of the Semitic-first ideology, which undermines a lot of our history — rather than seeing the interactions, over two millennia, between the Indo-Europeans in northern Mesopotamia particularly, but also in Turkey, where the first Indo-European writing, from 2000 BCE, at precisely the same time the Sintashta were there, appeared in Kanesh, in an Assyrian trading colony. The Amarna Letters from ancient Egypt, from 1400 BCE, show in textual evidence — so this is 300 years before the Rig Veda was standardised and written down — Indo-European monarchs ruling Canaan, four centuries before the Hebrew Bible, before King David and King Solomon. So the routes reach back past the Near East to the Dnipro, and the old reflex that civilisation began in the Fertile Crescent gives way. That’s work which has come out in the last few weeks.Whether the lagging name is Indo-Germanic, or southern Russia, or simply the awkward silence when ancient Ukraine is mentioned, our work should be one work: to bring the moniker up to date. I’m quite deliberately introducing the term ancient Ukrainians, and ancient Ukraine, into our civilisation — not as a slogan, not to take a thing from anyone, but because it is true, by the same standard that makes ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian and the first Aryans true. Ancient Ukraine: the cradle of a family that reaches from Ireland to India, standing at last on the ground where it has always been. So that’s what I have to say about that.The Salted GroundI was then going to move on to a couple more archetypal analyses. I wanted to talk about the salted ground. One week, around the same bridge where all of this began for me, three small things landed together. A volunteer battalion commander accused the regular Ukrainian army of something. A big social media channel sneered that, while tanks roll through Luhansk, my old employer, the OSCE, is off attending a bridge opening repaired by the hard-working people of Luhansk with the help of God. This is all in the media, in the Luhansk Corpus, which I collected between 2015 and 2018.No victims were named, no date, no incident you could check — just a place, a real place, a place I knew, being smeared lightly from several directions at once. You could feel it: a low, diffuse unease settling on the name of the town, Stanytsia Luhanska. Something’s wrong there, from the perspective of the Russian propaganda media. Something otherworldly. And your instinct, as a propaganda analyst, is to plant a flag and call it a deployment. This method makes you stop.I tested it against the pattern of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper who extorts the crossing — and it doesn’t fit. Nobody’s been denied passage. I tested it against the bogeyman, the nameless looming enemy, and it almost fits; but the piece that makes a bogeyman dangerous, the protector who arrives to save you from it, simply isn’t there yet. So the verdict is: not yet. This is not a mature piece of Disinfolklore. It’s what I call salted ground — a place being seasoned with disrepute now, so that a real operation can detonate on pre-poisoned soil later. A detection method that cried propaganda at this stage would be useless. It would burn its credibility before the real strike came. The discipline to say not yet, but watch this ground, is not the method failing. It’s the method working.The Innocent ApparatusThe militia chief in occupied Luhansk, by contrast, explains in another news item that some Ukrainian soldiers died near Shchastia — which means “happiness,” and it’s a city the Russians destroyed in the first months of the first full-scale invasion. More precisely, it was Prigozhin’s men who destroyed it. But this is long before then, and it’s a town I used to go through almost every day when I worked in Stanytsia. The militia chief in the occupied territory says the Ukrainian soldiers died because they were rigging a bridge to blow, and something went wrong with the vehicle carrying the ammunition — it exploded early. In the very next breath, “our positions,” he alleged, “came under mortar fire from Kiev five times in a day.”There’s a flatness to the charge here. He’s almost bored. They did it to themselves; we’re the ones being shelled. It doesn’t reach for your fury, and that weakness is itself a tell. In this method, when the emotional charge is faint, you’re usually looking at raw material, not a finished weapon. I run it through the test I built for manufactured wounds — the move where an aggressor invents or self-inflicts an injury and then points at it. Two threads are there: the speaker plainly benefits from the framing, and his side is structurally never at fault. The enemy’s dead are always self-inflicted; the shelling is always one way. But the core of a true manufactured-wound operation — being the documented cause of the wound you’re crying about — isn’t on the page. So no archetype convicts. What I name here is the innocent apparatus: not a finished story, but a posture being preset. “We are never the ones at fault.” Lay that foundation now, and the later strike inherits the innocence.The Forecast PhantomNow the one I would build a lot around, because it’s the purest little machine there is — and the Disinfolklore method still won’t formally convict it. That tension is the most honest thing I can show you.In April 2016, the militia headquarters announced that Ukrainian forces are preparing provocations using OSCE symbols to discredit the mission. Two cars with OSCE insignia were stopped near Smile village. The militia does not exclude the possibility that they could be used to stage something on the territory of the Folk’s Republic. Read that again, and hear what’s not in it. Nothing happened. No so-called provocation occurred. The only actual fact — two cars drove off — is in the same report, exactly as the OSCE said: our cars were in the car park. The menace lives entirely in the future tense: preparing, could be used, does not exclude the possibility.That is the device. A threat asserted in the future tense can never be falsified in the present, because it hasn’t happened yet; and when it doesn’t happen, that just proves how dangerous the preparations were. Its target is precise: it pre-discredits the neutral witness before that witness can report anything inconvenient. I stood behind that insignia. This is the story that was built to make you not believe me before I opened my mouth. I call this the forecast phantom. By the strict rules of the Disinfolklore method, it is four-fifths of a bogeyman, missing only the rescuer. So I do not formally convict it, and I will not bend the rule to make the number prettier. But the pattern is named, and a named pattern is the defused one. That is the whole craft.The Mirror WoundThis one I have to handle with care, because at the centre of it is a real child who was really hurt, and nothing I’m about to say takes that away. In December 2015, while I was living in Russia-occupied Luhansk, the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic’s Ministry of Emergency Situations — and, just as an aside, every time Mockers reads “Ministry of Emergency Situations,” my eyes go up, and I know her eyebrows are raised as well; just the idea that a modern state would have to have a Ministry for Emergency Situations tells you all you really need to know about Russia, and then, when it establishes its fake occupying republics, it ensures they too have Ministries for Emergency Situations, but that’s an aside — they put out a notice saying a 15-year-old near Teplychne stepped on an anti-personnel mine and was seriously injured. And then the notice adds this: despite the fact that in 1980 the UN adopted a convention prohibiting the use of mines against a civilian population, and that in modern wars mines are rarely used.Feel what that does to you. A maimed child — remember the mother and the maiden archetype — a maimed child, the enemy’s mine, the enemy (which is Ukraine in this story) breaking the very law written to protect children. The pull is protective fury: the deepest, fastest charge there is, the one that fires before thought. And that is exactly why I do not trust the feeling. I make myself apply the rule, not the fury.Here the method does something I want you to notice, because we confront this all the time — whether it’s about Starobilsk, or in Palestine, or in the school massacre by Donald in Minab. The strong instinct is to call this the mother and the maiden, the violated innocent. The rule says no, though. The text names a physical injury and nothing more — no act done to a child, as a child, in the way the archetype requires. The feeling says fire. The discipline says no. It was a mine; it was an anti-personnel mine. The discipline wins.But then the deeper test fires. Who is telling me this? The same apparatus whose own mines, elsewhere in this very archive, kill civilians it then blames for infiltrating despite the signs. It lays mines, it cries about the enemy’s mines, and it reaches for the children’s convention to harvest your indignation. That move has a name: the mirror wound. You attribute to the adversary precisely the harm your own side also does, then you quote the protective law to bank the outrage. The child’s wound is real. The operation is the mirror. Hold both of those at once.The Witness, Not the Weapon: Where the Method Says NoI want to end this little mini-series on the one where the method says no most importantly of all, because this is where a lesser instrument would do the most damage. In December 2015, in central Luhansk, the occupation’s police — its Berkut — arrest a handful of young people for burning a Russist flag and chanting what they call nationalist slogans: 20-year-old Natalia, 19-year-old Yevhen, 17-year-old Artem, a schoolboy, arrested in an occupied city for the identity they would not hide.Now, every surface signal here is screaming at the recogniser: children, arrest, identity, loyalty. That is the exact silhouette of the changeling — the disloyal-by-identity operation. A crude detector, or an analyst hungry for a hit, fires here instantly and feels clever. The Disinfolklore Analytical Method refuses to. And the reason is the whole reason this matters. This text is not a weapon aimed at you. It is a Ukrainian outlet bearing witness to a real act of repression. The story isn’t running an operation on the reader. It’s reporting one being run on those three young people. The mana is faint precisely because nothing has been done to you. Something is being done to them, and you are being told about it.So the verdict is: this isn’t Disinfolklore. And here is what that verdict does and does not mean. It does not exonerate the apparatus. Criminalising a teenager for his flag is grim and real, and the apparatus’s conduct is changeling to its core. What the method refuses to do is flatten true witness report into a propaganda artefact, just because its surface is seductive. A method that cannot tell the weapon from the witness is not a method. It is the confirmation bias it claims to cure. The discipline to say this one is testimony, leave it standing, is the most important move there is. The Disinfolklore instrument knows what to say — and that’s why I was compelled to invent the name Disinfolklore, to cover instances like this.The Closed FactoryI’ve got one more story, which I’ll tell you. It’s a very quick one. In every Soviet-era industrial town in Russia-occupied Luhansk, it tells you the same story when you arrive. Before the war, we had a factory. The factory’s now closed. Kiev destroyed it. In my corpus of 10,000 propaganda items, 165 carry this blame-swap formula. It’s the single most effective economic Disinfolklore item I have catalogued, because it meets the listener at the site of their greatest pain. Unemployment is real; idle factories are real; collapsed pensions and lost skilled work are real. Russia’s Disinfolkloreists do not need to invent the wound. They only need to re-label the wound’s cause.Let me read you the canonical example. 17th of February 2017: LPR and DPR heads Plotnitsky and Zakharchenko expressed concern over the condition of industrial infrastructure facilities located in Kiev-controlled parts of Donbas, and demand that Kiev let the republics’ observers carry out inspections. Notice the grammar. The pretenders position themselves, with no discernible irony, as the conservators of Ukrainian industrial heritage. This is the closed factory archetype in full regalia. The logic: step one, the factory is closed — true, the war closed it. Step two, Russia and its proxies did not close it, Kiev closed it — false, the front line closed it. Step three, Russia’s rule would restore the factory — undeliverable, but emotionally activating.The Stakhanov Carriage Works, the Lysychansk Oil Refinery, the Severodonetsk Azot chemical plant, the Alchevsk Metallurgical Combine — my corpus is full of them, each one in the occupier’s mouth. The promise is emotionally adjacent to true historical memory, and this is common to all of the nostalgia, far-right, Russia-inspired parties across the whole of Europe — and indeed MAGA. The Soviet Union did keep these factories open. The men who ran them for 40 years, their fathers ran them. The bread on the table came from the factory. The sense of dignity, of skill, of identity — all of it was rooted through the factory gate. When the factory closed, something deeper than a payroll died.Russian Disinfolklore taps this grief with surgical precision. The closed factory archetype does not need the promise of the Soviet Union back. It only needs to whisper: we remember, Kiev forgets. And here is the cruelty. The archetype was deployed by actors who have no ability to reopen the factory. The occupation strips the machinery, exports what can be exported, lets the rest rust, and promotes a puppet mayor to make New Year’s announcements about the resumption of work of the city-forming Alchevsk metallurgical plant — a resumption that, by the actual measurement of production, never arrives.The counter is to name the shells. Every closed factory in Donbas has a date, coordinates, a shell fragment, a casualty report, and reports about how the Russians are taking away all of the contents and selling them for scrap. Many of the shells that arrived were fired by Russian-backed positions. My corpus holds the entries and the evidence. Name the shell that cracked the wall. Name the brigade that lost electricity. Name the pensioner who never got paid because a Russian-supplied munition hit the administrative building. Grief for the closing factory is legitimate. Its direction is in question.The Wise Counsellor’s Poison: The Captured PhilosopherA couple of weeks ago I started Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss, so I’m just going to start one of those — the penultimate episode of that — and then I won’t go beyond another seven minutes, I promise. This is the wise counsellor’s poison episode, the fourth in this miniseries.I want to begin tonight with the most flattering trick in the whole arsenal, because it is the one that works on the cleverest people — the ones who think they are too clever to be worked over. You have spent the last three episodes learning to distrust the bully and the brother. Now I’m going to ask you to distrust the man who reads: the grey beard, the shelf of difficult books, the one who does not shout, who sighs. The one who, when the tanks roll, does not cheer them — he explains them, gives the killing a reason, a lineage, a melancholy grandeur. He is the wise counsellor, and he is, I will argue, the single most dangerous figure Larysa Yakubova names in her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss — more dangerous than the soldier or the propagandist, because they announce themselves, and the wise counsellor does not.Here is the claim up front. The philosopher is not the source of the doctrine. The philosopher is the apparatus speaking, in a robe and a beard borrowed to disarm your scrutiny. Tonight’s anchor is Tool 1, archetypal literacy, turned on the most respectable archetype there is: the philosopher. Philosopher disarms in exactly the same way brother disarmed us. In episode one, if you remember, we talked about the fraternal-brotherhood troll that the Russists used to justify their murder of Ukrainians. Brother switched off your defences by invoking love. Philosopher switches them off by invoking thought. Both are costumes worn over the same machine.The Man They Dug Up and Called the Pushkin of PhilosophyYakubova built this whole investigation to crack one costume in particular — the one Moscow has been polishing for 20 years. Let’s open it. In 2005, the Russian state did something a confident culture never needs to do. It went looking for a dead philosopher, and it found Ivan Ilyin — an émigré ideologue who died in Switzerland in 1954, a man of white fascism, a monarchist of the most revanchist kind — and brought his bones, literally brought his bones, home to Moscow with honours. Putler himself has stood at Ilyin’s grave. Russian university rectors have called Ilyin, with a straight face, the Pushkin of philosophy. His texts get pressed into the hands of governors and FSB officers. A dead man was exhumed and installed as the official mind of a living state.Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. Russia is not a brute. Russia is a civilisation. It has a philosopher — a deep, suffering, orthodox thinker who saw the truth about the West a century ago. When Russia acts, it acts not from appetite, but from thought. And here, here is the thinker to prove it.Register the mana first, that feeling before the argument. It is reverence — the small, automatic genuflection an educated person makes towards the word philosopher. You feel yourself slowing down, lowering your voice, preparing to consider. That hush is the weapon. A state that can make you reverent has already made you a little bit obedient.Now name the archetype under the robe. This is the captured philosopher: the credentialed thinker whose actual function is not to think but to bless — to lay a patina of respectability over an enterprise that, stripped of the robe, is simply murder organised at scale. Yakubova does the stripping herself — a member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, no less — with a single devastating question, which I give you as her argument, not her words. She asks, in effect, whether a revanchist, monarchist, fascist apologist can be the conscience of anything. That is Tool 1 in its purest form: refuse the credential, look at the function.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? Is it generous? Does it open the mind or close it? The Ilyin operation fails on the first question alone. It’s just not true. It’s a manufactured genealogy. So this is Disinfolklore, and of the most ambitious kind, because it does not target your fear or your grief. It targets your respect for thinking itself, and it turns it into a leash.Next week, God willing, I’ll continue this and talk about how Yakubova treats the Golem and the Grand Inquisitor, who of course is that great grand character in The Brothers Karamazov. So that is it for this week. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being there. Out. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words. Previous episode:The title of the book is The Beast from the Abyss, and she draws the parallel between the abyss and the deep folk — the emptiness of the so-called deep folk of Russia.The Lie That Holds the Room TogetherSo you have a manufactured folk defined by a manufactured enemy. Now the question Yakubova spends her hardest pages on: what holds it all together? Real people are bound by 10,000 real things — language, kin, a song your grandmother sang, the shape of a particular hill. What binds a people drained of all of those?This is very apt, because those of us who were listening to Will earlier today heard him answer a question by Ming about when he expects the collapse to come — which many are cataloguing at the moment, including Beefeater.Yakubova’s answer — Larysa Yakubova’s answer — is the most unsettling part of her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss. The binding agent is the lie itself. Not one lie: the lie as an atmosphere, all-pervading, the medium everyone swims in in Russia and no one is expected to believe. Everyone knows the official story is false. Everyone knows everyone else knows, and repeats it anyway. Knowingly, together, in public, that shared knowing repetition becomes the bond. You’re not asked to believe the lie. You’re asked to repeat it.This produces what Yakubova, citing the sociologists she draws on, names as the terminal symptom: a mass so hollowed out that it denies its own subjecthood, gives up, voluntarily, being the author of its own acts. Sit with what that means. To deny your own subjecthood is to give up being an author of your own acts. “I didn’t decide. I’m not responsible. I just flow where the people flow.” It’s the abdication of the self as the price of admission. True selflessness.“None of This Is On Me”: The Distributed TyrantHere is what the Russist apparatus wants us to think. None of this is on me. I’m a small person in a vast river. I didn’t start the war. I don’t make policy. I just live here. Judge the Kremlin, not me.Register the mana. It is relief — the narcotic relief of laying down the weight of being a moral agent. No guilt, because no agency. No shame, because no choice. It feels like innocence to the Russist. It is the most dangerous counterfeit the Russist apparatus makes, because it counterfeits the very faculty you’d need in order to refuse it.Name the archetype. This is the merciless sovereign in a mask. Not the tyrant on the dais, but the tyrant distributed — smeared so thinly across 40 million shrugging shoulders that no single shoulder feels the weight. Coercive control’s masterpiece is not the dictator who commands. It’s the population that has agreed, together, to stop being able to say no, and to call that condition peace.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it patient? No. It depends on never stopping to think. The river only carries you while you don’t plant your feet. Is it true? Is it right? No. The deepest lie is here, because “I have no subjecthood” is the one statement that refutes itself. Only a subject can disown its subjecthood. Is it generous? No. It’s the refusal to extend reality to anyone, oneself included. This is Disinfolklore, and it’s the engine room. Everything else runs on this drained, knowing, lie-bound consent.The Other Half: Yakubova’s Real Deep FolkNow the other half — because without it, everything I’ve said curdles into the very thing my Disinfolklore framework exists to refuse: a story that paints a whole people as monsters. Yakubova — Professor Larysa Yakubova of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, NAS — she does not do that, and neither do I. Because Yakubova has a deep folk of her own, a real one, and she sets it deliberately against the manufactured one, edge for edge, so you can see exactly what the counterfeit is a counterfeit of.She points to the Greeks of Mariupol, the Rumeika-speaking communities who had lived on that coast for centuries — in her account, a unique people carrying a vanishing language, a thread of real human particularity the war was actively erasing. And she points to the village folk, the ordinary unarmed people who, in the first days of the full invasion, walked out into the roads in front of Russian armoured columns and, by nothing but standing there as a real person in a real place, made the machine stop. No weapons. Just subjecthood planted in the road.Feel the difference in the mana. Feel it in the energy, in the charge of those actions, because it is total. The manufactured deep folk gives you belonging without a self. The real deep folk gives you a self that belongs — rooted, specific, named: a grandmother’s actual language and an actual hill. This is the mother and the maiden in her true register — not weaponised grief for bogus children performed for cameras, but the genuine article: the rooted folk who protect what is real with their bodies and their presence.The babushka in the road is not denying her subjecthood. She is spending it — staking the whole weight of one real person against 40 tons of steel. That is the exact inverse of the drained mass. And it is why the war is underneath everything: a war over Tool 4 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which you’ll see at disinfolklore.eu, where the 12 tools are. A war over who gets counted as a real us, and who gets painted into the outer dark.Tool 4 is inner/outer realm switching: inner realm occupied Luhansk defining itself against the outer-realm monsters across the Donets River, the Ukrainians. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? Yes — Yakubova’s real folk is made of particular, checkable, rooted things: a language with a name and a people with a coast. Is it generous? Yes. The woman in the road treats even the boy in the tank turret as someone who might still choose. Is it patient? Yes. Rootedness is the most patient thing there is; it was there before the column and intends to be there after. This is in-folklore — the genuine folk energy the counterfeit was built to imitate and replace.The Hinge: A Forgery of a FolkThat is the hinge of Yakubova’s whole argument, and of this episode. The Russian deep folk is not the opposite of a folk. It is a forgery of one — a real human substrate drained of its content and refilled with a manufactured enemy, until the measureless emptiness can be pointed at Mariupol and feel like destiny. The Beast from the Abyss is Larysa Yakubova’s name for what crawls out when you do that to a people. The abyss is not somewhere else. The abyss is what’s left in a folk after the self has been surgically removed by Disinfolklore.Here’s the single thing I want to carry through in this part of the episode. When we hear the comfortable story — ah, it’s just the regime, the people are hostages — hold it up to the light the way Larysa Yakubova does. Some are hostages, yes: the real folk. The Mariupol Greeks and the woman in the road are the regime’s victims. But the manufactured mass that performs the lie and denies its own subjecthood — that one is not a hostage. It is, in her account, the machine itself. The co-author. The manufactured consensus is not a by-product of the Russian central apparatus. It is the apparatus — the engine that turns a whole country into a weapon.This is why Larysa Yakubova warns that the West missed the birth of its ontological enemy by seeing Ukraine through — and I quote — “the eyes of the Kremlin.” Look through the apparatus’s own eyes and you see the deep folk the way Surkov wanted you to: eternal, humble, real, mystical, soulful. And you miss the surgery that made it.The recognition carries its own antidote — the one hopeful thing in this dark chapter of her book. If the disease is the denial of subjecthood — I am not responsible, I just flow — then the cure is the restoration of subjecthood. The babushka in the road has already shown you what that looks like: one real person planting her feet, refusing to flow, becoming again an author of her own acts. That the way out exists at all is the promise I’ll redeem in the final episode of this miniseries. The machine is not eternal. A drained people can be refilled. But that is the end of the road, and we’re not there yet.In the next part I’ll go to the altar — because a manufactured folk needs a manufactured god to bow to, and the god the apparatus installed has a face, and a liturgy, and a single commandment. Their god is war.An Experiment: The Method Handed to a TeenagerBut first, I’d like to try a little experiment. This week a friend spoke to me — two friends, actually — about their children, and they were wondering how they can explain to them, how to make them more resilient to, basically, pickup artists. That’s my translation of how they put it. I thought about it for a bit, and then I thought: maybe I can make the Disinfolklore Analytical Method help them.The method I worked on was built, obviously, to read state propaganda — Russian bridge trolls, troll farms, presidents trolling each other online. So here’s a test of whether it’s actually powerful rather than merely clever. Does the same machinery work on a problem in your daughter’s or son’s life? It does. And watching it transfer is the whole demonstration. The archetype is prior to the domain. The instrument that reads a Kremlin meme reads a charming stranger at a party, because both are running the same ancient pattern on a human mind.Tool 1 in the 12-tool way, which is up there on disinfolklore.eu, is archetypal literacy. An archetype is a stock character, a role that recurs across thousands of stories with different names and costumes. It isn’t a real person, but a part people play, and it exists to do a job on your feelings. The pickup artist is one of these. He has a recognisable script and a toolkit of techniques.Here is the move that makes this teachable to a child, and it’s the heart of my insight. As an analyst, I can trace the pickup artist all the way down. His game — and it is usually a male — his game is a modern, commercialised descendant of the shaman-trickster: the shape-shifting seducer-magician, like Odin or Donald Trump, who uses charm and word magic to move others’ emotions and bend their will towards an end they did not choose. That deep layer is real, and it’s quite interesting. But our daughters do not need to know a single word of that. Archetypal literacy does not require knowing the substrate beneath the pattern. It requires only this: there is a type of person called a pickup artist; he uses techniques X, Y, and Z; if you spot the techniques, you’ve spotted the type. The deep pattern is the analyst’s business. The recognition is hers, and recognition is enough. Once she can see the role being played, she cannot unsee it, and the moment she names it to herself — oh, this is a pickup artist move — its power over her has halved. The spell only works while it is invisible.Teach the TellsSo teach the tells. The technique set is well documented and concrete. One: negging — small put-downs disguised as compliments, “you’re pretty, for someone who…”, designed to knock her confidence so she starts seeking his approval. Two: love-bombing and fast escalation — overwhelming flattery and instant intimacy, “I’ve never met anyone like you,” rushing closeness far faster than real trust grows. Three: push-pull — hot then cold, attentive then dismissive, to make her anxious and craving the warm version back. Note: these are precisely the same techniques any cult leader — including Donald and MAGA, and indeed the Russists — use. Four: manufactured urgency — now or never, don’t overthink. Five: isolation — peeling her away from her friends, from the European Union, her group, her phone. Six: boundary creep — testing small yeses and escalating, so each step feels too small to refuse. She does not need all of them present; some or all is the trigger. A pattern of these is the signature of the type.Tool 2: the incoming troll radar. This is the gatekeeper standing at the threshold of her own mind. Its job is not to argue or to be fair. Its job is to triage what gets in, fast, before her thinking mind has to. Crucially, the incoming troll radar runs on the felt charge first — the slightly-off feeling, the flutter of flattered-and-uneasy — and on the technique match second. When a behaviour matches the pickup artist archetype’s tells, the radar fires.Here’s the part that frees her — and us, when we’re on Twitter and trying to resist being activated by trolls. The radar does not have to decide whether or not he intends harm. It cuts straight through that question with a simple rule: if the pattern matches and you can’t be sure, you stop, and you gatekeep. Better to misflag a harmless man than to let a manipulator pass your threshold. The cost is wildly lopsided, so the radar is allowed to be precautionary. That is permission to trust herself.Tool 5: Trigger, Experience, Reaction — and the GapTool 5: trigger, experience, reaction — which, as long-time listeners will know, I took from the psychologist Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama’s Atlas of Emotions model. We can use this on Twitter too. We’re triggered by something, we experience a feeling, and then we react to it. This explains how the manipulation actually works, and it’s the key to situations people don’t freely choose.Every push on a human being runs in three beats. A trigger arrives — a missile into the Pechersk Lavra; a line, a touch, a pressure. The body has an experience — excitement, flattery, fear of losing him, being appalled. And then comes the reaction. Between the experience and the reaction there is a gap. Mockers, for instance, was operating in that gap for the entire show after the Russists hit the Arsenal, the museum in central Kyiv, which I’ve been to; after they hit the Pechersk Lavra, very close to it; and after they hit the film studios and all those other sites. Mockers, though grotesquely appalled by all this, didn’t let that overcome the way she presented the show. That’s a perfect teaching in how we can control that gap — between the experience of feeling appalled by grotesqueness, or feeling attracted by a pickup artist, and the reaction.In that gap lives our freedom, and any of our daughters’ freedom. The free choice happens there and nowhere else. The entire craft of the pickup artist is to destroy that gap: to flood her with feeling and pile on urgency, so that she reacts from inside the rush before she’s chosen anything. That is precisely how people end up somewhere they would never have walked into with a clear head.So the counter-move is small, and it is negative. When she notices the rush and the pressure, the discipline is simply: do not decide anything important while the window is open. Don’t answer now. Don’t go anywhere now. Step out, find her friends, let the feeling settle. Real connection survives a pause; manipulation needs the pause not to happen. The moment she insists on the gap, she’s taken her freedom back.Counter-trolling, then, is four moves, none of which require confrontation or proof. Name it to herself. Let the radar gatekeep without needing to justify it. Refuse to act inside the urgent window. And get back to her people. No scene, no certainty about his soul, no debate she has to win. That is the power I wanted to show my friends: a method built for geopolitics, handed to a teenager — protecting not against an idea, but against a moment, and giving her, in place of fear, a clear and usable competence.Their God Is War: The CathedralSo — their god is war. Back to Larysa Yakubova. I want to start by asking everyone to picture a building, because Yakubova does, and the building is the whole episode in miniature. Appropriately, for this week, it is a cathedral. And the thing they have gathered to worship, Yakubova argues, is not the God whose costume the building wears. It’s the war itself.That is the claim of this part of my exposition of Larysa Yakubova’s Beast from the Abyss. Behind the orthodox, traditional costume, the apparatus does not worship God. It worships war. Yakubova’s whole anatomy leads there: the state’s true object of worship is force and death — the sacralised violence that turns the two into a liturgy. She calls the thing the title names — the Beast from the Abyss — not as a flourish but as a diagnosis: a totalitarian, apocalyptic sect that has put on the vestments of a church.The anchor for this part is Tool 3: look for the mana in the meme — the energy, the intention, the charge a thing carries before you have finished reading it. A war cult does not persuade you with arguments. It works on the mana, the feeling in the chest before the thought in the head. The two mechanisms beneath it are the ones we name again and again: war magic — the weaponising of sympathetic-magic logic, the belief that if you perform the ritual hard enough the world will bend — and drama, the stage that substitutes for reality, which the audience are made to sit and watch. We proof every move against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and we name the archetype underneath, where the voltage lives, because recognition halves it.Yakubova walks us through the surface of Russian state religiosity: the processions, the icons carried at the head of columns, the St George ribbons knotted on lapels and gravestones, the priests with their censers swung over tanks and rockets, and the Z and V markers, which she reads as Nazi-style adept marks — the brand worn by the initiated. The costume is total. Everything looks like the oldest, most rooted faith on the continent.And then she shows you what the costume is wrapped around. Not orthodoxy at all, but a thing she anatomises as Z-orthodoxy: a war faith in a church’s clothes, whose actual object of devotion is not the divine, but the violence performed in its name. Here is what the apparatus wants you to think, she writes: this is an ancient holy people defending its sacred tradition; the ribbons, the processions, the blessed weapons — these are faith; to stand against them is to stand against God and history.Register the mana first, the feeling, before you reason about it. Strip the incense away, and the charge is the worship of force — the thrill of the consecrated weapon, the holiness loaned to a missile by a man in a cassock, so that the man who fires it feels not like a killer but like a celebrant. This is the mana: sacralised violence dressed as devotion. This is the merciless sovereign in his most dangerous guise — the one who has stopped pretending to rule in God’s name and started asking to be worshipped as a god. A god of war, with war as the sacrament. The cathedral is his temple; the blessed weapon, his relic.The mechanism is war magic in its purest form: the sympathetic-magic conviction that if you bless the weapon, sing over it, build it a temple, then the killing becomes a rite. The numerology in the floor — dimensions tuned to encode an eternal victory — is war magic written into architecture. Build the promise into the stone, and the stone will make it true. Proof it against the Code. Is it true? No, it’s a costume, worn to make a lie look like the oldest truth there is, borrowing the authority of faith to license the atrocity. Is it generous? No. A cathedral whose floor is melted weapons and whose worship is the blessing of the next strike is the least generous building on earth. Is it patient? It promises eternal victory, and a thing that promises eternity is selling you urgency — the standing red flag the Code of Positive Trolls is built to catch. So this is Disinfolklore: a religion assembled to make force feel holy.The Cult of Death: The Martyred CommanderYakubova’s anatomy turns to what she reads as a cult of death — a necrophilia at the centre of the war faith, in which dying is not the tragic cost of war but its point. The apparatus stages the funeral as parade, the coffin as banner, the killed son rebranded a hero, so that his mother’s grief is converted before it can become angry. To die for the war is held up as the highest thing a person can do. Death itself reframed as the supreme form of patriotism. Her image of where this ends is unsparing: a beast that thirsts for blood and will drown in its own blood. Page 282.Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. Our dead are not victims of a catastrophe. They are saints of a holy cause. To mourn them honestly — to ask who sent them and why — is to betray them. The only loyal grief is grateful grief.Register the mana, because here it is overwhelming by design. The charge is grief — the oldest, most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. But grief captured, turned inside out, with the question surgically removed from it. You are not allowed to ask: why did my son die? You are handed, in its place, a swelling, terrible pride: my son is a hero. That conversion — sorrow into glory, before the sorrow can become a question — is the mana of the death cult. And it’s the most dangerous energy this apparatus produces, because it recruits the mother and the maiden archetype; it recruits the mother’s love itself as fuel.Name the archetype. This is the martyred commander — the fallen one held up not to be mourned but to be spent, his death reframed as a debt the living must keep paying. And laid over it, the mother and the maiden: the grieving mother whose love is hijacked and pointed back at the war that killed her child. The mechanism is drama — the funeral staged for an audience, mourning converted into theatre, so that the watching nation feels the cause is holy rather than asking whether it is real.Proof it against the Code. The verdict writes itself. Is it generous? It uses dead sons as the load-bearing beam of the very war that killed them. Is it true? It inverts the truth: it calls catastrophe sanctity. Is it patient? No. So this is Disinfolklore at its apex: a death liturgy. And the Code’s counter on the martyred commander is the subtlest, and the only honest, one. Mourn the dead, refuse the liturgy. Do not dismiss the son. Do not let him be turned into the key that licenses the next coffin. Grieve him honestly — which means asking the question the cult has cut out: who sent him, and why?The Stage Without Actors: Law as a PropThis is the most revealing move she makes, because it shows what the war cult does to everything around it — to law, to politics, to the entire public square. Yakubova — Larysa Yakubova, in The Beast from the Abyss — argues that the Russist apparatus has hollowed out the centre of its society, and hollowed it out for a particular reason. The ruling party, in her reading, is reduced to a stage without actors — a set that performs the form of politics with no living politics inside it.Law is mocked into a stage prop. She points to the grotesque celebration of the sledgehammer — the execution tool turned into a souvenir, turned into a brand, turned into an anti-law openly flaunted as the real source of authority. The courts perform justice; the sledgehammer is justice; and everyone is meant to see both at once and know which one is true. The whole public sphere becomes a staged substitute reality — a performance the population are made to watch, in which nothing is what it claims to be, and the watching itself is the point.Here, she says, is what the apparatus wants you to think. There is a state here, a law here, a politics here. Parties, parliaments, courts — everything is in order. Look at the stage. See how complete it is. Register the mana. The charge is strange and cold, and you have to name it precisely: the mana of enforced spectatorship. Sitting in a darkened hall, watching a play, not allowed to leave and not allowed to call it a play. Beneath the warmth of move one and the grief-fire of move two, this is the substrate: a whole society demoted from citizens to audience, from participants to watchers — the realm of action quietly replaced by the realm of performance. The charge is passivity manufactured at scale.Name the archetype. This is the merciless sovereign again, seen from a different angle: the sovereign who has dissolved every institution that might check him into a stage set he controls, so that the law itself becomes one of his props. The mechanism is drama in its fullest sense — not a single staged event, but the spectacle: the society in which authentic life has been wholly replaced by its representation, where you no longer live but only watch.Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? It manufactures a false reality and criminalises noticing — the opposite of true. Is it generous? It strips a whole people of agency and hands them a script. Is it patient? It needs the performance unbroken, the audience seated now and always, no pause in which someone might stand and say “this is a play.” So this is Disinfolklore: an entire public sphere converted into a death cult’s theatre, with the sledgehammer where the law should be.The Architecture: One Engineered LiturgyLet’s step back and look at the whole architecture, because the three moves are not three things. They are one engineered liturgy. The cathedral consecrates the violence, gives force the costume of holiness. The death cult sanctifies the dying. The stage-without-actors empties the public square so there is nowhere left to object. That is the war faith.Yakubova’s word for the thing assembled from those three moves is the title of the series, chosen with exact care: a beast from the abyss — a thing that, in her line, thirsts for blood and will drown in its own blood. And here’s the single thing to carry out of this part of the episode. A religion is recognised by what it asks you to love. This one asks you to love force, to love dying, and to mistake a stage for a world. Once you can feel the mana for what it is — sacralised violence wearing incense — you cannot unfeel it, and the costume stops working. That is Tool 3 doing its whole job: read the charge, look for the mana in the meme, and the church clothes fall off the gun.And it tells us, by its shape, what its counter must be. You cannot out-argue a religion of death. You can only answer it with a religion of life. The counter to a cult that worships the coffin is not a better coffin. It is the cradle. Hold that, because that’s where the rest of the series, which I’ll continue next week, is going. In the next episode I’ll talk about the wise counsellor’s poison — the figure the Russist apparatus sends out to make all of this respectable: the philosopher in the wings, the sage who lends the beast its patina of thought. Because every war cult needs a man in a study to tell the war its wisdom. I’ll save that one for next week.Plotnitsky: The Vanished KoshcheiI’ve got 15 minutes, if you’ve got the patience. Let’s move back to a series I started weeks and weeks and weeks ago, on this 10,000-piece corpus which I collected in Russia-occupied Luhansk way back, 2015 to 2018. It’s the basis of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, because I excavated it for archetypes.So: Plotnitsky, the vanished Koshchei. Koshchei is someone Larysa Yakubova uses too, in her book — and maybe Iona knows who Koshchei is already, but I’ll remind you. In Slavic folklore there’s a deathless villain called Koshchei. He is an old man in black armour who cannot be killed in the ordinary way. His death is hidden in a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare, inside a chest, buried beneath an oak tree, on an island in the middle of the sea. To kill Koshchei you must undo every layer, and if you do not kill him properly, he comes back.Igor Plotnitsky appears in my Luhansk well-corpus 445 times between 2014 and 2017. He was the self-declared head of the self-declared Luhansk Folk’s Republic, its so-called president in miniature. Then, in November 2017, he vanished. An armed challenger, Leonid Pasechnik, moved on him with tanks. Plotnitsky was deposed. He fled to Moscow. He did not die — he is reported occasionally to be alive (this is unlike his parents, who died eating mushrooms in Russia, a very dangerous activity). This is the perfect Koshchei arc. The occupier-installed leader is created, elevated, liturgised as sovereign. Then, when his usefulness expires, removed by a younger Chekist who wears the same uniform and speaks in the same folksy voice. The sovereignty is transferred, and the archetypal position is never vacant. Plotnitsky vanishes, Pasechnik enters. The ceremonial chair is always filled.Let me show you the prophetic moment. 5th of April 2016, ria.ru: “LPR and DPR leaders to stay in power until 2018.” The director of Russia’s Political Environment Centre, Alexei Chesnakov, said to RIA Novosti that he had recently attended a meeting of advisers to President Putin. Read that carefully. In April 2016, a Russian official is telling a Russian wire service that Plotnitsky is authorised to remain in office until 2018. His removal is already, in the spring of 2016, being timetabled in Moscow. This is how you know the Luhansk Folk’s Republic is not a state. It’s a Disinfolklore creation. The leader has a Moscow-assigned expiry date, like a bottle of milk. Plotnitsky was never sovereign. He was Koshchei, with a scheduled death.Notice the co-occurrence. 17th of February 2017, in the English-language lug-info.com: Plotnitsky issues a joint statement with Zakharchenko from the Donetsk People’s Republic, demanding that Kiev let the republics’ observers carry out inspections of Ukrainian-controlled industrial facilities. The Koshchei figure, one year from deposition, is performing peak sovereignty — issuing demands across an international frontier, acting as if his title carries diplomatic weight. The louder the performance, the nearer the end.Why should we care about Plotnitsky specifically? Because his disappearance illustrates the interchangeability principle of Rashist occupation governance. The individual leader is a costume. The costume is hung on whichever Chekist is useful this year. The population’s loyalty is to the costume, not the man, because the population has been trained by the daily fake-state liturgy to revere the position. When Plotnitsky is replaced by Pasechnik in November 2017, almost no one in occupied Luhansk protests. The Koshchei figure has changed, but the spell has not.This is why Russia can afford to burn through occupation leaders quickly. Zakharchenko is assassinated in a café bomb in 2018. Plotnitsky is deposed in 2017. Gubarev is sidelined. Mozgovoy is killed. Dremov is killed. The Koshcheis fall and new Koshcheis rise, and the archetypal chair is never empty. The counter is to name the chair as empty. The Luhansk Folk’s Republic has no legitimate sovereign — only a rotating cast of disposable characters.The Helpful Gardener: The Bridge Troll Points and Shouts “Troll”I have one more, which is quite quick, so I’ll go for it, even without your permission. This is in the same frame — again, I mined these documents for their archetypal presences, and they really have quite a lot. This one is The Helpful Gardener.December 2015, the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. The militia of the so-called Folk’s Republic puts out a line: the Ukrainian Army, and what it calls the National Battalions, again limit the movement of civilians through the checkpoint on the front lines. And then — this is the part to hold on to — the People’s Militia, together with the OSCE, is making every effort to ensure the smooth movement of the civilian population.The bridge troll: the creature under the bridge who owns your crossing. Name it, and the voltage halves — because now I can ask the questions the voltage was built to stop. Is this true? “The army again limits movement” — asserted, never shown, and that line in the road only exists because the occupation drew it. Is this generous? No. The cost falls on civilians crossing in the Christmas rush, and the actual armed party holding that side is dressing itself up — with the OSCE pinned alongside it for cover — as the kindly helper at the gate.And that’s the move. The troll points down the road and shouts “troll.” So this is Disinfolklore — a weaponised story — and the counter to it is simple to say and hard to live: be the keeper who keeps the crossing open and answerable, whose account of who blocks whom survives an honest, careful look. In 2015, that bridge was still contested ground. The question is never which side blocks the bridge. It is who built the line in the first place.I’ll leave it at that for this week. Out. 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The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a LetterThis week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read.Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolklore.eu, and also disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net, which are three interwoven projects, but my main body of work is on disinfolklore.eu — I spend most of my time pulling apart the dark folklore the Kremlin pumps into the world. Tonight I want to do something I don’t do that often: I want to hold a piece of Infolklore up to the light. This letter is a near-perfect specimen of Infolklore, and it teaches us more about how the Code of Positive Trolls actually works than a month of theory. Let’s get our eyes in.The Mocker Takes the PodiumI reference M’ockers on purpose here, because Mockers, like me, decided on her moniker before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and through all of her work each day on Volya Radio she mainstreams the act of the mocker. As I am programming my neural network algorithm, the Mocker and the mocking tone has become actually very engineering-relevant — because if you can detect the mocking tone, which frontier models can do, then you can distinguish Infolklore, from Disinfolklore which is never humorous but does mock, on the basis of the rightness of what it’s mocking. M’ockers on X, for instance, will always be mocking aspects of Russian society which are not right.President Zelensky — as a lawyer, and as a comedian, and as an actor, as an honest actor. He is the most honest acting head of state there is in the world today, whereas Putler pretends he acts as sovereign on behalf of the siloviki and doesn’t admit that he is an actor — but he is an actor. President Zelensky, as all public figures do — they do act in a dramatic sense, but also in the sense of fulfilling their functions — there’s no hiding the fact that he is at heart an actor, an artist, and a true artist, and a great artist, perhaps one of the greatest artists ever, as we see with his career spanning Servant of the People and now taking care of global security.The first thing the letter does is mock. Listen to the register. Ukraine’s long-range drones, he said, “paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St Petersburg.” “Paid a visit” — over a thousand kilometres, to crash the showpiece economic forum — and he calls it a social call.Longtime listeners know the figure I mean: the Mocker, the positive troll who reads the enemy’s spell aloud, names it, and turns it inside out. The Russian propaganda machine spends fortunes staging a forum to project a serene, prosperous, unbothered Russia. One ironic sentence and a drone, and the stage set is punctured — by the artist, by the Comedian.Mockery Welded to Verifiable FactHere’s the discipline, and this is the whole game. Mockery on its own is cheap. Grievance dressed up as wit is exactly what the other side does — that ressentiment-soaked sneering we decoded in Putin’s Astana press conference last week. What makes this mockery Infolklore and not just noise is that it is welded to a verifiable fact. “We have video confirmation of every one of your losses,” he writes. These are not empty claims. The Mocker who earns his place doesn’t vent. He surfaces, frames, and outflanks — with the receipts.“This War Is Your Personal Choice”Then comes the move which I want you, and all of us, to tattoo on our brains. “Whatever you may say about NATO, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice. A war without a real cause.”Stop. That is the Counter Disinfolklore in a single breath. For 12 years the apparatus has wrapped this war in costume after costume — denazification, encirclement, protecting Russian speakers, defending traditional values — and President Zelensky declines every costume at once and names the naked act.The cosy great-power deal cooked up in Alaska — Baked Alaska, anyone? — “Ukrainian and European issues are not decided in Anchorage.” Every time, he strips the mask and names the act.Picking the Lock on the Tsar’s ChannelNow the part that makes the letter genuinely radical — and here’s a thought I owe to a conversation I had this week. I was on The Eastern Border podcast of Kristaps in Latvia on Saturday. We did a two-and-a-half-hour session which was really fascinating and a really great conversation — I implore you to listen to it, and also listen to The Eastern Border; I look forward to his episodes every week. He did recently a really interesting one on food quality in Russia — he and his wife dug very deeply into the phytosanitary rules and the quality of food there. As we know from listening to Mockers talk about the butter, and the meat glue in the butter and suchlike — you should really avoid that stuff. But anyway, that’s an aside.A ruler’s deepest power isn’t tanks. It’s the monopoly on speaking to his own people. The Tsar decides what Russians are told, what they’re allowed to want, who gets to define their interests. That channel — ruler to ruled — is supposed to be his and his alone. Putler’s alone. This letter picks the lock on that channel.Read who it’s actually talking to. “They do not like our drones. They do not like gasoline shortages. They do not like your endless war.” That’s not addressed to Putler. That’s addressed over his head, to Russians — telling them what they want, what their ruler costs them, and that “the majority of Russians would respond positively to peace. And you know it.” A foreign president standing in the Kremlin’s own living room, talking past the host to the family. That’s why this is more than just a clever letter. It’s a usurpation. Not a march on Moscow — a letter that quietly annexes the one thing a Tsar can’t afford to lose: the trust of the people he claims to speak for.Wounding the Prideful SovereignIt’s engineered to wound a very specific target. Think about who Putler has to be. He is cast, by the men who put him there, in the role of the prideful sovereign: serene, eternal, untouchable, the fake strongman who never tires. The whole performance runs on pride. So look where the letter aims. “Age is beginning to take its toll.” The mutiny: “June 23rd will mark another anniversary of Prigozhin’s mutiny, and silence will not erase this fact from history.” “Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue.”Here he is piercing the heart of Abramovich — who, we subsequently found out, was in Kyiv. So now the Russist siloviki will be thinking Abramovich was moaning to President Zelensky, while they met, about the fatigue. When President Zelensky mentions the businessmen, he is driving a dagger right into the heart of the coalition that keeps this war going.“The first ruler of Russia ever to go begging to Pyongyang.” President Zelensky mentions North Korea — which the Russists made a joke of until two years ago, when they started importing their men to try and liberate their own territory of Kursk. “Fully dependent, for the first time in Russian history, on Beijing.” These aren’t insults thrown out at random. They are purposive trolls, each one a needle into the armour of the performance, placed by someone who knows exactly how the prideful sovereign is wired. You don’t roil the state with these lines — you roil the actor playing the state.Refusing Fake Virtue: Mana and Name in SyncHere’s where a lot of pro-Ukrainian content fails the Code, and this letter doesn’t. It would have been easy to drape the whole thing in halo light. He doesn’t. “It is not as if we in Ukraine are concerned about the fate of Russian soldiers,” President Zelensky writes flatly. “But I do care about Ukrainians.” No pretence of caring about everyone. No fake universal compassion. He even tells you the brutal exchange ratio — one Ukrainian for five or six dead Russians — and says it still matters, because these are my people. That refusal to fake virtue is the tell of the real thing. Mana and name in sync. The letter says what it is: an adversary’s hand extended honestly, with the receipts on the table and concrete offers attached. A full ceasefire. An all-for-all prisoner exchange. The return of the stolen children. That’s not a propaganda artefact. That’s Infolklore.Because I won’t sell you a fairy tale, one honest flag: this is a weapon. A beautifully made weapon, but a weapon all the same. It’s built to corner a man. The line “we can work towards that fatigue” sails close to the wind. The casualty numbers are Ukraine’s own, and they flatter Ukraine. But here is the difference that the Code of Positive Trolls is built to catch: every one of those claims is falsifiable. You can check a drone strike. You can count losses. You can verify a returned child. That is the opposite of Disinfolklore.So that’s the lesson. The same tool — mockery — that the Kremlin uses to poison, this letter uses to heal: to surface a lie, name it, and outflank it. Same instrument, opposite hands. The Code is what tells them apart. And the deepest move of all wasn’t a drone or a number. It was a man standing in his enemy’s house, turning to his enemy’s own people and saying: I think you want peace, and I think you know it. And he is the man who can deliver them peace. That’s not just answering propaganda. That’s picking the lock on the throne. Glory to the truth-tellers.Putler’s Reply: The Man Who Won’t Say the NameSo I wanted to talk then about Putler’s response. Obviously, they found it a bit rude. I find it a bit rude when they plant mines between the dead body of a 21-year-old woman and her child in Bucha, so that the Ukrainian deminers will blow themselves up while burying these poor victims. That’s what I found rude. But Putler and Lavrov found President Zelensky’s letter rude.I’ve just pulled apart the open letter. Well — the man on the throne’s answer, on Russia’s TV. Putler replied, and his reply is a gift, because it teaches the other half of the lesson. If the letter showed you what Inolklore looks like at the top of the world, the answer shows you how the Disinfolklore comes back at it. And it lets something slip — because by the end of this, I want to convince you of one thing: that letter was never really for Putler. Let’s get our eye in.The first thing to notice about Putler’s reply is who he refuses to name. Zelensky is never President Zelensky. He’s “the author of the letter,” this so-called “colleague.” At one point — and this is almost too on-the-nose — “the authors of this letter,” “fans of the epistolary genre.” A head of state reduced to a man who writes letters. That’s not pettiness. That’s an archetype going to work — Tool 1. Putler is performing the role he’s been cast in: the Tsar. And the one thing a Tsar cannot do is negotiate with a pretender as an equal. So he doesn’t. He won’t dignify the name.Then watch him perform the magnanimity — Tool 6, generosity, in its counterfeit form. “I’ve never refused a meeting,” he says. Generous, regal — except he spends the rest of the answer explaining why he won’t actually meet. So we can adjudicate this claim. Performed generosity with the substance withheld. That gap between the gracious words and the closed door is itself a tell.He turns from the letter to the troops. “It is necessary to address not the authors of this letter, but our fighters on the line of contact. Comrade soldiers and sailors, the whole country is proud of you. Work, brothers.” The father of the nation, turning to his children. Note what just happened. The answer to a peace letter is to address the army. The reply to “let’s stop” is “keep going, lads.”Tool 7 and the Starobilsk Claim: Accusation in a MirrorNow Tool 7, the big one — right, ethical discipline. We ask: is it true? Here’s the most delicate moment in the whole episode, and I’m going to handle it carefully. Putler says that on May 22, Ukrainian troops hit a college dormitory in Luhansk, in Starobilsk — which we’ve talked about for the last few weeks — and killed children. With his own words: “not a single military facility nearby.”I’m not going to tell you what happened. I’m not going to tell you it didn’t. I don’t know, and neither do you, and the honest move is to say so. What I can read is what the claim is for. Look at how he uses it: “They ask for a meeting and commit such horrific crimes as the murder of children.” The atrocity isn’t offered as news. It’s offered as the reason he can’t meet. And the specific shape of it — child-killing, pinned on the other side — is the oldest move in the Kremlin book. We have a name for it on this show: accusation in a mirror. You take the crime your own machine stands credibly accused of — and Russia is the side with international warrants out for taking Ukrainian children out of Ukraine, forcibly transferring them — and you hold it up like a mirror to the enemy. The structure is the tell, whatever the facts of that one night in Starobilsk turn out to be.And he does the mirror twice. He lectures President Zelensky about elections. “If you hold on to power outside the Constitution, that’s a power grab, a criminal offence. Now, hold elections, rule constitutionally.” Fine principle. I won’t call a true principle a lie. But listen to who’s saying it. A man 25 years in power, who has never been legitimately elected, who murdered a million Chechens in order to secure enough mana to brainwash Russians into believing him to be their sovereign, who has built the entire constitution around himself — lecturing the leader of an invaded country who got 74 percent of the vote. President Zelensky won an unprecedented every district in Ukraine except for one near Lviv. This was thought to be impossible — for a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian to win every district in Ukraine. And he’s being lectured to by this autocrat who has never put himself forward for election, and who — I was reminded by Kristaps on The Eastern Border — has never even debated anyone. Not once, in the entire time since he emerged from the KGB, has he debated someone publicly. And he has the chutzpah to lecture the leader of an invaded country whose elections are suspended because of the invasion he launched. The principle is clean. The mirror is the trick.The Minsk Splice: True Premise, Poisoned ConclusionOne more move before the turn, because it’s a beautiful specimen. Putler says the Minsk agreements — that I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine trying to make work — were really only about buying time to rearm Ukraine. And he’s got the receipts, he says. Western leaders did, after the fact, admit something like that. “So why do we need these agreements anyway?”Watch the hands. He spends a true thing — a real, embarrassing Western admission — to buy your trust. And then, while you’re nodding, he splices on the part that doesn’t follow. This is the is-versus-ought: something happened, therefore we must kill all these Ukrainians. Which is in that very first foundational tweet that founded the North Atlantic Fella Organization, when that Russian ambassador in Vienna said: “You pronounced this nonsense, not me.” The serpent — the serpent adjudicating on NAFO memes, RIP, always to be remembered — characterising Russia’s excuse for entering Ukraine as: Ukrainians killed a few civilians, so we decided to go into Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. “You pronounce that nonsense, not me,” said the serpent, said the Rushist ambassador.So while we’re nodding, he splices on the part that doesn’t follow: “therefore, no agreements ever.” The true fact is the mask. “Refuse all diplomacy” is the payload hiding behind it. A true premise carrying a poisoned conclusion. Once you can see the seam between the mask and the payload, you can’t unsee it. The Kremlin runs on that seam.The Turn: The Letter Is Addressed to the BoardroomAnd now the turn, because this is the thing I most want us to take away — it changes how we read both documents. Let’s go back to the letter. We said the letter talks past Putler to the Russist people. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth, and a sharper read came up this week. Look again at exactly who inside the Russist power structure it is needling. “Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue. We can work towards that fatigue,” said President Zelensky. And the cold, cold arithmetic — Ukraine’s own claim, but a checkable claim — of tens of thousands of Russist soldiers lost every month, every one of them photographed in their death.Put those together, and the letter stops looking like a message to Putler at all. It looks like a message to the people around Putler — to the men who actually hold the strings. And the message is a deal. Your figurehead is an indicted war criminal who is bleeding you of 30,000 men a month, and the future, and the money to buy loyalty. Hand him over to The Hague, then we can talk about stopping that bleeding. That’s the lockpick. Not “Putler, please see reason.” It’s: gentlemen, surrender the patsy and the war can end. The letter is addressed to the boardroom, over the boss’s head.Every needle aimed at Putler’s pride — the age, the mutiny of Prigozhin, the begging trip to Pyongyang, the dependence on Beijing — every one of those is doing double duty. It wounds the actor, and it advertises to the men behind him that the actor is damaged goods. And here’s why that read is so devastating: Putler’s own reply confirms the target. Listen to who’s actually running things in his answer. “My press secretary, Peskov, showed me the letter, slipped me this letter.” “Some businessman from our business circle gets invited to Kyiv. He goes, comes back.” And Putin’s role in his own diplomacy: “I can’t send you in any official capacity. That’s for specially trained people at the foreign ministry, the defence ministry. I can’t authorise you into anything.”The Tsar — in the very speech where he insists he’s the Tsar — is a man being handed papers by his spokesperson and briefed by a businessman he can’t authorise to do anything. That’s Tool 12, reading the deep code under the meme. The throne is a costume.And here’s the foundation defence — the part the apparatus’s own house philosophers won’t tell you. Dig into where these peoples actually come from, the real deep root, and you don’t find a Tsar there. This week, even a pro-war Russian military blogger — one tweet, second-hand, so weigh it as one straw in the wind — said he gets the impression the president is being sidelined, President Putler, with an artificial information bubble created around him. Read that again. They are starting to suspect he’s an actor being managed by the people around him. They’re arriving, from their side, at exactly what President Zelensky’s letter assumed from the other. Putler isn’t the seat of power. He’s the man cast to sit in it.The Bubble Cracks: Simonyan’s Famine and the Oreshnik “Test”If you want to watch that bubble crack in real time, here’s the moment from this week that did it for me. At the same St Petersburg Forum at which, in June 2022, Margarita Simonyan said, “oh, they’re saying in the offices that all our hope is in the famine” — and what they meant by that in Moscow is that there will be famine in Africa because we do not deliver grain to them, and millions of migrants will go into the European Union, and then the European Union will stop supporting Ukraine and will lift the sanctions on Russia, “because it’s impossible for us not to be friends.” Switching between the register of a five-year-old banging on about their emotional argument in the playground — because it’s impossible for us not to be friends.At St Petersburg Forum 2026 — the one President Zelensky mocked, the one Ukraine’s drones paid a visit to — Putler explained the Oreshnik missile strikes. Now, for about a week, Russian channels had been roaring that one of these missiles vaporised a secret NATO command node hidden in some garages in Bila Tserkva. Big story. Huge. This week, Putler’s version: it was a test. “We struck where it was convenient to observe the results,” he said. The drones flew in afterwards so they could examine how the warheads were arranged. A test of how the pieces fell. No NATO node — just research.Sit with that for a second. Two things. One: he just overwrote his own propaganda machine’s week-long story, to its face, without blinking. The NATO node simply evaporated. That is the artificial information bubble — a story with no author, where last week’s truth is quietly deleted to make room for this week’s. And two, the cold one: one of those test shots of the Oreshnik missile, by Putler’s own account, came down in Russia-occupied Donetsk. The very land he calls Russian, where his own soldiers stand. Remember “Work, brothers”? The father of the nation who turned to his troops and said “the whole country is proud of you” fired a missile into their ground to see how the blocks lay around, and called it a testing range. They were standing on it. That’s not a sovereign. That’s a man reading lines in a play whose script keeps getting rewritten, who doesn’t seem to feel the people beneath him. Either the war bloggers banging on about the NATO command node, or his own Russian soldiers fighting their genocidal war in Donetsk, who get an Oreshnik hit on them just as a test. Putler doesn’t feel the words.I note that I owe a lot of this interpretation to Will — to Will Thiel’s immediate reaction to it, which was again a very solid performance from Will on Volya.The Two Documents Through the 12 ToolsLet me do the thing which this show is for, really, and run both documents through the toolkit, quick, side by side, so you can feel the contrast — disinfolklore.eu, where I have the 12-tool way, the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.Tool 1, the archetype: the letter is the mocker with the receipts. The reply is the cast Tsar with a mirror.Tool 2, direction: both fired outward, but the letter aims at the man who can end it. The reply aims at the soldiers who’ll keep it going.Tool 3, the mana, the energy under the words: peace and accountability versus keep fighting, dressed as dignity.Tool 4, inner and outer realm switching: the letter walks into Russia’s inner room and talks to the family. The reply tries to slam the door and shove the guilt outward to Ukraine.Tool 5, the trigger chain — the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman’s timeline of emotions: trigger, experience, reaction. It’s that space between experience and reaction, which we all have — the moment before we share the meme, before we rise to get angry or to repeat Russist Disinfolklore. When we experience that emotion, if we can remember that emotional manipulation gives us an opportunity to just hold off before we react. The reply engineers it openly: dead children, outrage, rally to the troops. “The audience will understand me, especially the Russian audience, because they like children.”Tool 6, generosity: the honest adversary versus fake magnanimity.Tool 7, is it true? The letter passes: falsifiable, lawful. The reply fails at the mirror, not at the procedure.Tool 8, the archetypes carried in the energy: the honest extended hand versus the father of the nation, weaponised.Tool 9, patience: the letter says the front line is where diplomacy begins — now. The reply weaponises patience: “a long-term historical perspective,” “let the experts work.” Patience is a stalling engine to Putler.Tool 10, mindfulness — should I let this into my mind? The reply’s whole ask is: accept the Tsar frame. And the answer is no.Tool 11, does it deepen or flatten? Is it insightful? The letter deepens: it names the cause and offers steps to get out of this mess. The reply flattens: one man’s refusal and a projection.Tool 12, the deep code, the cryptotypic code: one is the mocker healing; the other is the Tsar costume over an empty throne. Twelve tools, one verdict each. The letter: Infolklore. The reply: Disinfolklore. Same instrument.Holding Myself to the Same CodeAnd I’ll hold myself to the same Code I’m holding them to. I did not decide whether that dormitory in Starobilsk was hit. The “Putler’s just a costume” reading is a lens, not a proof. He is a sovereign acting inside a machine — a cast role, not a powerless puppet. And the one war blogger’s tweet is a straw in the wind, not a verdict.So here’s where we land. The letter picks the lock on the throne — and this week we can say it better. The letter wasn’t a plea to the king. It was an offer slid under the door to the men who built the throne and cast the king. Give us the actor, and the killing can stop. And the king answered by insisting on television that he is no actor — in a speech where you can watch his spokesman hand him the script, hand him the papers. The same tool: mockery, a letter, a turn of phrase. Glory to the truth-tellers, and we’ll see them next time.The Beast from the Abyss: Naming the BeastSo — the beast from the abyss. Naming the beast. This is Larysa Yakubova’s masterpiece. She is one of the greatest scholars of Russist and Russian totalitarianism, from Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. The artefact under the knife in this episode is not a single meme, but the whole apparatus. Our guide through it is Larysa’s 2023 book, Ruscism: The Beast from the Abyss, published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and written by the historian Larysa Yakubova while her country is under fire. Every line of hers here is taken from that book.I want to begin with a small bit of method, because it’s the thing this whole series runs on, and all of my work runs on. There’s this historian in Kyiv called Larysa Yakubova. She’s not a folklorist and not a poet. She’s a professional historian of totalitarianism at her country’s National Academy of Sciences. Footnotes, archives, Hannah Arendt, the careful apparatus of the discipline. And in 2023 she published a 318-page scholarly book about the Russist state, and she gave it the title a folklorist would give it. She called Russia the Beast from the Abyss.A serious historian reaching past the whole vocabulary of political science — authoritarianism, revanchism, hybrid regime — and taking hold of a monster. That is the scandal, and it’s not a lapse. It’s the most rigorous thing in the book, and tonight I’m going to show you why. Because it’s also the first tool — archetypal literacy — of the method I teach at disinfolklore.eu. The first tool in the 12-tool way is archetypal literacy, not to be confused with cryptotypic literacy, which is the 12th tool. Tonight’s anchor is Tool 1, archetypal literacy: the beast from the abyss. These are archetypes — deep Indo-European archetypes. The discipline of asking, of any piece of folklore that crosses your path: what archetype is being deployed here?The claim of everything this evening, stated up front the way I try to state everything: you cannot fight a thing you will not name. Nama — you need to name it. You name the mana. Nama: you name the mana. And the Russian apparatus has spent 30 years making sure you cannot name it. They deliver the mana, then they misname it, so you get confused over what is the substance of this and what is the surface moniker of it. Yakubova names it: the beast from the abyss. That act of naming is where the counterattack begins, and it’s the act that this particular episode is about. I will proof every movement in her book against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and I will name the archetypes, because once you can see an archetype operating you cannot unsee it, and recognition halves the mana.The Masks Have Been Thrown Off: The Elder BrotherYakubova’s second chapter has a title that is itself a diagnosis: “The Masks Have Been Thrown Off.” The mask she means is the one this apparatus wears better than any other. It’s the mask of the elder brother — the archetypal elder brother from folklore, from The Brothers Karamazov, where one of the brothers kills the father, and Alyosha, the holy spiritual brother, goes off to the church and then is debauched by his other brother Ivan Karamazov with the great, great Grand Inquisitor episode. The elder brother archetype.For 30 years the Ruscist state addressed Ukraine in the register of family. The Russkiy Mir, the Russian world, was sold as a warm thing: shared faith, shared history, brotherly peoples, one big tent. Russia was the patient elder brother, the regional peacemaker, the intercessor of the despised. When the tanks crossed the border in 2022, the official word for it was not invasion. The name — the official name — wasn’t invasion, but the mana was invasion, and we can adjudicate that according to the laws of war, the UN Charter. It was a “special military operation” to protect Russian speakers and liberate Ukraine from a “junta of Russophobes.”Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. This is a family quarrel. Russia is the reasonable elder relative, reluctantly restoring order in a household that has lost its way. Whatever is happening, it’s being done out of love — or at worst out of necessity, and certainly not out of hatred. It’s an intervention.Register the Mana first, the feeling before the thought. The charge here is fraternal reassurance — a big, calm, patient presence. This is the merciful sovereign. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The “protection” was launched against a sovereign neighbour that had attacked no one. Is it generous? It cast a whole nation, Ukrainians, as a fiction to be corrected out of existence. The mask says brother. The conduct — the substance, the mana — says something else entirely. The moment you can see the merciful sovereign costume on the elder brother, the warmth stops disarming you, because you can see what it’s delivering.Yakubova’s whole opening move is to refuse the costume. She will not say conflict. She will not say family quarrel. She lifts the mask, and underneath it she finds not a brother but a beast.Why the Monster? Rigor Refusing the EuphemismWhy does a careful scholar abandon the careful words? Because — and this is the heart of Tool 1 — the careful words were the apparatus’s idea. For more than a century, Yakubova argues, and in her devastating phrase, the discipline “missed the birth and the formation of its own ontological enemy.” The mild vocabulary — the regional conflict, the post-Soviet space, the Russia question — these are not neutral. These are the elder brother’s own vocabulary, and to use it is to keep seeing through his eyes. The antidote is to name the thing in your own tongue.Here Yakubova is not alone and not eccentric. The word she anatomises — Ruscism — is not an insult she invented. Ukrainians spontaneously coined it within days of the full-scale invasion. I was in Ukraine for seven years before the full-scale invasion. I didn’t hear the word once. Yet in the first week of the invasion it was everywhere, in all of the Telegram posts, and I was wondering: what is this Ruscism? Ukrainians — 42 million of them — spontaneously, within days of the full-scale invasion, fused Russia and fascism into a single moniker, a single name. They named what they were seeing. They named what they were meeting — not fraternal love — on the battlefield and under occupation.On the 2nd of May 2023, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, formally ratified and formally defined it, naming Ruscism’s signatures: systematic human rights violations, the cult of the leader, the “Russian world” as a tool of expansion, the use of prohibited methods of war. And in early 2025 the European Parliament responded, condemning the same ideology of Ruscism and policy as incompatible with international law and European values. Two parliaments, an entire continent, naming the enemy by its name. That is Tool 1 performed at the scale of a continent.That’s why the book reaches for the beast. The monster is not a loss of rigor. It’s rigor refusing the euphemism. This is why I created a term to describe something new. In our own terms: the most dangerous archetype is the one that has trained you not to call it an archetype at all. The elder brother’s deepest defence is that “brother” doesn’t sound like a weaponised story. Naming it as one is the whole fight. He’s not a brother. He’s a beast. And he’s risen from the abyss to kill every single Ukrainian — not out of love, but out of ressentiment.Ruscism: The Highest Stage of the Russkiy MirYakubova’s third chapter sets out the thesis the rest of the book proves: Ruscism is the highest stage of the Russkiy Mir. Not a betrayal of the Russian world, but its fulfilment. The warm tent and the beast are the same structure seen in two moments, and the warmth was always the delivery system for the thing inside. The warmth was the delivery system. The brother — that is the moniker, the name. But the mana is the beast.What is inside, in her account, is not ideology in the ordinary sense at all. It’s something near a death drive, wearing the clothes of a civilisation. She describes a state that had dreamed of stretching Ukraine — these are her words — on the cross: defamed, humiliated, deprived of the right to its very existence. That is the project the elder brother mask was covering. Not the correction of a wayward sibling, but the erasure of a subject. And of the apparatus that does it, she writes the line that gives the book its spine: it is the beast that in the end thirsts for blood, and will drown in its own blood.Hear what that sentence does, because it is itself a piece of Tool 1. It refuses the merciful sovereign’s two great alibis at once. It refuses reasonableness: a beast that thirsts for blood is not balancing books. And it refuses invincibility: a beast that drowns in its own blood is not eternal. She has, in nine words, dispossessed the costume.The verdict writes itself. Is the Russian world generous? It is generous the way a tent is generous to the people it is being lowered onto. Is it true? Its central claim — “one fraternal people” — exists to deny that Ukrainians are a people at all. Is it patient? It’s been waiting a century, and it’s in a hurry now. The Russkiy Mir proofs at every one of the Code’s tests as Disinfolklore: folklore turned against the people it pretends to embrace. It’s the one that arrives dressed as your friend, or your brother. The Russkiy Mir worked for 30 years precisely because “brother” does not set off alarms. Warmth is the one charge we are built not to defend against.Larysa Yakubova’s act — the scholar’s act of refusing the warm word and naming the beast — is Tool 1 in its purest form. And it’s available to you tonight, with any story that crosses your feed. When something addresses you as family while it takes from you as an enemy: lift the mask, name what is underneath it. The naming will not stop the beast — whether that beast is your spouse, or someone in your life who’s bullying you or being unkind to you or operating a coercive control operation on you, or your country, or your community, or your children. But it ends the spell that kept you from seeing it, when you name it. And everything else in this method begins there.I’ll finish off on one more element from this, because it’s such an amazing book. If anyone wants it, I’ve translated it into English, so let me know — we can work out some way; I’ll post it on Substack or something.The Deep Folk: Surkov’s Manufactured PeopleWhen I started this work, I believed the most comfortable thing that everyone in the West still believes. I believed there was a Kremlin and then there was a people — a vast, suffering, hostage population held down by a small clique of cynics — so that if you peeled the clique away, the people underneath would be more or less like us. It is a kind belief, and it lets you hate the regime and pity the nation with the same breath. Yakubova’s second move holds that belief up to the light and very quietly breaks it, because her hardest chapter is not about the men in the Kremlin at all. It’s about the millions who said yes.Here is my claim up front, the way I always do it. The so-called deep folk — that’s Surkov’s archetyping of Russia’s people; he calls them the deep folk — and Yakubova addresses this. She says the so-called deep folk of Russia are not the regime’s hostage. They are its co-author and its accomplice. That is the most uncomfortable sentence in her book, and I think the most important, so I’ll earn it slowly.Tonight’s anchor here is Tool 4: inner realm / outer realm switching — Tool 4 of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, disinfolklore.eu. What Donald does every time he talks about the outer-realm migrants coming to steal our children, to steal your daughters, to eat your dogs, eat your pets. That’s inner/outer realm switching. It’s the cognitive division Disinfolklore exists to exploit. Every one of us carries an inner map: an us, a circle of the trusted, an arya — A-R-Y-A — a centre, the centre of our community. That’s what arya means. The Aryans were simply the people in the centre of our community, the inner realm, and the real. In outer darkness, the enemies and monsters lived. So they were the ones that the Russians in Russia-occupied Ukraine were archetyping Ukraine as, across the Donets River. They were saying that is outer darkness, through a million different memes and stories every day, which I was trying to parse and understand.And the apparatus — the apparatus doesn’t invade that map. It redraws it. I’ll show you the most ambitious thing that has ever been drawn there: an entire manufactured people, a manufactured us, conjured into being by the manufacture of an enemy. And we proof every move against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and we name the archetype, because recognition halves the mana.So: the people that was made. There’s a phrase Yakubova works with that we all need to know, and it’s one of the most chilling pieces of political branding of our century. The deep folk — from Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s own stage manager, ex-deputy prime minister of Russia, reputedly on the Maidan, if not directly directing the snipers then overseeing the snipers’ work, when the Heavenly Hundred were massacred. He coined it in a 2019 essay, and he meant it as praise: a mystical, bottomless reservoir of ordinary Russians who always rescue the state in its hour of need by simply being there. Deep, loyal, inexhaustible. The regime gave itself a folk. It named its own foundation.Yakubova turns that phrase over to show us the rot on the underside. Because a deep folk in the Surkov sense is not a people who grew. It’s a people who were drained. She describes a mass from which the load-bearing human values have been, in her account, surgically removed — conscience, the capacity for guilt, the sense of the other person as real — so that what remains can be pointed at anything and will not flinch. A mass she calls, in a word I’ll quote exactly, boundless — bezmernyi — measureless, without an edge or bottom. Not deep like a well that holds something. Deep like an abyss that holds nothing.Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. We are eternal. We are the people. We are the folk — vast and humble and true — and our enemies are a thin foreign film on the surface. To stand with the deep folk is to stand with something older and realer than any law you could cite against it.Register the mana first, the feeling, before any thought. It is belonging — warm, total, dissolving. The relief of being part of something measureless, never having to stand alone or answer alone again. That feeling is the product. That is what was manufactured by Surkov. The moment you can feel the engineering in it, you can name what is underneath.The archetype is the outer realm monster, and it runs backwards from how you expect. You think the monster is the thing in the outer dark — but here the monster in the outer dark is the device. These are not beliefs the deep folk hold. They are the walls of the room the deep folk lives in. Tool 4 in its purest form: the inner-realm us is conjured by the manufacturing of an outer-realm them.Proof it against the Code. Is it true? No. A folk defined entirely by the enemies it has been given is a fiction. The enemies are painted, and so therefore is the people. Is it generous? No. It’s built by the wholesale denial of everyone outside the war. This is Disinfolklore at industrial scale, because the unit of manufacture here is not a meme or a slogan. It’s a nation’s sense of itself.ClosingNext week I’ll continue with that series, because I’m quite excited by it. She’s just amazing, and I think everyone in the West needs to read this book. If they don’t, I’m going to do my best to ensure at least all of us become aware of it. I’ll leave it at that for this week.Next episode: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026.I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught myself, somewhere about the 20-minute mark, beginning to relax — and that is the moment to name.https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternalTonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, at disinfolklore.eu, which I, Decoding Trolls, am elaborating on over these podcasts and over all of my life for the past three years.The single hardest archetype to see is the one that arrives dressed as your friend. All of us will have experience of this, especially in conversations about Ukraine.Shaw’s Test: Reasonable vs UnreasonableThere is an irony in my title that an erudite colleague of mine in eastern Ukraine would savour. He once called me, only half-mockingly, an unreasonable man — in Bernard Shaw’s sense: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” My sin, in his telling, was a habit of asking my superiors the questions that undermined their authority. Totally innocent questions on my part. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be the whole method.The tyrant performs the reasonable man — adapted, accommodating, asking only for facts. The antidote is the unreasonable person: the troll radar that refuses to adapt to the costume and keeps asking the question the calm was built to stop.Here is the claim of this piece, stated up front the way I state everything. The performance of the reasonable man is the costume the merciless sovereign wears to the press conference. The wolf in sheep’s clothing — the sheep’s clothing of the reasonable man. The calm is not the opposite of the threat. The calm is the delivery system for the threat.By the end, I’m going to show you that Duncey Putler obligingly names his own method out loud, in his own words, and then dares us not to notice.In everything I do as Decoding Trolls, everything is proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it true? Is it right? Is it patient? I name the archetype, because once you can see the archetype operating, you cannot unsee it. Recognition halves the mana.The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a MirrorLet me begin. The drone he had only heard about. A journalist from TASS opens with the news of the hour. A drone has come down on a residential building in Galați, in Romania, a NATO member. Europe says it’s Russia. Why didn’t they shoot it down?Watch what Putin does. He does not answer. He performs not knowing. This is a trick many of us who watch Donald closely have noticed him also perform. Putler said: “I only just learned, before walking into this hall, that some event occurred with a supposedly ours drone. If you’d be so kind as to repeat it for me, I say this without jokes, without irony.”Then he demands proof and dismisses the accuser: “Frau von der Leyen wasn’t in Romania. She didn’t examine the wreckage.” Then the pivot, the real move: “We know Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, into Poland, into the Baltics. The first reaction was always, oh, the Russians are coming. Then it turned out they were Ukrainian. Blown off course.”Here’s what the apparatus — the Russian apparatus, which has cast Putin in the role of sovereign — wants us to think. Putin is the only calm adult in the room. The Europeans are hysterics, shouting before the forensics are in. It was probably a stray Ukrainian drone anyway.Register the mana first: the feeling before the thought, the energy, the disarming calm. A man so unbothered, so reasonable, asking only for evidence. That feeling is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it and the voltage halves.This is accusation in a mirror — the oldest move in the combat propaganda playbook, where you perform the violation and then, before anyone can prove it, hand the violation to your victim.Proof it against the Code. Is it true? The honest answer, “we don’t yet know,” would survive. Putler doesn’t stay there. He says no one can name the origin until an examination is done, and in the very same breath he supplies the answer. Is it generous? No. It calls the bereaved hysterical. This is Disinfolklore. It violates the Code of Positive Trolls.Standing on the Ground: Romania’s 28 BreachesThe counter is the ground that the apparatus needs us not to stand on. Romania says Russian drones have breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began bombing Ukraine’s Danube ports. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, did not reach for forensics. He said Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all, and that the Alliance stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory.I noticed both the United States and NATO archetyped it as reckless behaviour — which I know from criminal law is: either you were reckless, or you did the act intentionally. By archetyping the act as reckless, they are giving Russia a get-out. No matter. The keeper of the open account does not need an autopsy on every single drone when the pattern is 28 breaches deep. The question is never “can you prove this one?” It is: who has been flying into NATO airspace for three years?The Bridge Troll Dressed as Friendship: ArmeniaSome of you will remember the bridge troll, the archetype from the beginning of my work on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2017. He went on with this press conference to talk about what I now see is the archetype of a tollgate. The tollgate dressed as friendship — the obstacle to be overcome, the exchange between you and he. This is where you have to keep your guard highest, because the next move is delivered as love.He went on at length about Armenia, giving Armenia advice about the cost of moving towards the European Union. I won’t dwell on it, but I will dwell on its meaning. The mana here, the energy, is not fear. It’s something warmer and more dangerous. It’s gratitude. You’re positioned to thank Moscow for its honesty. Name the archetype and the warmth curdles.This is the bridge troll, the keeper of the threshold who sets the toll for passage, fused with coercive control. I’ve stood on the literal version of that bridge at Stanytsia and watched armed men decide who crosses. The toll schedule is the threat — and note the tell Putin volunteers unprompted: “the crisis in Ukraine began with attempts to join the EU.” That is not analysis. That is: look what happened to the last neighbour who tried the other road. It’s a threat.I’ve written before about how we — not we, because we are — we must get better at recognising Russian threats, because they are masked through reasonable men acting as the toll keeper.Proof it. Is it patient? No — he’s demanding Armenia makes a choice “as early as possible,” before the bill can be weighed. It’s manufactured urgency. It’s inevitability farming. Urgency — whether it’s someone socially engineering your ID or your data, or in geopolitics — is always the red flag the Code is built to catch. Is it generous? No. The entire world’s weight is loaded onto a small economy and dependency is dressed as benevolence. Is it true? The 14 percent of GDP reduction is real, because Russia controls every lever in it. This is Disinfolklore, again delivered by the reasonable man.The Mother and the Maiden: Starobilsk Converted to KyivSome of you will also remember the mother and the maiden archetype, which I look at as being the base for most Disinfolklore. The centre of gravity of the whole performance of Putin in this press conference in Kazakhstan, the most engineered to switch off your judgement by switching on your grief.Asked about his strikes on Kyiv, Putler turns the question into an indictment of Ukraine and of the journalists in front of him. Again, another trick we see Donald do. “Our strike too was in response for their crimes against children in Starobilsk. Our strike on the Kyiv region. They deliberately killed our children.”Is this mass media? No. It’s the means of mass dumbing-down. It’s brilliant — a terrible, stupid little pun. Mass media becomes the means of mass stupefaction. It does three things at once: it grieves, it accuses, and it pre-discredits anyone who might check.What the apparatus wants us to think: Ukraine murders Russian children, Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are righteous revenge, and any outlet that doesn’t lead with the dead children is a lie machine. Feel the mana, because it’s overwhelming by design. Protective fury — the oldest and most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. This is the mother-and-the-maiden’s grief and the martyred commanders. It must be avenged. Fused and loaded.I will name the archetype precisely. It is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets, laid over an accusation in a mirror: the documented mass killer of civilians performing mourning in order to license the next strike.I’m going to be more careful here about what the apparatus is, not less, because the method has to work the same no matter who is pointing it — or it’s worth nothing. So here is exactly what I claim. We’ve all seen the TV programmes from Russian TV demonstrating the Rubicon unit were operating out of this facility. Ukraine denies hitting the dormitory, calling the Russian account manipulation. A local resident told Reuters the site was a former base hit first by rockets. Reuters was not able independently to verify anything. The United Nations has no access to the territory, as we discussed last week, because it is occupied Luhansk, and could only confirm that reportedly six dead — even though TASS eventually drove the children’s count to 18, and, as we saw two days ago, Putler was banging on about Starobilsk again.The Disinfolklore is not in the grief. The Disinfolklore is in the conversion of the contested grief into a warrant — into roughly 600 drones and 90 missiles against the civilian capital, one of them an Oreshnik, a nuclear-capable missile that the EU’s Kaja Kallas rightly called “reckless nuclear brinkmanship.” It is in the inversion that brands the only outlets reporting an occupied-territory strike as the liars.Proof it against the Code and the verdict writes itself. Is it patient? It demands immediate vengeance. Is it generous? It uses dead children as the load-bearing beam of a justification for killing more children. The UN’s own count is 337. I’m a huge critic of the methodology that the United Nations uses, and I participate in some of these fact-checking exercises myself, going into the morgues to visually ID the dead bodies of people in order to help these statistics. We understand that up to 80, or maybe as many as 100,000 people in Mariupol were killed, and many of them were children, whose numbers will never be counted in these UN statistics — because they need someone like me to see, they need two or three people like me to triangulate and to see the body, before it can be counted in the statistics.This is Disinfolklore at its apex. The Code’s counter-move on the martyred commander is the subtlest one I know and the only honest one. Mourn the dead, refuse the liturgy. Do not dismiss the children. Do not let them be turned into the key that unlocks Kyiv. The UN said the only thing that survives the fog: civilians must be protected wherever they are. “Wherever” — that little word refuses to hold retaliation arithmetic.The Goebbels InversionAsked whether Russia is preparing for the war that Europe says it is preparing for, Putler said: “It’s nonsense. It’s a lie. A crude, brazen lie. As Goebbels said in his time, the more incredible the lie, the faster they believe it. These are exactly the standards Western politicians and media implant.”Sit with that. The president of the Rushist Federation invokes Goebbels in order to accuse the West of being Goebbelsian. Then he runs the full exculpation. “The 2014 coup in Kyiv forced Russia to protect the Crimeans” — here he’s playing merciful sovereign. Then the Donbas so-called republics: “We did everything absolutely transparently, legally, step by step.”This is accusation in a mirror in its purest, laboratory form, fused with the merciful sovereign’s self-exculpation and the NATO-expansion bogeyperson.The proof that it is the mirror is that he names the mechanism himself. A few answers earlier, on the drone, he had said: “The West tries to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy one.” He told you the trick. He told you its name. The work of counter-Disinfolklore is simply to refuse the transfer. The work of Disinfolklore is to point out that these kinds of phrases — “to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy” — are the way Russia communicates its threats from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy. That’s what I bring to the table with Disinfolklore, because as far as I’m aware, nobody else has seen that pattern and looked at it so closely as I have.Proof it. Is it true? “Transparent, legal, step by step” is contradicted by a new 9th-grade Russian schoolbook edited by Medvedev, now Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council, that prints unoccupied Zaporizhzhia and Mala Tokmachka among it as the Rushist Federation. Annexation taught to children as geography — unoccupied land under UN Charter Article 2(4), which forbids exactly that.The Goebbels projection has an evidential counter too. There is a serious Atlantic Council study, written before this press conference, entitled “Putler’s Next Move: Five Russian Attack Scenarios Europe Must Prepare For.” European defence is not paranoia invented to fleece taxpayers. It’s a threat assessment that predates the man calling it nonsense.This is Disinfolklore. The one who quotes Goebbels to call you the liar has handed you the mirror. Let’s hold it up to him.The Paper Conquest and ISW’s VerdictA lighter move, but a revealing one. Putler says: “The situation is nearing completion. Our troops advance on all fronts. You see it every blessed day.”What the apparatus wants you to think: the war is all but won, resistance is futile, better to settle on Moscow’s terms now. Name the archetype. This is the paper conquest — the claim that runs miles ahead of the territory. It has a real-world theatre attached to it: the move the apparatus reaches for whenever a city has to be declared taken. In late 2025, Russia invited foreign journalists, as I talked about last week, and even Ukrainian ones, to come and film the encircled Ukrainian force in Kupyansk.Proof it against the ground, because here the ground answers with the numbers. The Institute for the Study of War, reading the same battlefield, found that Russian forces seized 104 square kilometres in the first five months of 2026, against 1,619 in 2025 — a 15-fold collapse. ISW’s verdict on the man himself is devastating: “Putler has likely developed a false perception of Russian military successes based on heavily exaggerated maps from the Russian High Military Command.”The counter wrote itself in the most literal way imaginable. When Russia invited the cameras, President Zelensky was there, demonstrating the conquest Russia didn’t make. The Jamestown Foundation documents that Russia’s draft budget cuts military spending while raising state media funding by 54 percent. They’re buying the story because they cannot buy the ground.What I Will Not Call DisinfolkloreThe neural network that I’m creating has to be capable of dividing memes, or elements in memes, into Disinfolklore, in-folklore, and neutral. This is a neutral part.When he explained the Russian export credit financing Kazakhstan’s nuclear plant, he talked about standard international practice: “we lend rather than gift.” That is ordinary statecraft self-portraiture. Not necessarily Disinfolklore.Now, those of us who are aware that Rosatom is brutally occupying Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and bombing Chernobyl nuclear power plant, understand the idea of Russia being involved in building a nuclear power plant anywhere is to create the potential for nuclear catastrophe as leverage.When he claimed Russia is one of three nations with sovereign artificial intelligence “that some firms build on, and Sberbank builds its own” — that is a national-champion sales pitch, and it could be argued with on the merits. Neither of those is really Disinfolklore, and I won’t code them as such. The whole method dies the day it becomes a machine that stamps Disinfolklore on everything a Russian president said. The discipline of refusing to overname it is exactly what earns the verdict when the real thing appears.The Costume Slips: Kaliningrad and LatviaTwice near the end, the costume slipped, and you see the thing the reasonableness was wrapped around. On the Baltic states’ talk of striking Kaliningrad: “Russia has every means to raze to the ground all who try.” On a claim that Ukraine had moved drone operators to Latvia: “All places from which to direct — I want to stress, direct — military threat to Russia emanates, our legitimate targets.”What the apparatus wants you to think: don’t poke the bear. Any move near Russia, and the response is total and lawful. This is provocation logic, “don’t poke the bear,” in its naked deterrent form. It pre-licences strikes on the soil of UN Charter members by making the bogeyperson’s threat elastic enough to mean anything Moscow decides.Here’s the contradiction we must hold up against the light. Four answers after calling the idea of Russian aggression towards Europe “nonsense, a crude, brazen lie,” he threatens to level NATO members. Set the two sentences side by side and the performance collapses on its own.The Schröder Wedge and the Minsk InversionThen the door he pretends is open. He floats Schröder as a trustworthy European partner — the Nord Stream Chancellor — “yes, we are friends, what’s wrong with that?” That is the wedge: elevate the captured insider, delegitimise everything else, split the European public from its own governments.In the same breath, he poisons the very idea of agreement. He now says the Minsk Accords were signed only to buy time and arm Ukraine. The independent fact-checkers at Myth Detector went back to what Merkel actually said: that Minsk gave Ukraine time to strengthen because the threat came from Russia. Putler takes her defence of admission and inverts it into proof of Western treachery. The same inversion one more time. This is Disinfolklore.I’ll add the one thing I can say that he cannot, because I was there from 2015 to 2018: the man telling you Minsk was a Western trick is the man who broke it every morning before breakfast.The Architecture: 18 Answers as One Engineered ArcLet’s look at the machine behind the man — the whole architecture — because the 18 answers he gave are not 18 answers. They are one engineered arc.The candour frame lowers your guard: “I’m only being honest, gov.” The merciful sovereign governs the middle: the generous creditor, the caring neighbour. The grievance engine loads the avenging mana: “they killed our children.” The exculpation discharges it at the scale of history: “you are the Goebbels liars; 2014 forced us.” And then the teeth: the legitimate targets, the wedge, the poisoned door.The Propagation Apparatus: The Pravda Mirror SitesIt does not stay in Astana. Within 24 hours the same lines were splashed, near-identical, across a whole network of mirror sites — Pravda in English, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Turkish — each re-skinning the Kremlin transcript for a local audience, so that the same claims appear to come from everywhere at once, manufacturing the feel of independent corroboration. That is the propagation apparatus the questions never mention. That is the mana being mass-produced.The Unreasonable HumanHere’s the single thing I want us to carry out of this episode. When a sovereign sits before the cameras and is patient and candid and reasonable and grieved, that is not evidence that he is none of those things. Reasonableness is a register. It can be worn. The merciless sovereign wears it best of all, because he learned a long time ago you will lower your guard for the calm man faster than you ever would for the shouting one.He told us his own method: from the sick head onto the healthy one. Our whole task, yours and mine, is simply, every single time, to refuse the transfer from the sick head unto the healthy one — from the accusation in the mirror blaming Ukraine for Russia’s own murders.That refusal has a name — the one a colleague pinned on me, half-mockingly, in Severodonetsk one afternoon on the ground in eastern Ukraine. It is the work of the unreasonable human. The one who will not adapt themselves to a tyrant’s reasonable world, who keeps asking the questions that undermine the authority performing it. If George Bernard Shaw was right that all progress depends on the unreasonable person, then so, every single time, does all counter-Disinfolklore.That’s his press conference. That’s what I have to say about that.The Counter Pole: The Arabat Spit StrikeGoing back to the Starobilsk episode, which I talked about last week — I didn’t get to the positive bit, so I just wanted to go back to that a bit, which is what I call the counter pole, the Arabat Spit, and what I call the substrate truth.I want to put against the Kyiv strikes that Wendy witnessed a counter-example from a few days before then, because the asymmetry is the substance of the case.The 17th of May. The Arabat Spit — the long, narrow barrier island that runs north-south along the western edge of the Sea of Azov, near occupied Henichesk in Kherson Oblast. Ukraine Security Service Special Operations Centre A (Alpha unit, who many of us have helped) strikes a Rushist FSB headquarters complex. Nine buildings. A Pantsir-S1 self-propelled air defence system parked at the site destroyed in the same operation. Around 100 Russian personnel killed or injured. NASA satellite thermal data confirms the fires. President Zelensky publicly confirms the strike on the 21st of May. He released the footage on Twitter. He named the unit that did it: “Thanks to this single operation, Russian losses amount to about 100 invaders killed and wounded. The Russists must feel that they have to end this war of theirs. Ukrainian medium- and long-range strikes will continue.”The Asymmetry: Open Ukraine, Closed ApparatusNow apply the comparison. Ukraine’s Arabat Spit strike: named military target, in FSB headquarters, named air defence asset alongside it, named perpetrator on the Ukrainian side, public release of the footage, open attribution, international humanitarian law observed in the targeting, transparent in the announcement. This is what striking a legitimate military target looks like.Russia’s Kyiv strike six days later targets the National Art Museum, the Chernobyl Museum, the Opera Theatre where Ukraine’s first parliament of the 21st century met, residential blocks, a water supply facility, a market. Casualties overwhelmingly civilian. Munitions including the Oreshnik nuclear-capable hypersonic. Attribution: the apparatus framing of retaliation for a contested stage-one event the apparatus itself probably had manufactured.This is the asymmetry: Ukraine striking Rushist military apparatus openly. When the Western press treats these two operations as morally symmetric instances of “the war continuing,” the Western press is failing the Code of Positive Trolls. When the Western press’s headlines use Ukraine’s strike as the cause and Russia’s strike as the response, the Western press is doing the apparatus’ work for it.The Pantheon of Heroes: Real Walls, Real NamesAgainst the apparatus’ annual mass memorial fabrication on the 9th of May — the Immortal Regiment photos of strangers — stand the genuine Ukraine memorials. The wall at St Michael’s Monastery, which I’m sure Wendy saw, and which I found at the beginning of the war. The Google Street View footage of St Michael’s, of the wall empty — and then gradually we’ve just seen it, this massive, massive long wall being filled with the photographs of the people who have died defending Ukraine. Those photographs of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who died fighting Russism since 2014.The new National Military Memorial Complex, the Pantheon of Heroes, inaugurated this month, where Colonel Andriy Melnyk and his wife Sofiya were reburied. Statues throughout Ukraine: to murdered starosta Olha Sukhenko of Motyzhyn; to the forcibly disappeared Serhiy Tsyhipa from Kherson; to the named fallen or disappeared at the village scale. Real wall, real cemetery, real statues, named individuals with real biographies attached to real towns — not these fake Immortal Regiment photos that are tossed away at the end of the parade.Foundation Defence and Right ManaThe framework’s name for this asymmetry is the Foundation Defence, where the apparatus tries to install Disinfolklore mana at the foundation pole — the cognitive substrate of the post-war Indo-European linguistic order. The in-folklore counter installs right mana at the same pole. Same surface, opposite Code adjudication, opposite substrate. Mana effect: the mana truly held, the energy truly held, is the substrate. The mana counterfeited collapses on the substrate it cannot back.Running the Case Through the 12 ToolsLet me run this quickly through the 12 tools, because the toolkit — which I talk about a lot on disinfolklore.eu — is what turns the case from an outrage we shout about into an instrument we can hand to other people.Tool 1, archetypal literacy: what archetype is being deployed? The provocation logic cycle — A accuses B of provoking A. Putler accuses Ukraine of forcing him to kill Ukrainians. Twelfth year of continuous deployment. The Starobilsk–Kyiv cycle of last week is the most recent instance of an archetype the apparatus has run since at least 2014.Tool 2, troll radars: is this incoming or outgoing? Both. Incoming to me: the apparatus would like me to argue about the Starobilsk casualty figures, to litigate the Rubicon headquarters claim, to be drawn into the apparatus’ chosen terrain. Outgoing from me: what am I broadcasting? Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it? Am I distributing that picture of the black-haired French woman that so many people seem to be posting without realising that they are keeping the troll going? They may be writing in text “oh, this person is horrible” — I don’t even read the things, but I do mentally note anyone who shares a picture of this person is doing what the Russians want them to do. They’re putting a pretty, a beautiful, a sophisticated face on Rushism, on the filthiness of Rushism. Even if you criticise it in text, the image goes into people’s brains before they do it. Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it, by sharing the photos without naming it? The discipline is to gatekeep in both directions.Tool 3, mana in the meme: the energy is moral inversion — the aggressor dressed as victim, the witch switch — executed in headline grammar at scale. The mana is the apparatus’ signature.Tool 4, inner/outer realm: the outer realm — the public, collective conversation, the headlines, what we do on Volya, the institutional record, the stage-two echo — is the apparatus colonising the outer realm of democracies.Tool 5, trigger-experience-reaction — the Dalai Lama / Ekman timeline of emotions, the cognitive model which is a core module in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. Trigger, experience, reaction. The trigger is the picture of this black-haired French person. The experience is, “gosh, she looks sophisticated and nice.” Then your reaction: “oh no, she’s awful, I’m going to share it.” The trigger is the Starobilsk story arriving in my feed. The experience is moral arousal. The reaction the apparatus wants is engagement on the apparatus’s terms: “oh, beautiful people like Russia — oh, I will like Russia then.” Tool 5 tells us to interrupt the chain, to notice “I’m being moved on cue.”Tool 6, generosity: is it generous? No. The meme treats 21 dead adolescents as ammunition for justifying mass strikes on Kyiv. The meme is the opposite of generous.Tool 7, right: is it right? No. The meme inverts the moral character of aggression. It is unethical at the root.Tool 8, mana energy, implicit archetypes — the Vritra archetype. Vritra, who fought against Indra to keep the waters blocked up and stop the land being fertile. The Vritra archetype: the force weaponising substrate. The apparatus weaponises international humanitarian law, which underlies our entire civilisation — the moral substrate of how democracies talk about civilian casualties — and turns that substrate against itself, against its own purposes. International humanitarian law was built precisely to prevent the apparatus’s framing. The apparatus uses the language of the laws of war to invert the laws of war, against the UN, to publish their version of what happened.Tool 9, patience: the apparatus needs us to respond now, before the framing is examined, before the contradiction surfaces, before the asymmetry becomes visible. Tool 9 tells us: slow down. The cycle is 12 years old.Tool 10, mindfulness, focus. This is the operative tool of the whole case. Mindfulness as gatekeeping. The apparatus delivers you a payload. You have a choice about whether to accept it. Trigger, experience, reaction. Most of the audience capture the apparatus achieves happens because audiences do not exercise the choice — because the framing arrives at speed, dressed in the visual grammar of grief, and the gatekeeping muscle is not trained.Tool 11, insight, wisdom. The apparatus’s framing flattens who is the aggressor and who is the victim into a fog of “both sides strike things sometimes.” Insight requires restoring the substrate truth.Tool 12, cryptotypic literacy: the RT cryptotype, the “right” substrate that underlies all of our civilisation. The apparatus is claiming “right” in international humanitarian law — protection of children, condemnation of strikes on civilian infrastructure — while operating as the backward pole of the same cryptotype. There are the cryptotype markers of the inversion: the Mariupol-boat artefact, where Darya Dugina explained to a Western journalist on camera that Ukrainians hide their weapons in schools to provoke Russia to attack the schools; the Amnesty report, which was spun by Amnesty’s tweets accusing Ukraine of exactly the same; the Pokrovsk invitation that we talked about last week; the Kupyansk encirclement claim; the Starobilsk announcement. Same cryptotypic deployment, different deployer class, 12-year plan. The deployer is incidental. They’re invoking “right” for something which is not right. It’s wrong, and it’s verifiably wrong.The DN and ND CryptotypesOne new observation as a closing note. The apparatus’s paper conquests — the Pokrovsk encirclement, the Kupyansk surrounding, the maps that claim territory 30 kilometres west of Kupyansk — these are operations on what I call the DN cryptotype, on the river substrate: the Don, Dnipro, Donets, Dniester, the flow-threshold, water as substrate, as dividing land from other land.On the other side, this ND sound, which is in our English word “land,” is the opposite of the DN. It’s the static counterpart — ground, territory, anchor substrate. England, Ireland, the Russian Heimat equivalent, Russian land. The apparatus claims land it does not hold. The Ukrainian counter installs “our land,” nasha zemlya — we always hear President Zelensky say that. Substrate truth, naming at the same pole: real soil, real towns, real soldiers buried in real ground. Cryptotype at full force on both sides of the line.The Counter Move: Outflank, Not RebutWhat is the counter-move? Because I’m not going to leave you with an analytical instrument and no instruction on what to do with it.The counter-move is not to rebut. Rebuttal is the apparatus’s chosen terrain. When we rebut the Starobilsk dormitory framing, we’re already arguing about the dormitory, and the apparatus has already won, because the dormitory is now the subject of the conversation.The apparatus wants the conversation to be about stage one. Stage three — the Kyiv strikes, the destruction of the Chernobyl Museum, the nuclear-capable hypersonic — that’s what the apparatus wants us to look away from. Rebuttal looks away.The counter-move is to outflank. Name the deployment for what it is: the apparatus’s multi-month campaign elevation doctrine, Pokrovsk to Kupyansk to Starobilsk, $458 million per year of state-funded information warfare, Vodolatsky’s self-incrimination on the Voin telegram showing the Starobilsk facility, Vatnik Soup and Tankerfeller forensics within 72 hours, the provocation logic cycle in its 12th year of continuous deployment. Name it, then refuse to litigate the apparatus’s chosen terrain. Do not share these pictures of people.Then put back on the table what the apparatus wants you to ignore — the substrate truth. The substrate truth is the Arabat Spit strike, Ukraine three days before the apparatus-manufactured Starobilsk framing, striking FSB headquarters, with public attribution, with named targets, with footage released, in compliance with the laws of war. The substrate truth is President Zelensky’s selfie in Kupyansk in December — the sovereign. The substrate truth is the wall at St Michael’s Monastery, the Pantheon of Heroes, the village statues to the named fallen. The substrate truth is that the apparatus’ grammar of retaliation is itself a Disinfolklore payload, and the right response to a Disinfolklore payload is to refuse to retransmit it.President Zelensky, July 2022: “No Logic in Terrorists”President Zelensky named the substrate truth in July 2022, and the line still cuts. He said, quoting verbatim: “You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. The Russian army does not take any pauses. She has one task — to take people’s lives, to intimidate people, so that even a few days without an air alarm already feels like part of the terror.”That’s the refusal of the revenge cycle historian’s framing in one sentence. The apparatus is executing the operation it was always going to execute. The framing of retaliation is what the operation wears. It’s a costume. The operation is what the apparatus does. You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. No provocation logic. The retreat from logic is the apparatus’s instrument. The framework is our way back to it.That refusal is Tool 10. Should I allow this into my mind? No. Should I allow this into my conversation? No. Should I allow this into the framings I put into the world through my own speech or tweets? No. Mindfulness applied with discipline at scale across millions of audiences who’ve read this far in the work — that is what would eventually deny the apparatus its product. The apparatus’s product is the framing’s circulation. The counter-move is to deny the circulation, to name the deployment, to refuse the engagement, to move on with the work.The work in this case is Ukraine’s: the Arabat Spit strike, the Kupyansk–Khartiya counter-offensive, President Zelensky’s selfie 1.15 km from Russia’s positions. That is what winning looks like. That is what right looks like — the RT cryptotype, where the action is aligned with the assertion of right, whereas the Russians’ assertion “we control this land” is unaligned with reality or right. The Kyiv strikes are what the apparatus’s response to winning looks like. The doctrine is a textbook deployment, and the toolkit catches it, which is why I focused on it.ClosingIf you’re encountering these 12 tools for the first time, the place to start is the disinfolklore.eu website. I’ll leave it at that.Discussion: Strelkov, Akhmetov, and the Flywheel of DeathI’ve been waiting to see milbloggers talk or face the fact that the war will end when they lose Crimea and when they withdraw from 100 percent of Ukraine. Today I was speaking with Iona and Will and Ming, and a few others, and Lexicon. I hadn’t read the text of this post, which I then, re-listening to Mockers, re-heard. I focused on it because it was talking about the flywheel of death — a Russian blogger talking about this flywheel of death which the Russians are involved in in Ukraine.I’ve been excavating archetypes from ancient Buddhist texts all week, so I’ve been very connected to this idea of the wheel of life and the Universal Sovereign. When I saw that phrase, I was like — wow, that’s amazing. It’s really interesting to hear. The real meat in that was — this is the first time I’ve heard anyone with a significant following, anyone anywhere in Russia, realise that the end of the war is when they leave Crimea. I’ve been looking for this indicator since early March 2022, and today it landed.As I was saying before — I had read this properly to Will on the show — I see the same pattern in what Strelkov is saying now as what he was saying in early March: “oh, we need a mobilisation, things are terrible, awful, awful, awful, we need a mobilisation, we need a nuclear bomb, we need this, we need that.” They never vocalise this realisation, which I want to see take hold.I’m very happy about that. I’m on record as saying that is the indicator I was looking for: when the Russians start realising that they’re not going to get away with stabilising the front lines in Donetsk.Now I know the Russian official state position is still — I saw it again this week — didn’t we see that Russia says, if Ukraine just gives us Donetsk and Luhansk, then we promise we’re not going to conquer the rest of Ukraine. Which is just the most bizarre logic I’ve ever heard in my life. Basically: these villages in eastern Ukraine, which we can’t conquer militarily — if you give them to us, fine; if you don’t give them to us, then we’re going to conquer every city and village in Ukraine. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s embarrassing, as previously discussed, that Witkoff and Co fell for that troll.Very interesting to see that. I’m very happy for that. We’ve all been through — not, obviously, as bad a winter as the Ukrainians. How about you? What do you feel? What’s the mood? Wendy, did you encounter many people? Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Today I’m going to talk a bit about the Starobilsk incident, using the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and I’m also going to talk about some examples from what I call the Luhansk Corpus, which I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks. We’re in the midst — not even one hundredth of a way through — what I have to talk about. This corpus is 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while I worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and between Russia-occupied Ukraine and government-controlled Ukraine, between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk, and then afterwards in Dnipro.Today’s Topic: The Starobilsk IncidentThe first thing I’m going to talk about is the Starobilsk incident. Some of you probably didn’t hear about it, but it was a really interesting example for me to apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method to. The moment I heard the President of the Rushist Federation mention a school in Starobilsk — which is a town I know very well, I used to go through it a lot when I lived in Severodonetsk, so it has that personal connection to me as well — and the moment I heard President Putin talk about it and talk about this, what I call the manufactured wound archetype, basically, it reeked of this, and I recognised the pattern. I thought, as the English might say, there was something rum about this. I tuned in.Russia’s defence ministry announces in Putin’s name that international journalists are invited to come and see for themselves that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. The apparatus — which is how I refer to the entire collection of actors operating the Russian Federation — offers a five-to-six-hour ceasefire to enable the tour.12th of December 2025: Putin claims at a press conference, based on a briefing from Gerasimov, that 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions are blocked inside Kupyansk. Fifteen battalions. He invites journalists again to come and verify. On the same day, Volodymyr Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk himself, records a video address on his iPhone at the entrance stele, 1.15 kilometres from Russian positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. DeepState map confirms the coordinates.22nd of May 2026: the apparatus elevates a strike on occupied Starobilsk to a campaign. Putin calls it a terrorist strike. Peskov calls it a monstrous crime. Six Russian official spokespersons issue coordinated naming within 12 hours. Russia requests a UN Security Council emergency session. Within 36 hours, 90 missiles and 600 drones land on Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, as all of us will know — where the Oreshnik fell, and some garages. The Chernobyl Museum was hit. We had an interesting discussion about this on Ming and Joanna’s show earlier in the week. I think Lexicon and I were convinced — and indeed I think Ming as well — that this was a hit on purpose. The Oreshnik, the nut tree or the walnut tree, the nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, is fired for the third time in this war.What we’re looking at is not three discrete events — which many people will see them as, but not us, and not me through the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. We’re looking at one eight-month campaign elevation doctrine that has been running in continuous deployment since at least last October. The Starobilsk strike of last Thursday is the latest instance. It’s not the first, and it will not be the last. This is Disinfolklore in real time.The Apparatus Does Not Improvise Its ArchetypesThe thing about the apparatus is that it does not improvise its archetypes. It deploys them again and again on the same template. What looks like news in your morning headlines, or on my evening television, or in our social media feeds, is on closer inspection the apparatus running the same play it ran last quarter, and the quarter before that, and the quarter before that. The play I want to walk you through tonight is what I’m going to call, for the rest of this episode, the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine.It is one specific kind of Disinfolklore deployment — the kind that begins with an apparatus invitation to international journalists and ends with a hypersonic missile in Kyiv. The doctrine has a name and a shape and a budget line.When I talk about Disinfolklore being a narrative form, what I’m talking about is the actor who is the acting president of the Rushist Federation. He’s an actor. He’s deployed on certain stages at certain times, and he speaks fluent Disinfolklore. His Disinfolklore is then ventriloquised, puppeted through the voices of other members of the apparatus until it becomes like a cacophony, like a chorus, like a vibration in our brain, until it meets the ears of a child in Kyiv who’s suddenly very frightened. That’s why I call it Disinfolklore, and the whole operation is a Disinfolklore operation.The Budget Line: $458 Million for Information WarfareThe budget line is documented. In November of last year, the Jamestown Foundation — a serious-grade Western think tank that most of us will be aware of and respect, not a partisan source — published a piece by Yuri Lapayev showing Russia’s draft 2026 budget cuts military spending by $2.4 billion compared to 2025, while raising the state-funded media budget by 54 percent, $458 million additional. The apparatus is, in plain print, defunding its army to fund its information warfare. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha put the same funding on the public record. This is not a hidden doctrinal shift. This is the apparatus that has openly chosen to substitute information warfare for kinetic capability. The campaign elevation doctrine I’m about to walk through is what those $458 million are for.The Three Moves of the DoctrineThe shape of the doctrine is three moves.Move one: the apparatus invites international journalists to verify an apparatus claim about a Ukrainian territory the apparatus does not actually hold — Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Kupyansk, Krasnoarmiysk, Starobilsk. The invitation is the deployment. The apparatus does not need the journalists actually to arrive. The apparatus needs the invitation to circulate in Western media as evidence that Russia has nothing to hide.Move two: the apparatus produces its own evidence substrate. Telegram-distributed photographs from occupier-installed regional leaders; casualty figures from the apparatus’ human rights commissioners; all-actors framing statements from the apparatus’ foreign ministers; official namings from the Kremlin press secretary; and, at the apex, a head-of-state — an acting head of state, an actor, a stage actor, an acting head of state — personal statement from Putler himself. The evidence substrate is the apparatus’ product. Western media absorbs the substrate as if it were independent reporting.Move three: with moral cover now installed, the apparatus executes the actual operation — the strike, the barrage, the mass attack on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. The Western press’s headlines treat the execution as retaliation for whatever the stage-one invitation and evidence substrate had named. The cycle closes.This is the doctrine. Eight months of it now in public view. Let me walk you through how it ran in dates before we get to last Thursday.October 2025: Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and the Encirclement Archetype13th of October 2025: Russia’s Defence Ministry announces that Putler has ordered international journalists, including from Ukraine, to be allowed into Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. Note the counter-move when President Zelensky, who has the right to do this, ordered his army not to attack a small square kilometre inside Moscow for over a period of two hours.Russia, the announcement says, will halt hostilities for five to six hours so journalists can confirm the encirclement of Ukrainian forces. Notice this archetype of encirclement: of Ukrainian forces, cauldron, kettle. For Ukrainians these are sacred terms, because anyone who was in Ukraine in September 2014, just after the first Minsk agreement was signed, will remember the Ilovaisk kotyol, where Ukrainians had surrendered and then they were slaughtered and taken prisoner. The same troll happened again in Debaltseve, just after I arrived in Ukraine — after Minsk 2 was signed — Debaltseve, which is or was an important railway junction, was inside Ukrainian-controlled territory. After signing this agreement, the Russians went on the advance, and once again they killed a lot of Ukrainian soldiers in a cauldron or a kettle. Even the use of these terms — to people who don’t pay attention to these things — they won’t understand their archetypal content and their historical content.Ukraine’s Response: Tykhyi, Syrskyi, and the Centre for Countering DisinformationUkraine’s response is immediate and on the record. Heorhii Tykhyi — please forgive my pronunciation, I’m in the same category as Mockers, although I know she’s better than me at this point — spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, warns journalists not to participate. Russia broke the same promise during the battles for Ilovaisk in 2014, a ceasefire offered to allow Ukrainian troops to retreat, which Russia then violated, killing several hundred Ukrainian soldiers in what would become known as the Ilovaisk Massacre. One of my friends lost his lovely restaurateur chef brother, Andrei, in that. The Foreign Ministry is reminding journalists that this is what Russia’s humanitarian offers look like.Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, states publicly that there is no blockade of Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk or Kupyansk. The encirclement claim is false. The invitation is propaganda.Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation publishes the structural analysis. The Centre surfaces a detail worth dwelling on: the invitations to German journalists come from a man named Vladimir Sergienko, former assistant to Jürgen Schmidt, an AFD member of the German Bundestag. According to public data, Sergienko may have been recruited by the FSB and may be carrying out — in my opinion — assignments for Russian intelligence under the guise of journalistic activity. The Centre is naming the channel through which the apparatus is staffing its own substitute substrate of international journalists.Roman Svitan: The Operational ReadRoman Svitan, a retired colonel of the Ukrainian Air Force, gives the operational read in early November. His diagnosis, paraphrasing, is that the apparatus’s invitation has nothing to do with allowing journalists in. It has to do with the apparatus needing an operational pause. The apparatus is stuck in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. It needs a pause to bring in fresh reserves and form new tactical groups. The journalist invitation is the cover for the pause. Svitan: “The main request is a pause. That means the enemy has got itself into trouble.”This is something all of us who are caught up in the micro and the granular quotidian activities on the battlefield — insofar as we can, as most of us are not in Ukraine or on the front — but by comparison to normal people that we know who don’t spend all their time thinking about Ukraine and the war and how we can try and help, we know a lot. We understand what’s happening on this road, which I drove along a lot, between Berdyansk and Melitopol now. It’s kind of breaking through a little bit, but perhaps not.We can see a pattern between Russia having its proverbial handed to it by Ukraine at the moment, and these information operations — given a pattern of respectability by all these different actors translating the same script into head-of-state discourse, into diplomatic discourse, as Lavrov does. Simonyan gives lines to all their other propagandists in public so they don’t have to send the email. They know exactly what the official line is to say. We can see that relationship. We are journalists, we would hope — our newsrooms should be able to see that relationship, but don’t always see that relationship.Svitan — and this is why we have so much to learn from Ukrainians who have been dealing with these structures since 2014 — says the main request is a pause. That means the enemy has got itself into trouble. We’re trying to look at the substrate. Putler is inviting journalists in. He’s ordering a pause so journalists, international journalists, can come in. Actually, what’s really going on underneath it — this kind of literacy helps us understand structures and data, what’s imminent in them and the archetypes running underneath them. At the moment I’m programming a neural network to also recognise these in this particular area of Disinfolklore, which is an interesting process.Now follow the thread. The apparatus’ October-to-November 2025 deployment is a propaganda cover for operational weakness deployment. This is what we’re seeing at the moment. The apparatus needs the pause more than the apparatus needs the journalists. The apparatus is staged powerful in the framing and operationally stuck in the field. Disinfolklore here is performing the work the apparatus’s military cannot perform.December 2025: Kupyansk and Zelensky’s Selfie CounterFive weeks later, 12th of December 2025, same play, different city. Putin claims, on the basis of a briefing from Gerasimov which of course is filmed, that Russian forces have managed to block around 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions in the Kupyansk-Vuzlovyi area. He invites journalists again to come and see the surrounded Ukrainian army units.Same day, President Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk. I’m on record as saying this from early in the war: President Zelensky understands this on an instinctual level because he is an entertainer, because he was part of the entertainment industry. He understands how you control emotions, how you use certain triggers to perform certain emotions, and therefore he sees Putler — he sees what they’re doing — in a way that perhaps other world leaders need really smart advisors to help them see, and not many of them are seeing it. I suspect President Macron, who famously did his PhD with Paul Ricoeur, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century — he’s a very clever man, and I was so frustrated with him at the beginning, but now he seems to get it, absolutely gets it, as we see with the nuclear announcements today.I want to dwell on this. The president of Ukraine walks to the entrance stele of the city. DeepState map places him 1.15 kilometres from Russia’s positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. He records a video address. Ukrainian Ground Forces Day is being marked. He thanks the soldiers. He says, quoting verbatim: “Today it is extremely important to achieve results on the front lines so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy.” Do you remember that? We achieve results on the front lines so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy. That’s how it works. “All our strong positions within the country are strong positions in the talks on ending the war.” He closes: “Today is your day. Thank you, guys.”The same day, the Khartiya commander Igor Obolensky confirms to Ukrainska Pravda that the 2nd Corps of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Khartiya formation has conducted a successful counter-offensive inside Kupyansk and is itself encircling a Russian force inside the city. “The task was to enter the city and clear it of Russians. We operated simultaneously along two or three axes, cutting off their logistics.”Let’s read what just happened in the cycle vocabulary. Putler’s stage-one move on Kupyansk — “Russia controls Kupyansk, Ukrainian forces are surrounded, come and see” — is falsified by the sovereign physically standing in Kupyansk, by the OSINT-verified geolocation of his footage, and by the actual operational reality of Ukrainian forces actively retaking the city.The Counter-Disinfolklore MoveThe forward counter-Disinfolklore move installs right mana at the same right pole — the pole we use to determine what is true and what is not — which is the pole the apparatus is trying to capture. The apparatus is trying to capture the right pole. It’s trying to say A is true when it’s not true, and it’s trying to use the media Disinfolklore to persuade us that A is true when A is false. The counter-move is for President Zelensky to go there and demonstrate with his physical presence that actually B is true. The lawful authority is in place, and the apparatus claim to control is wrong.The Code passes for Ukraine, but it fails the Code of Positive Trolls — the second element of which is ethical discipline. It passes for Ukraine: the sovereign is there. It fails for Russia: the sovereign isn’t anywhere near Kupyansk, nor are his forces. The apparatus’ substrate fabrication collapses on its own terms. This is what an ace counter looks like.The Mechanism of Paper ConquestsBefore we move to Starobilsk, here is the wider mechanism President Zelensky’s selfie exposes. The one I want to name and put on the record is the mechanism of paper conquests. The apparatus’s stage-one claims about which Ukrainian territory the apparatus controls are recorded in its own maps. Russia’s general staff’s maps, presented at official briefings, claim — and the Institute for the Study of War has been documenting this in detail in the past week — that Russia controls not just Kupyansk, but territory 30 km west of Kupyansk. I’m indebted to, I think it was Will on Volya who alerted me to this. It could have been Firefella, I’m not sure who — I can’t remember. Territory Ukrainian forces clearly hold.This is taking on credit. The apparatus claims more than it holds because the claim is a propaganda asset. The claim becomes an operational liability. The apparatus’s own commanders cannot call in artillery or air bombs to defend territory the apparatus has officially claimed to control, because defending with artillery a position you say you control looks like friendly fire. Calling in air bombs exposes the lie. The right-pole hack — “we control X” — creates a liability: we cannot defend X. The apparatus pays for its Disinfolklore in its own degraded operational capacity. The apparatus self-defeats.The Flagpole TacticThe Jamestown piece names a sub-pattern of this: the flagpole tactic. Russian soldiers enter a Ukrainian-held position, sometimes in civilian clothes, raise the Russian flag, take a photo as evidence of complete control, and are then destroyed by Ukrainian fire within an hour. RIP. 29th of October last year in Pokrovsk: a Russian flag lasted less than an hour.The same week, 15th of October — even more telling — Russian media announced a mass landing of Russian soldiers on Karantynnyi Island in the Ostrov district of Kherson. Federal-level Russian media disseminated the announcement. The Ukrainian military filmed the area in question. There was no enemy. Russian media simply cancelled the news. TASS, October 22nd, 2025.The flagpole tactic, map-claim conquest, journalist invitation tours — all three are different expressions of the same operational logic. The apparatus is producing propaganda substrate for territory it does not actually hold. The propaganda substrate is the substitute for the territorial control, and the substitution carries its own self-defeating cost. This is the doctrine of Pokrovsk in October, Kupyansk in December, the same play scaled and repeated. Starobilsk in May is the latest deployment.Starobilsk: 21–22 May 2026Starobilsk, 21st of May 2026, the night of the 21st into the 22nd. Starobilsk in occupied Luhansk. I know it well, as I said, from my OSCE years on the contact line — half an hour’s drive from Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, where it all happened for me, where I discovered Disinfolklore, where I worked through the war from 2015 onwards. A drone strike — multiple drones, three waves — 16 one-way attack drones by Russia’s own count — hits a five-storey building inside the Starobilsk Pedagogical College complex.I’m aware of the reports about Russians bombing themselves and Ryan Sugar. My method: we don’t have to go into that. We don’t need to know the facts. It would be very interesting if out of proof came of that.The Chronology and First-Mover AdvantageThe read was about the pattern of the apparatus’ deployments, not about anything to do with the temporal order of incident reporting. When I commissioned a careful hour-by-hour chronology of the case to test my temporal hypothesis, the chronology disproved one specific framing I had been considering, and confirmed the deeper point.Here’s what the chronology found. The strike landed in the small hours of the 22nd of May. By the morning, Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner — again, an actor, so they’re acting the role of a Human Rights Commissioner — Yana Lantratova was already making the civilian casualty claim. 35 children. Remember: I discovered Disinfolklore when Russia planted the mother-and-the-maiden archetype in a story that just seemed not true.Pasechnik, the Moscow-installed fake regional governor — again acting as a governor, he’s an actor, as in a stage play on a television programme — of occupied Luhansk, posted the Telegram photos of the damaged building. The regional state TV channels of occupied Luhansk, the apparatus-aligned GTRK Lugansk feed, the Lugansk 24 channel, were already running incident coverage. 24/7 incident coverage.By the morning of the 22nd, the apparatus had been first to the incident framing. Ukraine’s general staff statement claiming the Rubicon headquarters target came later in the day — at 16:02 Kyiv time per UNN. Initially I had assumed Ukraine claimed it and the Rushists were responding to it. That was my hypothesis. When I looked in detail at the chronology, that hypothesis was wrong. It was explicitly reactive to the Russian-side incident framing already in circulation.For this specific case, the apparatus had a structural first-mover advantage on incident reporting. The strike happened on apparatus-controlled territory. Regional apparatus-aligned Telegram channels are on-the-ground first reporters. Ukraine’s general staff publishes target lists on its own schedule, typically morning-after batches, not racing-to-the-news mode. The apparatus’ first arrival on the incident is not a sign of what I call a Class L deployment. It’s a sign of who happens to be in the room when the strike lands on apparatus-controlled territory.The Campaign Elevation StepWhat is the sign of a Class L deployment? That’s a coding I’m using in the neural network. It is the campaign elevation step.The campaign elevation step, in this case, lands at approximately 15:15 Kyiv time on the 22nd of May. At that moment, at a meeting of his Vremya Geroev (”Time of the Heroes”) programme graduates, Putler issued the campaign elevation framing, verbatim per Meduza: “Tonight the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv carried out a terrorist attack on the student dormitory of Starobilsk Pedagogical Institute.” He added: “This strike was not an accident. It just once again confirms the terrorist nature of the Kyiv regime.” He ordered the defence ministry to draw up response options.Now watch what happens in the next nine hours. Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, issues the “monstrous crime” framing. Verbatim: “This is a monstrous crime — an attack on an education institution where children and young people are present.” The mother-and-the-maiden archetype: the fertility of the realm depends on children.Zakharova at the foreign ministry issues the “deliberate against children” framing. Lvova-Belova — for whom a warrant is currently issued for her arrest — Lvova-Belova, the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, another actor, the same operator who oversees the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children and kidnapped one herself from occupied territories — that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for her and Putin for — claims up to 18 children could be trapped.Russia’s foreign ministry calls for an emergency UN Security Council meeting. Pasechnik’s Telegram-distributed photo of the damaged building reaches Western media via the Associated Press, and is used by CBC News and Reuters as the article’s lead framing image. Six Rushist apparatus operators issue coordinated naming claims within 12 hours: state television, state media, MFA, Presidency, occupied regional — all in chorus. Pasechnik’s photo carries the framing into Western mainstream media. Within 36 hours, the UN Security Council has met. The kinetic retaliation has been ordered. The framing has been preceded into the Western press headlines. The cycle is closing for execution.This is the campaign elevation bundle. It’s the apparatus signature. It’s recognisable as a pattern. When I saw Putler talking about a school in Russia-occupied Starobilsk, I immediately recognised something — some pattern was being set off.This is not as a temporal first arrival on incident reporting, but as a coordinated bundle of operations within a time-narrow window. Six operators, same framing, 12 hours, Western media imagery absorption, cross-channel synchronicity. The bundle is the Class L deployment. I’ve programmed my algorithm to look for these kinds of patterns in data.The Cycle in Textbook FormOvernight on the 23rd into the 24th: 90 missiles, 600 drones, including the Oreshnik nuclear-capable hypersonic, for the third time in this war. Targets included the Chernobyl Museum, the National Art Museum, the Kyiv Opera Theatre — where, as we know, the first Ukrainian parliament of the modern era met — Dynamo Stadium where I once saw Depeche Mode, amazing concert, around 30 residential buildings, a water supply facility, two killed in Kyiv, 80 wounded, including three children. The Chernobyl Museum struck in a barrage framed as retaliation for the Starobilsk dormitory. The cycle in textbook form.The doctrine I described in section one — move one: apparatus invites journalists, manufactures evidence substrate. Move two: Western media absorbs the framing through the imagery absorption mechanism. Move three: apparatus executes the operation under moral cover.The Substrate Truth: Vodolatsky and VoinThere’s one more substrate truth about Starobilsk specifically that the apparatus’s framing tries hardest to hide. The substrate truth is the apparatus self-incriminating in its own evidence. The apparatus’s load-bearing assertion on Starobilsk is “no military facilities nearby.” Without that assertion, the war-crime framing collapses. With that assertion, the war-crime framing holds together long enough for stage three execution to land — which is the justification of the fake revenge attack, which was always planned anyway.When you see Putler beginning this campaign elevation pattern, you understand an attack is on the way, as Ukrainians do.The assertion is falsified by the apparatus’ own named operator, on the apparatus’ own social media channel, on the same day as the apparatus framing chorus. The operator’s name is Vodolatsky, Member of the Duma since 2008, on the European Union sanctions list, founder and head of VOIN, the apparatus’ Military-Patriotic Centre network, founded in 2022 on Putler’s direct instruction. Kremlin funding to the tune of 50 billion rubles over the past five years, which translates into about $100 million. 21 branches, two of them in occupied Ukrainian territories — one in occupied Donetsk, one in occupied Luhansk.The Luhansk branch’s own materials list the curriculum: drone control, shooting, tactical training, electronic warfare systems, parachute jumps from training towers — presumably after you’re trying to put up a Wi-Fi link. Three-month basic courses producing drone pilots and electronic warfare operators for the Rushist Armed Forces. 400 instructors, many trained at the Rushist University of Special Forces. Per the apparatus’ own materials, graduates direct to special UAV pilot units such as Rubicon. The Rubicon Centre, which is what Ukraine’s general staff said it had struck.The apparatus’ Military-Patriotic Centre network’s own published doctrine names Rubicon as the destination unit for the drone pilot recruits their network produces.Here’s the move. On the Voin Centre’s own Telegram channel — Vodolatsky’s own social media surface — on the morning of the 22nd of May, as part of this cacophony, in the same statement window as Putler’s campaign elevation, Vodolatsky signs a statement claiming the Starobilsk strike as an attack on (quoting): “students of the Starobilsk College of OUR Pedagogical University.” The capital letters on OUR are in the original.The apparatus’ named operator of the apparatus’ drone pilot recruitment network, on the network’s own social media channel, has claimed the Starobilsk institution as Voin’s own — in the same window as the apparatus’ naming of the Ukraine strike as a war crime against civilians.A separate Vodolatsky statement on the same Telegram channel — this one from before the strike — documents that the Luhansk Voin branch has signed network agreements with all universities of the fake republics. University students become Voin candidates, training in UAV operation, fire training, engineering tactics. The entire higher education apparatus of the occupied Luhansk region has been integrated into the apparatus’s drone pilot recruitment pipeline. Vodolatsky personally signed off on it.The Apparatus Self-FalsifiesNow apply this to Russia’s “no military facilities nearby” assertion. The apparatus’s named operator has, on his own channel, claimed the Starobilsk institution as Voin’s own, and documented that Voin-integrated universities are drone pilot recruitment substrates for Rubicon-class units. Ukraine’s general staff statement that it struck a Rubicon-class drone warfare unit headquarters is no longer Ukraine’s contested claim against Russia’s denial.We’re at the right pole here. We have two assertions of truth. Putler says it’s a monstrous war crime, or Peskov does. Ukraine says: no, we struck a Rubicon-class drone warfare unit. How do we adjudicate between both sides? Ukraine’s named target claim is corroborated by the apparatus’ own named operator’s own self-documenting Telegram channel. This is not a borderline case.My Code of Positive Trolls adjudication on “which is the right” — Russia’s “no military facilities nearby” assertion fails, not because of Ukrainian counter-evidence, but because of the apparatus’s own evidence. The both-sidesism in Western coverage collapses in the apparatus’s own materials. Even in Alice in Wonderland, there has to be some sort of logic.The campaign elevation bundle has a hole in it. The apparatus deployed its named operator to claim the substrate the apparatus’ official naming simultaneously denied existed. The deployment self-falsifies.If it turns out that the Russians bombed the place themselves, none of this changes. That’s why I give this analysis: to enable us to find patterns in cases where Russia doesn’t bomb its own facilities. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not it bombed the facility itself with this analysis.The Namer ClassI want to pause and name something structural about the operators we’ve just walked through. The operators in the Starobilsk campaign elevation chorus are not random. They are a class.Peskov is the Kremlin press secretary. He’s been the apparatus’s official naming voice since 2008. Zakharova is the foreign ministry’s spokesperson, in that role since 2015. Lvova-Belova is the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, the operator the International Criminal Court indicted — or, strictly speaking, issued warrants for — alongside Putler himself, for forcible deportation of Ukrainian children. Lantratova is the Russian Federation’s Human Rights Commissioner. Pasechnik is the occupier-installed head of the fake Lugansk Folks’ Republic — the man who was, before 2014, a Ukrainian security service officer, and who is now the regional namer for the occupier-installed administration of an occupied Ukrainian oblast. Konashenkov and his successors at the defence ministry. Lavrov at the foreign ministry. Medvedev on the security council. Kirill at the orthodox patriarchate.These operators are a class. The institutional function of the class is to perform what I’m going to call, for the rest of this and going forward, the Namer Class Function. The Namer Class Function is the institutionalised performance of naming on behalf of the apparatus: naming what the apparatus needs named, in the framing the apparatus needs, on the schedule the apparatus needs.The NM Pole and the MN PoleIn the framework’s vocabulary, the Namer Class operates at what I call an NM pole — the foundation pole of naming what is. It’s the opposite of MN, mana. Mana is the spirit, it’s the element, it’s the energy inside a meme. The naming pole is what you call it.When the naming attaches to the substrate that actually exists in the way the naming says — when the wall really did contain that many fallen soldiers, when the pantheon of heroes really does enter the name of Ukrainian war dead — that’s right mana, that’s right mana. Disinfolklore mana is installed on the NM pole.Code Tool 7 adjudication — which is ethical discipline or “right” — fails. Against what standard? Against the post-World War II legal-factual standard: the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the Budapest Memorandum, Additional Protocol I on the Protection of Civilians. Every official naming by the Namer Class — on Starobilsk, on Mariupol, on Bucha, on Izyum and Kakhovka, on the deportation of children to Crimea, on the annexation decrees of September 2022 — every single one of these official namings fails the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls. It fails against the post-World War II legal standard.This is what I mean by Peskov as namer, adjudicated as falsely naming mana, not right. All Russia’s official spokespersons. The class itself is structurally a sustained NM-pole Disinfolklore mana installation machine. The chorus we saw in Starobilsk is not a one-off — it’s the daily output of this class. The class is the deployment, the deployment is the class.For the framework’s detection model — the local large language model I’m building — the Namer Class is a role-tag class. The model is being trained to recognise the institutional roles, the chorus pattern, chorus density per time window, the imagery substrate absorption pattern from operator Telegram channels into Western media, and the Code Tool 7 against named-legal-instrument adjudication. The class is detectable, the class is trainable, and the detection of the chorus is the leading indicator of the Class L campaign elevation that the apparatus is about to land.Western Media Stage 2 AbsorptionHow did the Western media carry the stage-one framing into stage two on Starobilsk?CNN, 23rd of May. The URL of the article — and you don’t even need to read the article, but of course I did — the URL is the framing: “Putin-Ukraine-strike-Starobilsk-international.” The headline reads: “Massive Russian Missile Barrage Hits Kyiv After Putler Orders Retaliation for a Deadly Ukrainian Attack.” The grammatical subject is Russia. Yes, Russia hit transitively. But the predicate carries the cycle’s grammar perfectly intact: “after Putler orders retaliation for deadly Ukrainian attack.” The word “retaliation” is doing the work. “Deadly Ukrainian attack.”Same day: “Putler vows revenge after a Ukraine attack kills at least six, wounds dozens at student dorm.” Same grammar. “Ukraine attacks” established as fact predicate. “Putler” established as the responding moral agent — the merciful sovereign.The lead photograph, the article’s authority-position imagery, is from Pasechnik’s Telegram channel, distributed by Associated Press. The caption to CBC’s editorial content identifies Pasechnik as the Moscow-appointed head of the Russian-controlled Luhansk region. Let’s be grateful for small mercies. But the photograph occupies the article’s authority position. Most readers do not know who Pasechnik is, or even where this is in Ukraine, or even what’s going on in Ukraine. Most readers will not internalise that the Luhansk Folk’s Republic is an occupier-installed structure with no legitimate authority over the territory it claims. The photograph reads, to a non-specialist eye, as the authoritative image of the event. The Class L absorption is happening at the visual substrate layer where most readers’ impressions form, while the propositional layer of the article maintains plausible balance.Even Al Jazeera, which used the more critical attribution verb “labels” — “Russia labels Ukraine attack in occupier monstrous crime” — even Al Jazeera leads with the Rushist framing verb in the headline.The UN — and I want to be fair, the UN was the most cautious of the surveyed sources. The UN headline reads: “UN alarmed by reports of deadly strike on dormitory in occupied Luhansk.” They have the word “reports” — good. They have the verb “alarmed” — less good. Alarm is itself an apparatus-induced state. Inside the article, the UN’s own caveat is explicit: “The UN does not have access to the area, which is under temporary Russian occupation, cannot verify the details of the reported strike.” So why is it commenting on it? The UN is telling you that it does not know whether the Russian framing is true, but the headline does not say “unverified.” The headline says “alarmed.”Two days after the strike, Zakharova publicly accused the BBC of officially refusing to visit Starobilsk — I’m sure they can get that guy Rosenberg in Moscow to go — and accuses CNN of being on vacation. The apparatus extracts mileage from Western coverage. The apparatus also extracts mileage from Western non-coverage. The framing wins either way. The framing is the apparatus’ product. The framing is what the apparatus is for.The Right Stage-Two Response: Ethical DisciplineWhat is the right stage-two response from the Western press? It’s not balance. Balance in this asymmetric situation is the apparatus’ victory.The right response is what Tool Seven — the ethical discipline, or right tool, in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is a core module in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method — would tell you to do. Apply the question: is the meme’s mana right or ethical? Russia is the occupying power. Russia is striking Kyiv with hypersonic missiles as we speak. These claims do not deserve parity in a Western newspaper headline. To give them parity is itself an ethical failure.Revenge Cycle HistoriansI have a name for the journalists and commentators who do this, and I have patience and sympathy and empathy for them, but not for the ones who have been watching this war for as long as I have and who still cannot see this pattern. I have called them, since March 2024, revenge cycle historians.The revenge cycle historian treats the most recent apparatus-announced trigger as the starting point of analysis. The cycle is presented as if it began on the 22nd of May 2026, and everything before that — Pokrovsk, Kupyansk, the 12-year apparatus pattern that I first noticed in Stanytsia Luhanska on the ground, on the micro and then on the macro, the Mariupol-boat–Dugina artefact in 2022 when she, in her very lovely English, performed the Amnesty August 2022 report (which had the same framing that Dugina had) — all of it is excluded from the frame as background.The revenge cycle historian is the most powerful instrument the apparatus has in the Western press. The apparatus does not need the Western press to believe its framing. It needs the Western press to treat the framing’s starting point as the cycle’s starting point. “Ukraine attacks Starobilsk and Russia avenges this.” That is the only stage-two move the cycle requires.Vatnik Soup and Tankerfeller: Independent ConvergenceOne more piece from the Starobilsk case before I get to the end. As I was assembling this material, a Finnish anti-disinformation practitioner, Pekka — I’m not great with non-Indo-European names either — who publishes as Vatnik Soup, published a 13-panel thread on the case that converged on near-identical analysis as mine, using independent methodology and largely distinct primary source evidence. He quotes the NAFO photo-forensic researcher Tankerfeller extensively — not to be confused with my fellow Irishmen.Six categories of evidence beyond what I’ve walked through in this episode. Tankerfeller traced the apparatus’ victim photos — the photos the relatives were holding at the staged memorial scene — to Pinterest selfies, casting platform stock, a 2000 viral Mars Boys Russian internet meme, the Ukrainian Plast Scouting Organisation, and a Ukrainian blogger named Katerina Yurievna. The photographs the relatives were holding were not photographs of the dead.The apparatus has a documented history of doing this. Vatnik Soup notes they once used a photo of a gay porn star, Billy Harrington, on one of their memorial planks — probably without paying him the just fee. Random and recycled photo deployment on apparatus memorials is meta-pattern, not accident. We see the same thing every 9th of May, the annual Immortal Regiment March, where many marchers carry portraits of people who are not their ancestors — portraits distributed at staging points and discarded near rubbish bins after the procession — documented since the Red Square incident of 2015, which some of us will remember.RT Ireland and the Pre-Strike CoverageVatnik Soup catalogued the named international journalists the apparatus brought to the Starobilsk fake coverage tour: Chay Bowes from R.T. Ireland — I hate saying those two words together, R.T. Ireland — again, “writ,” “right.” Saeed Khalaf from Al Arabiya Moscow. Eldar Aydar from Türkiye. Giovanni Pigni, who writes for La Stampa but has lived in St Petersburg since 2015. And Lu Yuguang from Phoenix TV, China. The apparatus pre-builds its own international amplification substrate rather than waiting for Western media to organically echo.The Starobilsk tour is one deployment. The Pokrovsk–Kupyansk October–December series is the precursor. The pattern goes back to the Mariupol-boat–Dugina tour of August 2022 — how did that work out for you, Daria, RIP — and the earlier Donbas tours of 2014 onwards.The load-bearing falsification of the entire apparatus framing is the apparatus’s own pre-strike state-TV coverage of the Starobilsk facility. Rossiya 1, GTRK Lugansk regional state TV, the Luhansk 24 channel — all three had filmed the facility before Ukraine struck it. You don’t need to hire Palantir to get their targeting — you just watch RT Today. Their footage shows all-male drone pilot trainees (because of course women couldn’t possibly drive a drone in the Rushist imagination) at laptops with target-locking micro-drone hardware. No women in sight. The watermarks of three state broadcasters are visible on the footage. The apparatus has falsified its own post-strike claim on its own most authoritative surfaces. Girls aged 14 to 17 killed — again, the maiden archetype, to trigger emotions.ClosingWhen two independent practitioners — me and Pekka — reach the same verdict within 72 hours of the strike, the verdict is the verdict. The framework’s job is to do this work systematically at machine scale on every Disinfolklore deployment that lands. Vatnik Soup is showing what Disinfolklore-grade Code discipline analysis looks like in real time. The local large language model I’m training is being trained to do exactly this in volume, on the apparatus’ whole output every day.I’ll leave it at that for tonight.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who want a bit more detail, they’ll look in there, they’ll see all the origins — it’s about a million and a half words, divided into about two and a half thousand short passages, purposefully like that so that it’s very accessible. I also publish on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net. Those three projects’ Substacks you can subscribe to, and they all meld into one.I’m currently building — well, I’ve completed this week — the building of the architecture of a training set to fine-tune an open-weights LLM, large language model, locally. That’s very exciting. The architecture is based on the 12-tool way, and based on the contents of disinfolklore.eu.The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information ProjectionThe first thing I wanted to talk about today was really because it’s kind of in the news. Many of you have heard me talk about the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever, which is “don’t poke the bear.” It’s probably obvious to people, when I get your eye in, that this is Disinfolklore, because it’s about the bear, it’s from fairy tales, it’s from folk tales.This week we saw Russia projecting that meme, that piece of Disinfolklore, into our information space, through the mainstream of the German information space, through a political party which has been funded by the Russians. The AFD may have been founded in a virtuous way, although it was founded to deal with migrants — and the entire Syrian migrant crisis was on purpose provoked by Russia accelerating its carpet bombing in Syria in September 2015, when it wanted a bit more leverage at the so-called mythical negotiation table.That had a lot of concatenating effects, including Law and Justice being elected on an anti-migrant Polish nationalist agenda in Poland, Orbán consolidating his position, Brexit being done, and Merkel famously allowing in one million Syrian migrants to give them a path to citizenship. I’m sure they’re contributing greatly to German society and the German economy now, so it’s not all bad, and amazing lives have been changed by it. However, AFD consolidated its power out of this, out of this othering, and we see it projecting this “don’t poke the bear” troll.On its surface, it’s a piece of folk wisdom. It sounds reasonable. It sounds cautious. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful person might say to counsel restraint: don’t provoke Russia, don’t escalate.The Mana in the Meme: Russia as BearDon’t poke the bear — attend to the mana. In my understanding, the mana is the energy, the charge in the meme. What is the energy imminent in this meme? First, the mantra: look for the mana in the meme, which is one of the 12 tools.First, the bear. Russia is a bear — not a government, not a collection of decision-makers, not a bureaucracy with budgets, logistics and internal politics. A bear: a force of nature, unchallengeable, primordial, amoral in the way that nature is amoral. You do not blame the bear for mauling you. You blame yourself for getting too close. The archetype is the wild, the untameable, the power that cannot be reasoned with but only accommodated. This is not analysis — it’s mythology. Its function is to strip Russia of agency and responsibility simultaneously. The bear does not choose to attack; it is provoked. The causality is reversed. The victim is the author of their own destruction.The Poke: Infinitely Elastic ProvocationSecond, the poke. What constitutes poking? In practice, everything Ukraine does to assert its sovereignty is poking. Joining NATO? Poking. Joining the EU? Poking. Speaking Ukrainian? Poking. Existing? Poking.The concept is infinitely elastic. It expands to encompass any action by any party that Russia finds inconvenient. Because the bear is a force of nature, the pokee has no legitimate grievance. You do not file a complaint against a thunderstorm. You take shelter. The implicit instruction of “don’t poke the bear” is: submit.The Don’t: A CommandThird, the “don’t.” This is a command. Not a suggestion. Not an analysis. Not an invitation to consider multiple perspectives. A command addressed to a potential victim, instructing them to modify their behaviour to avoid provoking their own destruction. The entire moral weight of the meme rests on the victim. The aggressor, the bear, has no moral weight at all. It simply is.The Charge: Pure ManaThis is pure mana. The factual content of the phrase is zero. There’s no claim to fact-check. There’s no argument to rebut. There’s only a charge. Notice the RG in “charge,” the same RG in “energy.” It’s the same RG in “reign” and in “right” — this is the second most important cryptotype, which I write about.There’s only a charge. A dense package of archetypal energy — again, the RGE in “energy,” “right,” “reign,” “regency,” “regiment” — that, once received, restructures the recipient’s perception of the conflict. Russia becomes nature. Ukraine becomes the provocateur. The West becomes the foolish hiker who ignored the warning signs. All of this happens below the threshold of conscious evaluation, in the half-second between hearing the phrase and feeling its truth in your gut.Naming as DisarmamentThe mana tool — look for the mana in the meme — asks you to notice this, to slow down, to feel the charge, and then to name it. Naming is the beginning of disarmament, real disarmament. Once you can say “this meme encodes the archetype of the untameable wild, and deploys it to invert the moral relationship between aggressor and victim,” the mana loses its grip. Not entirely, not permanently — mana is resilient. Naming it creates a gap, a space between the charge and your response. In that gap, adjudication becomes possible. You can decide whether or not to share the meme. You can decide whether or not to support AFD. You can make a decision to step back and stop yourself becoming emotionally moved by this, or scared.847 Instances in the Luhansk ArchiveI found 847 instances of bear-related metaphors in the 10,000-item foundational corpus of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which is what I call the Luhansk Archive — this collection of propaganda items that I collected while in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, and hand-labelled according to the archetypal imminences within it. Not all of these 847 instances were “don’t poke the bear” specifically, but they all drew on the same archetypal reservoir: Russia as elemental force, Ukraine as irritant, the West as naive interloper in a drama it does not understand.The consistency was remarkable. It was not the consistency of a coordinated campaign — though coordination was certainly part of it — but the consistency of a deep cultural archetype being activated and amplified across thousands of individual acts of communication, which reached over a million ears almost every day.This is what makes Disinfolklore so difficult to counter, or even to perceive if you’re caught up in fact-checking. It’s not imposed from the outside. It resonates with something already present in the cultural substratum. The mana was already there. The propagandist merely increases the volume. The mana has been collecting its energy and its charge for 6,000 years, from the first Indo-Europeans who stood on the edge of forests on the steppe in ancient Ukraine, to those who returned to tell stories of the elemental bear. That is the mana charge. That’s when the mana charge in this particular meme began collecting. This week we saw AFD activating it inside the minds of all of us, unbeknownst to us. Perhaps they don’t even know what they’re doing, but they received their orders and they followed them.Unpacking the AFD Statement: The Twelve SignaturesLet’s look at what it means when AFD said that, by helping Ukraine with its attack on Russia, Germany was provoking Russia and making an attack on Germany more likely. That was communicated through this meme of “don’t poke the bear.”1. Inner / Outer Realm Sleight of HandThe first aspect of it is inner/outer realm sleight of hand. As many of you will know, inner/outer realm switching, othering — what Donald does when he others migrants, or women, or Iranians, or trans, or whatever. This is in-realm and out-realm switching. I call it the witch switch — switching scapegoats. It had this geographical positioning for me on the bridge in eastern Ukraine, on Stanytsia Luhanska, where, depending on where you stood, the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk was being protected from people like me and outsiders and Ukrainians by the Russians, by the merciful sovereign.Inner realm equals the Germans — that’s her constituency, even though she lives in Switzerland. Outer realm: the bear, Russia, framed as predator. Ukraine, the actor actually defending itself, has disappeared from the analytical frame entirely.This deletion of the victim from the analytical space is itself a recurring signature. Some of you will remember I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Palantir and Maven — all of this hand-wringing by certain people in the American chain of command about the advent of automated targeting — and Ukraine was completely absent from this. It turned out the only AI involved in this was a decision about which targets to take; humans were involved in pressing the button. Whereas Ukraine is dealing with this issue on a technical level hundreds, if not over a thousand, times a day, deciding when to let the human take over in the descent of a drone.We see this signature, this mana signature. It’s actually in absence — when Ukraine is not part of the conversation. This week we saw Russia again trying to promote the troll that Europe doesn’t have a chief negotiator already, but they don’t like Kaja Kallas because she was born in the Soviet Union, she understands them. They suggest all these bizarre, other bizarro suggestions. The mana, the energy in there is: Ukraine doesn’t matter. Ukraine is an empty vessel. This is a deal to be done by the adults at the table. That’s the essential meaning of it. That deletion of the victim, we see so much of the time. Most of us are very hyper-aware to that.2. Agency InversionSecond thing: agency inversion. Germany helping Ukraine drone-bomb Russia makes Germany the active party. Ukraine becomes the receiver of help rather than the attacked party defending itself. The original aggressor, Russia, is reframed as the passive recipient of aggression. A three-step agency reversal. It’s very powerful — just in five words, that’s basically the effect of what they’re doing.3. War Magic OperationThird, it’s a war magic operation. I did that series of talks before Christmas on sympathetic magic — how the law of contagion (which are mental aspects of the mentality of, well, anthropologists claim all humans — I’ll go as far as saying all Indo-European humans) — the law of contagion, the law of similarity, and the law of difference. The war magic is: when Alice Weidel, whatever her name is, talks about “don’t poke the bear,” then millions of minds suddenly get this fear that they’re going to be annihilated, and that they should stop helping Ukraine. It moves them.War magic operation: making Germans insecure. Declaring Germans insecure performatively. This manufactures the insecurity, like “Make America Great Again.” America was great. It didn’t need people going around with “Make America” on their hat — which was actually promoting the troll that America is not great, and was not great. Basically, these are tricks.It’s like so-called pickup artists. Their opener is to neg their potential victim, to make them insecure and vulnerable, so that they can fill their emotionally charged mind with ideas and memes which aren’t in their interests. This is the same substrate-summoning mechanism that Buchanan’s Cultural War speech enacted in 1992 at the Republican National Convention. Pat Buchanan declared there was a cultural war between transnational elites, cosmopolitan elites, and traditionalist values. A generation of academics parsed that and looked into it, and discovered and determined beyond all reasonable doubt that there was no such division. However, by declaring there was a cultural war, the statement became the act. This is the same with this German person — or rather, the Swiss politician modelling herself as a German politician. She is basically inferring to Germans that they’re going to be attacked by Russia for helping Ukraine defend itself.4. The Axis of Misogyny Coalition TellAFD is documented by me as being part of what I call the Axis of Misogyny. I don’t talk about the axis of authoritarianism — I don’t think that’s very insightful. I talk about the Axis of Misogyny. When have you ever seen China have a female leader? How many female leaders are there in Iran? I think one minister is a female leader. How many proper professional kinds of women do you see around the new Prime Minister of Hungary? Zillions. He’s surrounded by effective people, competent-looking people — as indeed was President Biden, and all good leaders today. You never see real women with real power around Donald, or around authoritarians, and the same thing with Putler around them.AFD is a documented Axis of Misogyny Coalition member. Authoritarian groups now model themselves in the modern way by getting women into positions of power, but those women are promoting authoritarian rhetoric. There’s no difference in their rhetoric or in their modes of decision-making between them and authoritarian males — essentially the Putin–Buchanan trans-civilisational adoption pattern, which is the Cultural War Declaration.In December 2013, Pat Buchanan wrote a piece. For those who don’t know, Pat Buchanan advises Donald Trump to this day. He was caught up in Watergate for his famous Dividing Democrats memo. Then in 1992 he declared this cultural war. Whenever you hear the term “culture war,” he is the originator of this strategy — the strategy of dividing societies and communities by declaring what are, in fact, human rights to be merely matters of choice or culture. This is all part of the strategy to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order. You say that human rights, protected by law, are just a cultural norm of the West rather than universal.That was Hersch Lauterpacht, the Ukrainian international lawyer, and his book The Rights of Man, 1945, who taught in my law school as well. He managed to convince everyone that human rights should be protected as a matter of law, universally — not a cultural issue. This was the really clever strategy that is copied, a model copied by the so-called far right — because they are usually sinister, they are usually left — around the world. This predicts that AFD will deploy “don’t poke the bear” specifically because their coalition partner’s continued ability to wage war benefits from Western non-intervention. The Disinfolklore framework can flag this as a coalition signature, not just an individual statement.Basically, you excuse the sexual crimes by blaming the victim. On a personal level, we’ve seen many authoritarians do that. That extends to geopolitics — you can make predictions about the kinds of victim-blaming, blaming Ukraine for wearing a short skirt, for just existing, that will carry through into policies.5. Stealth Genocide Enabler and the Doubly Inverted Merciful SovereignI’ve talked before about Stealth Genocide — this idea of changing the identities of Ukrainians from the inside out using Disinfolklore, unbeknownst to them and not in the open. By doing that, you eradicate their culture and make them susceptible to being sent off on meat assaults. Refusing Ukraine self-defence enables continued Russian atrocity production.AFD positions itself as the Merciful Sovereign for Germans, while structurally enabling the Merciless Sovereign act against Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. You’ll remember I’ve spoken the last two weeks — you won’t remember last week because you didn’t hear it, but I did post it on my Substack, disinfolklore.net, if you’re interested to hear last week’s talk.Last week I talked about the drone attack on the mother and the maiden — her daughter — with the mother trying to protect her as they hid in a park in Kramatorsk by a tree, evading a Russian drone. Putler modelled himself as the merciful sovereign by invading Ukraine to save native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from what he was characterising as the merciless sovereign based in Kiev. In the moment we see the drone hunting this mother and the maiden — the mother being someone who probably was a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian in Kramatorsk, maybe even an IDP there from further east — in that moment you see this is the supposed merciful sovereign, who came and sent his forces into Ukraine to save them, and his drone is now hunting the very people he sent to save. In that very moment, he transformed, transmogrified in our minds, if we are attentive enough, into the merciless sovereign.That is the doubly inverted merciful sovereign nesting. It is the deepest detection signal here, because AFD is “protecting” German people by creating more Mariupol drama theatres.6. The World War II Restart SignatureThe sixth element is the World War II restart signature. Germany ratified the UN Charter precisely because the previous regime initiated World War II alongside the Russians. AFD’s framing argues against the very legal apparatus Germany committed itself to upholding after 1945. When we see senior American officials meeting AFD officials, or Elmo promoting AFD — we know their project is to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order, not least because they are guilty of the war crimes. Certainly the commander-in-chief is, and the defence secretary, and those below him in the chain of command, involved in multiple extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, and also in Iran, and who knows — actually it seems in Mexico as well.AFD is joined with all of them. The Axis of Misogyny is also united in their wanting to destroy the International Criminal Court, for instance. I don’t know if it’s confirmed, but we heard that Donald attempted to form a coalition with China, with Xi — or with Eleven — the other day, to destroy the International Criminal Court. AFD and Russian state framing are convergent on dismantling Article 51 of the UN Charter — the inherent right to self-defence as one of the factors of sovereignty, which Ukraine has.7. Drone-Bomb Verbal ConversionSeven: drone-bomb verbal conversion. “Bombing” — rather than “targeting military infrastructure, refineries, supply lines” — verbally converts Ukrainian lawful self-defence into something morally indistinguishable from aggression. Article 51’s inherent right of self-defence is rhetorically erased.8. The Outer Realm Mask SignatureEight: the outer realm mask signature. Germany is Indo-European Germanic substratum, Indo-European culture. Russia is Indo-European Slavic substratum — sister branches. AFD is reactivating Germanic-versus-Slavic othering. This reactivates exactly the deep cultural template Germany formally committed to never reactivating after 1945.The mask is performing distance from a substratum Germany is in fact cognate to. It’s claiming that Russia is a bear, is an alien. Then it is invoking these rivalries deep in the psyches of Germans and Slavs, not least from the Second World War, where the Germans treated Slavs as slaves — inverting this and drawing into people’s consciousness, as they go to look through their timeline, all of these ancient rivalries and worries about going into the forest or crossing the river.9. Reflexive Control: Conditioned ResponseNine: reflexive control — which was the subject of that series of five talks I gave. Reflexive control: conditioned response. Russia has spent years training Western publics to internalise the “we should not be Russia’s enemy” logic. The AFD leader is performing the reflexively conditioned response. I say this is a very generous interpretation on my part, if I don’t mind saying so myself. She is performing the reflexively conditioned response the training was designed to produce. She is the operation’s output, not its independent originator. She should be lecturing her community into not poking the bear, because that’s what she — who is particularly receptive to this messaging — has been conditioned to say.10. The Bear Retaliates If PokedTen: the bear retaliates if poked. Sustained by fear, not by demonstrated retaliation. Russia has not actually retaliated proportionally against Germany for past arms supplies. The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence.I share Iona’s pain, which she expressed today, just hearing Putler threatening us again with nuclear annihilation, Tomahawks — which seems to be, which I presume now means it’s on the cards. It means somehow Russia knows that, as part of these drone deals which probably will never come, because they’re such rubbish negotiators now in Washington, Tomahawks might be on the menu. I do share Iona’s pain, because — God — it still goes on. They haven’t retaliated proportionately to the Kursk invasion, or to these attacks in Moscow. They’re trying to pretend it hasn’t happened, which is very funny for most of us watching it.The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence. The AFD leader’s statement sustains the fear archetype. She’s transmitting the fear archetype under the guise of this folksy wisdom. That makes future Russian aggression rhetorically permissible and more likely.11. The Temporal Stratification CheckEleven. The antidote is basically the temporal — what I call the temporal — the time-related stratification check. The framing of the bear requires forgetting Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Kharkiv. The framing’s coherence depends on amnesia. That’s also what she’s doing. She’s putting a spell on us to forget Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Irpin — all of these places which will haunt us, and haunt the Russians, and haunt Ukrainians, and haunt humanity until the end of time. The framework’s insight tool — my tool, in my framework — surfaces what’s been disappeared from the temporal record by reminding us of this.12. Bear Archetype ReinforcementTwelve: the bear archetype reinforcement. The AFD leader is reinforcing Russia’s preferred self-archetype. It’s a raid on cryptotypes — the meanings, the semantic signalling systems which I have identified as operating imminent in folklore, obviously, but also in Disinfolklore. “Don’t poke the bear” is so mana-rich with all of these aspects that I’ve mentioned.Finally, anyone amplifying this AFD framing is transmitting Disinfolklore. Anyone sharing the speech without careful framing is at risk of transmitting Disinfolklore. Certainly those who report it straight are just one person removed from being an information warfare operative.The Provocation Mirror: Reflexive Control in the Luhansk CorpusI was going to go back to — because it’s so important — this reflexive control, which I spoke about over those five speeches, and what I call the provocation logic cycle. “Don’t poke the bear” is imminent in that. It is this really complicated idea, which is so common in our information space from the Russians — that’s why I go on about it so much.There’s a recurring sentence machine in Russia’s propaganda from occupied Luhansk that I want to take apart for you now. It’s one of the deepest structures in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus. I call it the provocation mirror. In my corpus of 10,000 propaganda items, 184 items are tagged with the bare formula — not “the bear,” the bare formula, i.e. the naked formula — “provocation.” The underlying logic is in hundreds more.Zolote Checkpoint and the Four-Step Sentence MachineHere’s the core. 31st of March 2016, lug-info.com: “Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LPR in violating the Minsk Agreement. Kiev’s opening of Zolote Crossing Point in the area of Pervomaisk has a provocative aim and could be used to accuse LPR of breaking the Minsk Agreements.”For those who don’t know, Zolote was at the contact line closest to the area where I lived for three years, from 2015 to 2018, in Severodonetsk. Our teams used to go there, and there was a whole thing about “let’s get the checkpoint open,” and it’s opened. It’s basically a mirror image of what Russian borders specialise in everywhere — all across the former Soviet Union — what they specialise in, I’ve come to realise: whether it’s in Georgia or in Ukraine, different parts of Ukraine, is creating obstacles at these intermission points, interaction points, on rivers.Let me read it again: Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame the Luhansk Folk’s Republic for violating the Minsk Agreement.One of the signatures I noticed early on of Disinfolklore — and of Russian information warfare — is this: in the absence of everything else, if you just don’t have the brainpower in a particular moment to work out what’s going on with this kind of thing, when you see the complexity of it and your brain starts going “what are they saying?” — that in itself is the signature. You’re being trolled. I just say that, but I am going to unpack it.I’ll read it again. Kiev — they’re saying “Kiev,” not “Kyiv” — Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint. Remember, this is an interaction zone, where on one side you have a community, on the other side you have a community, and those communities were able to interact freely before February 2014. Which reminds me, actually — James — the Little Green Men. The European Court of Human Rights determined that the occupation began in February 2014, which was the moment the Little Green Men, the polite people — the folkloric characters who were very important to my detection of Disinfolklore as an analytical method, as Russia’s means of brainwashing us. Of course: Little Green Men, green, Robin Hood, the polite people, like little fairies — these very disarming descriptions of these genocidal invaders by Putler and all around him, turning them into a bit of a joke. That began in February 2014. I’m sure today is an anniversary of something as well.“Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LFR” — I call them Luhansk Folks Republic — “in violating the Minsk Agreement.” A checkpoint is a civilian facility. It lets pensioners cross. It saves lives. Ukraine, grammatically, opened a humanitarian crossing — which the Russians had closed — and Morochko’s statement frames the opening as a provocation. This is the provocation mirror. It’s a four-step sentence machine.Step 1: The victim, Ukraine, takes a defensive or humanitarian action.Step 2: Russia labels the action a provocation.Step 3: Russia warns that if anything bad happens, it will be Ukraine’s fault because of the provocation.Step 4: When Russia itself subsequently attacks, Russia claims it was responding to the provocation.I’ve catalogued hundreds of these in my corpus. A Ukrainian checkpoint opens? Provocation. A Ukrainian pension paid? Provocation. An OSCE monitor like me visits? Provocation. A NATO exercise happens 600 km away? Provocation. A Ukrainian election campaign advertises? Provocation. A Minsk negotiator speaks? Provocation. Every act by Ukraine, no matter how benign, can be folded into the sentence machine as provocation.The Word “Provocation” as SignalOften the signal for this is this term “provocation,” which I noticed so frequently on the bridge speaking to the occupiers and to Ukrainian soldiers. I’ve spent 10 years unpacking, examining this, and collecting examples. I’ve got hundreds of them from the normal media as well, where provocations are asserted. Usually, the word “provocation” will be involved in it.You, now becoming more literate in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: whenever you hear that word, you can search for this little module in your brain and remember this mantra. The person accusing the other of the provocation — that accusation is the attack. When you don’t have the wavelength or the energy to think it through in the moment, just think: this person is talking about a provocation — i.e. Germany helping Ukraine, and Ukraine defending itself by sending drones into Russia. The person trolling about the provocation, they are the attacker. That’s hard to see. They’re operating in stealth, and they’re operating as if they have this great concern for the German people. Of course, if they had great concern for the German people, they would ensure that Germany arms Ukraine properly to go and take Crimea back and expel the Russians, so the Russians can’t do this again. It’s designed to disguise the fact that they are actually attacking us, and injecting this meme into our information space.That’s just a little saw to help you cut through it in the moment. These are really complicated things, and in the complexity they can smuggle all sorts of trolls in. Pick 100 people in a room and each of us is going to focus on different phrases. This three-sentence news item from 2016 is so complex that, if you had a room of 100 people, you would have almost 50 different ways of confusion and interpretation of it. That’s why it’s so clever, and why it in itself constitutes an attack.The Abusive Spouse LogicIt’s the same logic used by the abusive spouse: “Look what you made me do. If you had not burned the dinner, I’d not have to hit you.” The dinner was the provocation. Russian military doctrine calls this reflexive control: creating conditions in which the enemy’s only available actions are all framed in advance as aggression. The victim loses the ability to act innocently or lawfully. Every movement is already marked. That is also the function of AFD. They’re marking that movement. They’re closing it off. They’re saying: if you help Ukraine, that will lead to an attack on Russia. Some people will be moved by that.Why does it work? Because it parasitises a genuine human capacity — the capacity to recognise provocations. Real provocations do exist. Bar fights start with them. My cat provokes me into feeding them. Duels start with them. Wars start with them. We’re all trained to watch for the first move. Russian Disinfolklore hijacks this training by defining the first move as whatever Ukraine does next.The provocation cycle always begins with Ukraine’s actions, or the West’s actions. If they were proper historians, they would go back to actually who invaded Ukraine. You’re so confused and immobilised mentally by someone accusing Ukraine of provoking them, when all you are doing is just trying to look nice for yourself or for your friends. Russia has pre-claimed the position of responder, no matter what happens.The Counter: Refusing the MirrorThe counter is to refuse the mirror. When you see the word “provocation” — you don’t always see it, but it’s a start — you can sense its energy. I’m trying to train a computer, a neural network, to detect these archetypes in data, these imminences. Obviously the keyword “provocation” is very easy to spot, but thankfully the large language models now are so powerful that they can spot archetypes and imminences in data. It’s a really interesting process I’m going through at the moment, to train them to see it.When you do — let’s just stick with keywords — when you see the word “provocation” in a Russian-sourced report or from AFD, ask: who is the actual first mover in the causal chain that produced the moment of alleged provocation? In Luhansk, Russia invaded in February 2014. Every Ukrainian “provocation” since is a branch of that tree. Any genuine provocation analysis must begin at the root of that tree, not at one of its late leaves. Name the root. Keep naming it. Each naming breaks the mirror.I’ll leave it at that for this week. Out.Lexicon’s Question: Trito and the Indo-European MythThe Trito myth, which I’ve spoken about before, is the most attested story in Indo-European culture — attested in Celtic, Iranian, Vedic, early Indian, Germanic — in practically every tradition. Usually, often, using the name Trito. In that archetypal story, the Trito loses his cattle, he restores his cattle with the intercession of Sky Father, and then makes the first sacrifice. Trito is the third man, after Manu and Yama — the third man who establishes the right of sacrifice as a contract with Sky Father, and then our cultures live in that way. That’s the archetypal imminence in the story.You were just saying, Lexicon, that the hero is Trita. One of my insights, which I write about, is that both the serpent (or the dragon — sometimes it’s the dragon but usually it’s the serpent) and Trita claim that they’re restoring rightful sovereignty, or rightful control over the community’s capital or cattle. The word “capital” emanates etymologically from “cattle,” as does “chapter” — I was interested to know — as does “captain.” Both sides model as Trita.Donald and Putler model as Trita: the heroes on the bridge, saving the community, restoring, “making America great again,” restoring to Russia its rightful new territories. We have the post-World War II legal order to determine who is truly Trita. In the case of Ukraine, President Zelensky is Trita, and Ukrainians are. They are fighting to restore their sovereignty, security, and control.Trita Always WinsThe good news for Ukraine is — and we all have this kind of idea in our heads as well, and it doesn’t just come from Bollywood or Disney, the happy ending — Trita always wins, the rightful Trita always wins. The sound “right,” “writ,” is in Trita. It’s in the middle, as it is in “territorial integrity” and “right,” and both “integrity” and “territory.” These are deep codes encoded into us, and Trita always wins.That is what differentiates most of us, apart from the data. We have been sure since day one that Ukraine will win. It will be victorious. There’s no way the serpent is going to succeed here. We have been clear that Ukraine is Trita. Others have been trying to promote the troll that Putler is rescuing Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from the monster, or from the serpent — or that Donald is saving America from these outer realm migrants, the Mexicans, and all of that malarkey.I’m pretty clear they will end up — they will have to account for their crimes in the end anyway. I’m even more sure of that. That story’s in there.The Bully and His Lunch MoneyI feel your pain, Lexicon, because when I first worked this out I thought all I had to say to a friend of mine — who would say to me that if we help Ukraine they’re going to nuke us — I thought all I had to do is explain to him: if the bully asks you — I love the way Chuck Pfarrer is always going on about the bully and his school money, or his lunch money — that’s it. If you give him his lunch money one day, he’s going to keep on coming back for it. If you allow the bully to —As I also learned once when I was on a board of directors, in this nightmare situation, I was trying to defend what was right, against one person who was trying to promote what was not right, what was sinister, what was left. No one else really supported me. I remember one wise counsellor telling me afterwards: in a group of people, most people will just keep their heads down. They won’t put their heads above the parapet. That’s the kind of realpolitik, the kind of knowledge about psychology, that AFD and others are relying on when they say this.The Eurobarometer and Solidarity for UkraineThe good news is, I saw this polling — the Eurobarometer polling — you may have seen it. Support for Ukraine across the European Union is solid as a rock. I think the figure in Ireland I looked at was something like only nine percent of people thought that Russia was right, was Trita. That is despite all of the propaganda for years.As we see — and it pains all of us, particularly because of the kinds of personalities we have — they’re not doing everything they could do. I’ll be humble and say: I’m not doing everything I could do. I’m trying to do work in the information space. Most people won’t help. They’ll cheer Trita on, but they’ll basically be doing deals with the serpent on the side until — as Will always assures us, and I think hopefully it’s coming true at the moment — when people see that Ukraine’s a winner, then they’ll all pile on.That’s how I would parse what you said, Lexicon. I remember you were learning about the Ukrainian folkloric monsters and stuff when you were in Lviv, so that resonance is there as well. Out.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign TrollingI was happy to see this week when President Zelensky posted the executive order, for want of a better term, talking about how the coordinates — the very accurate, I think it was eight-digit grid coordinates, or maybe even ten — of Red Square in Moscow would be safe from Ukrainian missiles. I noted with great pleasure how everyone recognised that as trolling, and that interested me. There was no argument that this was what this was about. It was about trolling using the threat of force, or the non-threat of force, but in the sense of weapons. Here is a sovereign with the capacity to direct an army, missiles to kill people, using Twitter. I noted the Prime Minister of Ukraine and many ministers tweeted out the executive order, as did President Zelensky himself. That’s the online aspect of it. It was a very specific message within a complicated concatenation of negotiations that most of us are following on a day-by-day basis, but which most normal people wouldn’t follow.The venue was online in some senses, but everyone recognised it as trolling, not only because it was online. It had real-world aspects to it, and that pleased me enormously, because that was what I noticed about trolling in eastern Ukraine: it is a multi-arena activity that we have a sense of understanding what it is. It’s mainly encountered online, but when something happens like President Zelensky signing that executive order as part of a strategy to get 1,000 Ukrainian hostages back from Russia, we recognise that as trolling. That is in the context of the trolling series, which we’ll go into.Archetypal Literacy and the Luhansk CorpusThe second element is this archetypal literacy. On disinfolklore.eu, the website, the main expression of my work, there’s what I archetype: the Disinfolklore Analytical Method as the 12-tool way. The first tool is archetypal literacy.As part of my learning — I’m still learning — to be archetypally literate, to see archetypes immanent in data, I hand-labelled this massive corpus of over 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while working in eastern Ukraine from inside the Russia-occupying media space inside Luhansk. I refer to this as the Luhansk Corpus. These are hand-labelled as the archetypal imminences inside these stories.What I started here about five weeks ago was talking you through these stories and the different archetypes within them. Some of you might remember I was talking about the merciful sovereign. Inside the entire structure of the situation, Putler plays the merciful sovereign by saying that he is rescuing Ukrainians from the drug-addicted leaders and all of that nonsense, and the Nazis and all of that nonsense. When Putler is talking like that, he is archetyping himself as a merciful sovereign.The Mother and the MaidenSome of you might remember from a long time ago — it is a year, over a year now, that we’ve been doing these weekly, and I’ve only missed, I think, one or two weeks — that one of the very first ones I talked about was The Mother and the Maiden. This was an incident in eastern Ukraine where, in a blinding flash, I realised that there was something artificial about the use of this term: underage mother and her underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. Again, this is a form of trolling, and it’s a very typical situation in some respects, but it also has real-world effects. It begins in the information space. It passed into my chain of command and down to me as a patrol group leader of a team of international diplomats on the border with Russia-occupied Ukraine. We were dispatched to go into a forest to look for this mother and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces.As I recounted, what that was doing was trying to archetype, was trying to trigger us — me and my team, and those in my chain of command who ordered us on this ridiculous task — which, even before I even had the word archetype, only me and one other colleague who were sent on this task realised: this is ridiculous, this is not true, this is an artificial situation that we’re being sent on.I subsequently found out that the mother and the maiden are what Carl Jung calls primordial archetypes. As spoken about before, I disagree with Carl Jung on the universality of archetypes. My other work in Power of Mana establishes that all of the different traditions from which Jung was gathering evidence of the universality of archetypes were Indo-European traditions.The Kramatorsk Video: The Switch from Merciful to MercilessThis last week we saw this picture, this video — some of us will have seen this — of a mother sheltering her daughter, her young daughter, by a tree in a park that I’ve been to in Kramatorsk, while drones hunted them in the sky. The video lasts for about two and a half minutes. What we have there, for me, was a very significant video, quite apart from the human aspect of it and the barbarity of it. I did my best to share it because it hopefully will bring home to people one of the reasons why the mother and the maiden is a primordial archetype: it moves us. It should move us. It should move people in our lives who don’t really know about the drone safaris.The person filming that in the park may well have had no awareness of Carl Jung or why this particular scene — while that film was being filmed, while the person was standing there (I don’t know if it was a man or a woman who came across this scene while the drone was going overhead) — they themselves had to shelter from it, as we saw in the rest of the video. They themselves, while their life was in danger, were so drawn to the picture of this mother and the maiden, and because they had their phone they were able to film them. There’s a great beauty about these two and a half minutes. It’s kind of like an intermission in reality, where it goes into archetypal Disinfolklore in the sense of that video was capturing the horror of what the Russians are doing.The merciful sovereign Putler is — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that mother and her daughter, certainly the mother, was probably a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian. That is the person like the mother and the daughter that I wrote about in one of my first Disinfolklore pieces, who brought their child to shelter in the drama theatre in Mariupol and then was annihilated. In the moment of their annihilation, they were turned from the person the merciful sovereign was going to rescue — because they were being ruled by a crowd of drug-addicted Nazis from Kiev, according to the Disinfolklore — and in the moment of their annihilation, of being turned into biological dust, they were transformed into Nazis.Now, thankfully, I’ve made the link that in that very moment, the merciful sovereign turns into the merciless sovereign, and that switch is a reciprocal process. Immanent in that video we saw of the mother and the maiden in Kramatorsk last Friday was the transformation in the eyes of people viewing it of the merciful sovereign Putler as he was playing himself into the merciless sovereign, and the further entrenchment of President Zelensky as the merciful sovereign, who, as all of us know, is doing everything in his power to ensure the protection of his people.These are very, very old categories. Apart from that, this is a method to analyse particular situations that I find personally quite useful, and also very rich.Training the Neural Network on the Disinfolklore Analytical MethodThe point of me hand-labelling these and speaking and doing podcasts is — what I’m also doing is training an artificial neural network algorithm to think like I think. This week I finished creating the architecture and the inputs, the dataset which I input into the neural net, into the large language model to train it. The architecture itself of the neural network which I designed is based on the 12-tool way. The process of doing this is absolutely fascinating.As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is the future for all of us. We will have our own little neural nets running all the time. Some people will never have the ability to train their particular personal neural net. My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is a module that we can add on to our cognitive system, our cognitive structures.At the moment it’s available on the website. It’s available listening to me and gaining some sense of archetypal literacy, so that we can parse the data and the data streams coming through us into structural elements that help us understand what’s going on when Russia, for instance, is playing the merciful sovereign by saying it’s trying to rescue Ukrainians from something. We know the only harm in Ukraine is being caused by Russia. Equally, in the American example, this method translates perfectly to Donald and what Donald is doing.I talked before about the archetyping of himself as a sovereign through the use of the ballroom from Cinderella, from Louis XIV’s, and also this triumphal arch — again, the RCH, the right — archetyping himself as an emperor. The method should translate into all those things.In order to train the neural network algorithm, and in order to get the architecture, it is necessary to label, hand-label algorithms. This is what I’m going to talk to you right now about, which is the walk-in.Stephanie Baker’s Bloomberg Article on the Walk-InThere was a great article in Bloomberg published this week — very, very detailed article — and it was featured on the Daily Telegraph podcast, which I listen to every now and again these days, reluctantly. I do see this story of them kind of becoming more human and more European. Hearing the Daily Telegraph kind of eulogise Kaja Kallas and other people in Europe is a great joy to me, having gone through the whole Brexit malarkey. That’s a side point.One of the things in this Bloomberg article — her name is Stephanie Baker, well worth following on Twitter — one of the things she mentioned about analysing this particular Russian information operation, Disinfolklore operation, Combat 1614 or something like that, which I’ve talked about before in the context of the piece I did about five weeks ago on the European Union’s External Action Service Report, Fourth Report on FIMI Threats, which you’ll find on my Disinfolklore.net Substack from about five weeks ago. In it I analysed the Fourth Threat Report and joined it with the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and made some very gentle and humbly offered suggestions about how they can improve their FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) report in the light of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. I offered a few ways we could work together. I mentioned these particular operations. One of them, I think, was called Combat 1614 or something like that.Stephanie Baker in this Bloomberg report has really done the definitive study of it. Basically, the modus operandi is to pay somebody in an African country — probably highly educated, someone in Senegal or somewhere else, or maybe somewhere where Wagner is operating — get some university PhD student or whatever, or actors in an African country or in Western countries as well. You get these actors to say: “I worked in Chloé and Olena Zelenska came in and she bought a yacht,” or “I’m an estate agent in Abu Dhabi and President Zelensky has just bought 50 mansions.” They make massive amounts of these videos, and the credibility in people’s minds is established by the testimony, the first-hand testimony of a real person. Millions of views happen.The Walk-In in Eastern UkraineThis is exactly what I experienced in the first Disinfolklore story, which was in eastern Ukraine, where the MGB — the security service, the Russian occupier security service in occupied Luhansk — was called the MGB, which is the precursor to the KGB. The Russian occupiers decided to archetype their internal security service with the predecessor to the KGB. This was back in 2014.The MGB had gone to the people ahead of me in the chain of command — two or three people above me — and said: we’ve just had this walk-in, and this walk-in has given this testimony. The testimony is: he received a phone call from a Ukrainian Nazi in a government-controlled area, and that Ukrainian Nazi says he’s going to chop my wife, my common-law wife, and her underage daughter into tiny pieces if I don’t cross the River Donets — cross from the inner realm, the protective inner realm where the sovereign protector, the merciful sovereign Russia, is protecting us.I didn’t know any of this about archetypes then, but I did know this was a really odd operation for me then to be sent on, in two armoured vehicles, with my team of outsiders, of Westerners, of diplomats including Eastern and Central European, former senior NATO officers and the like. What I did notice also was how the idea of a mother and her underage daughter being chopped into tiny pieces really motivated some of my colleagues who weren’t that motivated by much of our work. Suddenly they were mobilised and they just wanted to go to this cottage in the woods and save them.Stephanie Baker in the Bloomberg article noticed how one of the tropes — one of the main indicators that you’re dealing with a Russian operation — is these first-hand testimonies from whistleblowers. I made the conceptual link between these whistleblowers and the walk-ins.The Walk-In: Stage Defectors and the MGBThe first little story I’m going to tell you is about a walk-in, called The Walk-In: Stage Defectors and the MGB.One of the most carefully architected characters in Russian Disinfolklore apparatus is the walk-in. He appears in my corpus 189 times. He has many faces, many aspects, but a single structure. I call him the walk-in. Stephanie Baker called him the whistleblower, but they’re the same archetype, they’re the same character.The walk-in is the Ukrainian — sometimes a soldier, sometimes a civilian, sometimes a doctor, sometimes a defector, sometimes the former spokesperson for President Zelensky — who, according to Russian-backed outlets, voluntarily walks into an interview with some pro-Russian American preppy guy who thinks he’s going to be the next President of the United States of America. Who voluntarily walks into a Luhansk Folks Republic or a Donetsk Folks Republic — so-called, I’m air-quoting here — Ministry of State Security office, and confesses. The confession always serves one of two purposes: to incriminate Ukraine, or to justify an occupation security action.Let me read one of them. 10th of March 2017, lug-info.com: “NATO instructors trained the DRG involved in the murder of Anishenko — MGB Luhansk Folk’s Republic. NATO instructors carried out special training of Ukrainian saboteurs from the 8th Regiment of the Special Operations Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces operating in the territory of the Luhansk Folk Republic. This was announced today by the Minister of State Security of the Luhansk Folk Republic, Leonid Pashnik.”Pause on that. In a single sentence, the occupation security minister tells us a Ukrainian sabotage group trained by NATO assassinated Oleg Anishenko, a Luhansk Folk’s Republic military officer, inside the territory of Luhansk Folk’s Republic. How does he know? A walk-in. Somewhere, someone has walked into the MGB office and told the story. The story is then released to lug-info.com, then to dninews.com — another Russian occupying media — then laundered through a couple of lateral outlets to Russian state TV, and finally looped back into Western coverage as “sources in the self-proclaimed republic say.”The Walk-In as Folkloric LureThe walk-in is a narrative device with deep folkloric roots. In the folktale tradition, the character who arrives at the cottage from outside with an urgent message. Did anyone else note the background, the kind of Aspen background, wooden shed that Carlson was interviewing the walk-in Yulia Mendel in yesterday?This is the character who arrives at the cottage from outside with an urgent message, and that urgent message changes the plot: the messenger wolf, the ragged pilgrim, the old woman who knocks at the door asking for bread. In every tradition, the walk-in is a device for introducing information that the audience could not have discovered on their own.Russian Disinfolklore repurposes this device industrially. Every walk-in confirms exactly what the occupation administration needs confirmed on that particular day. We don’t know when the walk-in Yulia Mendel interview was filmed. It could have been filmed a long time ago.Notice the convenient temporality. The MGB does not release the walk-in’s confession weeks later after verification. It releases it the same day, packaged, scripted, media-ready. This is not how genuine intelligence works. This is how theatre works.One of the premises of all of my work from the very beginning has been that what I saw on this micro scale in Russia-occupied Luhansk — working there between 2015 and 2018, and then between 2018 and 2022, being based in Dnipro but constantly, very closely watching the media in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk — one of the premises of my work is that what I saw there on a micro scale, we are now familiar with on a macro scale through Donald’s antics. There we see Tucker Carlson in what for me is a transparent Russian operation with Yulia Mendel.These different dimensions, these different Disinfolklore galaxies, these different methods — the walk-in troll, for instance, the walk-in character here — is the same in each, with Brexit, with all of this nonsense about the ballroom and the reflecting pool and Iran and all of these things.On the one hand, this is an area of the world which doesn’t matter to most people in our normal lives. It obviously matters to us because we’re interested in Ukraine. For me, from the very first moment I was there, I thought: well, this is really curious what’s going on here. When Donald got elected the first time, when Brexit happened — really unusual happenings — I realised that what I was witnessing in Russia-occupied Ukraine was being rolled out across the world. That’s why it’s relevant.Quite apart from the archetypal literacy element, or understanding the news, or creating an architecture for a neural network algorithm and then creating the model itself: you need data, a lot of data, which is archetypally rich data like this, hand-labelled, because I have to teach a computer to automatically recognise archetypes in any generated data.The Walk-In Story RecountedThe walk-in I described from my own experience in The Mother and the Maiden tale: a doctor walks into the MGB. I’m air-quoting “doctor,” because sometimes he was an ambulance, he was a healer, he was an archetype, he was a caricature. A doctor walks into the MGB, says his common-law wife and her underage daughter are being cut into pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi across the river — across the Donets River, across this interzone, across this dividing line between the inner and the outer realm. An outer realm creature, a monster, across the river, outside the jurisdiction of the merciful sovereign, from the perspective of the Russian occupiers.Within hours, Western diplomats are being dispatched to the cottage in the woods, and I was one of those Western diplomats. This is the walk-in as folkloric lure. The narrative forward motion, the urgency, the drama, the rescue quest — that is the weapon. Some of my colleagues, when they heard this — when I got the phone call from my boss to say, “oh, could you just swing by this cottage in the woods? There’s a woman and her daughter about to be chopped into tiny pieces. Could you just swing by there and then go to the bridge on your normal patrol?”I was like: hold your horses here. This was being told to me straight by the head of operations. I had to press them and eventually get a copy of the handwritten letter. At each moment I was trying to wake them from their dream, because this was a ridiculous operation.While this was going on, some of my colleagues were champing at the bit, because we were supposed to just be leaving our base and going to Stanytsia Luhanska. They were listening to this. I was hoping they would hear this crazy operation, which we were about to be sent on, on the basis of a walk-in to the Russian occupiers’ state security apparatus. I expected them to have the same impression I had, which is: I don’t really understand this, but this is nuts. Only one of my colleagues had that reaction.The rescue quest involving this rescue of a woman, a defenceless woman and her vulnerable daughter, the urgency — that is the weapon. It pulls the target deep into the forest. It separates the target from the safety of their normal critical faculties.Naming the Walk-In: The CounterThe counter is to name the walk-in as a genre. When you hear that someone came forward to security services and confirmed a politically convenient story, your first question should not be: what did they say? What did Yulia Mendel say? Your first question should be: does this have the structural signature of a walk-in? If the confession arrived pre-packaged, same day, with media-ready quotation marks, that’s not intelligence, it’s theatre.I fell for a walk-in myself, or I nearly did, in 2016. I walked into a forest on the strength of one — or more correctly, I drove in an armoured vehicle into a forest on the strength of one — until I managed to come up with a formula of words that would wake someone up high in the chain of command, without violating the chain of command.The formula of words I used was the precise formula of words that was used in the text of the walk-in. I hoped — even though that didn’t wake the head of operations or their boss when I repeated it to them, it didn’t wake most of my colleagues from their dream-like ecstasy of envisioning going into this cottage and somehow rescuing this mother and her child from being chopped, unarmed (I may add), chopped into tiny pieces.Intuitively I composed the text to the head of security for the mission and I said: “Please confirm order to go into cottage in the woods where a mother and her underage daughter are about to be chopped into tiny pieces.” He rang me immediately and said: “I’m not authorised to stop operations, but I’m telling you to stop this, and I will go around my chain of command and ensure this operation stopped.” He had the same reaction that I had to it — which I kind of hoped he would — which was: this is so inauthentic, and it’s such a crazy operation to be sent on, it cannot be true.Even though I at the time didn’t have any idea about the walk-in as a genre, or archetypal Disinfolklore, or Jung’s archetypes, it was such a strange operation it woke me from my slumber. I only escaped because my head of security parsed the folktale structure that I had texted him.The folktale structure is the escape route. Name the walk-in, name the genre, and stay out of the forest.The Minsk Coyote Lawyer: Dinego and Juridical TheatreThe second story I wanted to tell you tonight was about the character which I call the Minsk Coyote Lawyer. Many of you will know I’m very interested in the M-N- sound and the cryptotype, so Minsk is very interesting to me. I’m also interested in this other cryptotype, which is represented by the Don, the Donetsk, the Dnipro, the Dniester, and the Danube — the D-N- — which basically emanates from the idea of Danu, which is the embodiment of a river in early Indo-European culture. A river as a boundary zone, as an interaction zone. I’m fascinated by that area that divides Enerhodar from Nikopol, that divides where we see these islands which, as I understand, Ukraine has reconquered all along the Dnieper River, right in the area of Zaporizhzhia where Indo-European languages — all living Indo-European languages — emanate from.Dinego, this coyote, Minsk Coyote Lawyer, was the main negotiator — so-called negotiator — appointed by the Russians. I had to shake his hand once for the Luhansk Folk’s Republic in Minsk. Let’s call this The Minsk Coyote Lawyer: Dinego and Juridical Theatre.I’ve spoken before in my previous archetypal Disinfolklore stories about Morochko, who’s the folksy colonel of the Russian occupation of Luhansk. Vladislav Dinego is his Coyote Lawyer. In my corpus he appears 345 times. His title: LFR Envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group. His stage: the Minsk Peace Negotiations.The Trilateral Contact Group was the OSCE, the Russians, and the Ukrainians. The Russians, of course, were pretending that they’re not a party to the conflict; they’re merely helping to represent the organic revolutions of the Luhansk Volksrepublik. Obviously the Russians have appointed all of the structures and all of the people in the structures. His stage is the Minsk peace negotiations; his function, to perform legitimacy through the motions of juridical argument.In every folk tradition, there’s a trickster who argues his way past the guardians of the threshold: the coyote in the Pueblo tales, Anansi in the Akan, Renard the Fox in medieval France, Till Eulenspiegel in Low German. The coyote lawyer argues with a straight face that he has the right to the chicken, the corn, the seller, the bride, the Ukraine. His argument is not meant to be believed on its merits. It’s meant to consume the time of the guardian, to multiply the complexity of the refusal, and to plant the seed of doubt in the audience.Dinego’s function in the Minsk process was exactly this. Let me read from my well of 10,000 propaganda pieces.Reading from the Corpus7th of August 2015, lug-info.com: Dinego stages a press conference from Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. Remember last week we talked about how this is the Soviet revenant plus juridical theatre, one venue: the heroes of the great patriotic square. Every word in the press release, every word in the journal article, is an example of what I call Disinfolklore. It’s brain hacking. We get focused on perhaps the substance of it — what’s said at the press conference — without realising that we’re actually being brainwashed by the article talking about where the press conference actually is.5th of November 2015: Dinego hosts a group of — I’m air-quoting here — “European experts” to inspect the water supply facilities in Luhansk Folk’s Republic. Remember, I mentioned this last week. He meets them, he mediates with the management of Luhansk Voda Company, which I did all the time as well. Notice: the envoy of an armed proxy group is performing this role of hydraulic minister, looking after the fertility of the inner realm. The coyote is wearing the waterworks inspector’s hat today.11th of April 2017, lug-info: Dinego and Denis Pushilin jointly insist on ecological inspection of mines of Kiev-controlled Donbass area. The coyote lawyer is arguing that his chicken-coop inspection must extend to the Ukrainian side of the fence. The argument is absurd, but the absurdity is the point. Every hour spent discussing it is an hour Ukraine does not spend reinforcing a lie.7th of March 2017, lug-info.com: “SMM representatives leave Stanytsia area 30 minutes before disengagement — envoy.” Here, Dinego accuses the OSCE monitors — that’s me — of leaving on purpose to sabotage disengagement. The coyote lawyer now trolls the impartial guardian. The impartial guardian becomes an accomplice of the outer realm. That was me.We went through this — I think it lasted about two and a half years. Every day there was supposed to be disengagement. Every day, there was something that came from stage left to prevent the Russians from disengaging — that they couldn’t disengage if we weren’t there, and if we were there they wouldn’t disengage because of some other excuse, but if we left, then we were archetyped as the reason why they didn’t disengage, and therefore it’s our fault. We, the impartial guardian. The impartial guardian becomes an accomplice of the outer realm.Putler, no doubt, has some excuse for why Russia hasn’t released these 1,000 hostages that it was agreed to release. Donald himself will come up with some reason why it’s not Putler’s fault — it’s Ukraine’s fault for doing something. It’s the same kind of blame game. It’s all an act. It’s theatre. The people executing it know it’s theatre. We, as the viewers, should treat it as theatre, not as sacrosanct news.The Invariant ShapeEvery appearance follows the same shape. Dinego arrives. Dinego makes a plausible-sounding legal or administrative argument. Dinego demands a procedural concession. Dinego accuses the other party of violating a procedural norm. The content is fungible — water, mines, elections, disengagement, monitoring, humanitarian corridors. The shape is invariant.Why does it work? Because the legal process itself carries archetypal authority. This is the meaning, I believe, of Donald and his peace talks, and of Putler and his peace talks and ceasefire. They’re talking about concepts which have archetypal authority.In Indo-European folk memory, the figure who knows the law — the Druid, the Brehon in Ireland, the Senator, the Qadi — is one of the legitimate heirs of sovereignty. By dressing as a lawyer envoy, Dinego colonises some of that archetypal authority for his stateless armed group. Every time Western diplomats sit across from him, photograph him, quote him, his archetypal authority accrues a tiny bit of interest. Over three years, the interest compounds enormously.The Counter to the Coyote LawyerThe counter to the coyote lawyer is to refuse the procedural invitation. Do not argue his merits. Name the coyote. This is not a juridical envoy. This is a costume. Every minute spent rebutting his specific arguments is a minute he has won. Every minute spent naming his role is a minute he has lost.I’ll leave it at that for tonight. I won’t get on to trolling because I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’ll leave it at that. Out.Previous Episode Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Some of you may remember that two weeks ago I started a new series, looking at trolling and trolls. I am interspersing each week: one week on archetypal analysis of what I call the Luhansk archive, and then I move into the trolling.Trolling as Emotion-Moving ActivityJust to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that definition through the story I am telling you tonight, and that I told you last time — that trolling is about movement, and what binds the use of artillery in eastern Ukraine, which I witnessed a lot, with Donald’s trolling about Iran, or anything else on the internet, with indeed President Zelenskyy’s trolling about his ceasefire offer this week and Ukraine’s great response to that. What binds all of these uses of the term trolling — which do describe the phenomena I have described — is movement, and the movement of emotions.What unites an artillery barrage with a tweet, or with the kind of way you might communicate with your pet cat, or the way someone you love communicates with you when they are trying to persuade you to do something that initially you did not want to do, but it is in your interests — this is all about a movement of emotions, and there is an activity which moves the emotions. I just wanted to fix you on that as we go through this.The Journey from Factiva to Eastern UkraineWhat I am doing is bringing you on the journey I went on, which is: how do you link that aspect with the use of trolling as a term — trolls and trolling — for a phenomenon that most of us did not have any awareness of before, say, 2010? I did not have any awareness of trolling before about 2018 as a signifier. I remember the moment I received an email from a friend who just mentioned, oh, they were on YouTube trolling some people. I did not know what he was talking about at the time. I do remember that.What that signifier describes has been around forever, and I can say that with certainty because I have looked into what it means. The meaning which I deduce from the Dow Jones Factiva database of the uses of the term trolling and trolls — 65,000 uses of those terms in the world’s largest database of media, 33,000 media sources — that was my starting point. My friend used this term, it intrigued me, and I did not know what he was talking about, but I was seeing it a lot around. I wanted to see how this term has been used over time.That led me on this journey. It was my insight in eastern Ukraine that actually the meaning of this phenomenon — that has a meaning in early computer culture from California, and also with the advent particularly of Facebook and Twitter around 2008, this explosion of the use of trolls and trolling in the media around the world — what united those uses with what I was seeing in eastern Ukraine was the fact that there was a troll: as a person, as a metaphor to describe a person, or as a metaphor to describe a tweet, or what I now understand as any emotion-moving activity. The activity could be a flick of your eyebrow. It could be a tweet by the President of the United States. It could be a piece of legislation. All of these phenomena are united by the fact that they are emotion-moving activity, and they do move others’ emotions.Two Springs: Fishing and FolkloreLast time I spoke about this, I was talking about looking at the term, how it arose in the Oxford English Dictionary, and how it went from fishing — from the discourse of fishing. It was used as a metaphor to talk about how you troll for souls. That was some of the earliest uses. Then in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive account of the English language, used the term from computer culture for the first time — trolling for bait, in the sense that my friend used it. That was a proposed amendment in 2006.There are these two springs from which this idea of trolling and trolls comes. One is fishing, and that goes back to the 13th century. The other is folklore. Today I am going to talk about folklore, and the connection there obviously with what I was doing in Ukraine: I was on a bridge with bridge trolls. The troll’s tale described the structural situation that I was in in eastern Ukraine. There were all these colliding meanings and associations which I have spent years trying to work out and work through.First spring, fishing. Second spring, folklore — the creature under the bridge. On the older of the two streams that fed the word troll, the Scandinavian folk creature: the bridge, the billy goats, the Moomins, and the long moral ambivalence of the figure in the folk imagination, before it met the English verb at the bottom of the hill.I took you on the first of the two streams that fed the word troll. I took you on the angler on the river in 1606, the clergyman who wrote that God trolls for souls. Tonight I will take you on the second stream. This one is older, it is colder, and considerably stranger.The Creature of Moral AmbivalenceThe creature is not unambiguously malign. The creature is not unambiguously benign. The creature has a long, murky career as a figure of moral ambivalence.To understand what happened to the word in the last 30 years — because this is really what I am doing, telling you about the development of this word in most of our lifetimes, and the development of the practice of trolling from early computer culture in California, to the use of trolling as a weapon of war by Iran, by Russia, indeed by Ukraine, and by the United States of America — you have to see what happened to the figure across the last thousand years.When I say that the troll is ambiguous: we do associate trolls with negative connotations, but the literary history we have also has them as positive creatures. Why is this significant to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where on one side you had the Russian bridge trolls protecting their inner realm, Russia-occupied Ukraine?From the perspective of the inner realm, they were using their Disinfolklore to convince the people inside Russia-occupied Ukraine that those imprisoning them were actually protecting them from Ukrainian bogeymen, from Ukrainian Nazis. From that side, from the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk, you look at the bridge troll and you are being brainwashed into thinking that is a positive creature.If you are MAGA, you look at Donald as someone who is going to protect America. He is standing on the bridge. He is protecting the inner realm of white-dominated America from the marauding migrants who are coming in over the bridge. From the perspective of MAGA adherents, or those who fall for the Donald troll, he is a positive creature. Obviously, from all of our perspectives — I am making assumptions here, but I think it is a good assumption to make — from our perspectives, he is a troll in a negative sense, and he is destroying the inner realm of America.That ambiguity depends on where you stand. Understanding that helps us understand the complexity of the act of trolling, where you can very gently troll someone into doing something that is in their best interests, and vice versa. Yet it is the same activity you are really doing. It is persuasion, it is courting, it is expressing love. It is like if your child or your pet is trying to get you to do something.Old Norse: A Category, Not a CreatureThe Old Norse word trolls — spelt troll, without the S, in the sagas — does not, in the oldest attestations, name a single specific creature. It names a category. In Indo-European culture, we have this category with different monikers everywhere. The category is something like: a supernatural being, larger and stronger than a human, not clearly divine, usually hostile, sometimes intermarriageable with humans, often associated with remote places — mountains, forests, caves, the underside of bridges, the far side of rivers.Every one of those elements can be found in the Prose Edda, which is one of the earliest texts in a Germanic language, and in the Heimskringla, and in the Icelandic family sagas of the 13th century. The creature is pre-Christian in origin, and most of the surviving texts were written down after the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 AD, and the Christian scribes have already imposed a layer of demonisation.You find trolls who are pitiable or even noble. One of the oldest story types in the corpus that I collected is the story of a human hero who is trapped in the wilderness — on a mountain pass, in a cave during a storm at night, on a lonely road — and is rescued from the wilderness by a troll woman, who turns out, under hideous exterior, to be a supernatural figure of rescue.Here we have, in the other series I am doing, where we talk a lot about the merciful sovereign — when Donald or Putler create the crisis and then act as the merciful sovereign to get the Hormuz Strait open. This is an essential aspect of the early use of the troll. The troll woman gives the hero food, shelter, a magical object, crucial knowledge. The hero goes on to do his great deed because of the troll woman’s gift.This is not the story the Grimm brothers would later tell about ogres. It is a story that acknowledges that the creature outside the human community has gifts the community cannot provide, and that the hero who needs those gifts must be willing to accept them from the figure the community fears.Three Billy Goats Gruff: Moral SimplificationThree Billy Goats Gruff — which is the foundational story for me on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, because I realised that not only was it a structural description of what I was going through there, but it is a structural description of all encounters with the other world and all encounters in interaction zones — in airports, on the Hormuz Straits, wherever you have one community defining itself against an outer realm community.The Three Billy Goats Gruff is really a moral simplification in the classic Norwegian telling of it. As some of you might remember, I have innovated in the interpretation of it. It was first written down in the 1840s and published in English by George Webbe Dasent in 1859, and it immediately became a success. I know that because I looked at this archive, and you could see references to how important it was. It rose above all the other troll tales by a degree.The troll under the bridge is purely an obstacle, and the Three Billy Goats Gruff outwit him by scale. The smallest comes first and promises a bigger one is on his way — so deception. The middle one comes next. This is the version of the troll that most English-speaking readers first encounter. It is not the only version.The Moomins: Recovering the Older TrollConsider the Moomins. In 1945, Tove Jansson published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first of the Moomin novels. The Moomins are trolls. This is not a marketing decoration.When you look at the archive, trolls as an entity in our culture really start taking off in the 1950s. A guy in Oakland in California registered the trademark of troll dolls, and trademark disputes over people using troll dolls appear in this Factiva database regularly. Every few years there would be explosions in interest in trolls, usually through troll movies. There would be lots of lawsuits all related to these troll dolls.In 1945, when Tove Jansson was writing about them, people were aware of trolls and most children would have been read stories about them, but they were not a huge part of our movie culture or popular culture as we call it today.Jansson is explicit that her round, hippopotamus-shaped protagonists belong to the Scandinavian troll family. They live in a valley. They are gentle, curious, philosophically inclined, and slightly anxious. This is NAFO. This describes many of us who are either NAFO-adjacent or NAFO. Their visitors include the Snufkin, who plays a mouth organ and leaves every autumn; the Hemulen, who is rigid and rule-bound; the Snork; the Snork Maiden; and a variety of other morally ambiguous creatures.Nothing about the Moomins is frightening. They are 20th-century Finnish-Swedish rewritings — so Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, two different of the great language families alive today — rewriting the folk figure into the tradition of quiet, reflective, slightly melancholy kindness. Tove Jansson is, in effect, recovering the older version of the troll, the troll woman in the cave who gives the traveller shelter, from the moral simplification of Billy Goats Gruff.The Icelandic Tradition: Trolls in the LandscapeConsider too the trolls of the Icelandic tradition, another great Indo-European culture. In the 20th century, Guðmundur Finnbogason, Sven Lundgren, the folklorists who preserved the Icelandic material, collected stories in which trolls turn to stone at sunrise; in which trolls are tricked by the hero, but sometimes bless the hero; in which trolls are the ancestors of specific mountain formations and rock arches; in which the troll is explicitly connected to the earth itself.The trolls of this tradition are features of the Icelandic landscape, physical manifestations in the landscape, because the Icelandic folk imagination read the landscape as the petrified bodies of trolls. The figure is not a simple villain. The figure is in the theology of a place. Iceland’s most famous natural monuments are its trolls. This is not a culture that thinks that the troll is merely wicked.Why Did the Billy Goats Gruff Version Win in English?Why, in the English language imagination, has the Billy Goats Gruff version won? I have three answers.The first is the Grimm effect. When the English translator rendered the Norwegian tales into English, he imported them into a Victorian children’s literature framework that already expected moral clarity. Grimm’s Tales had been translated into English in 1823, and the Grimm pattern — I have talked before about the relationship of the Grimm brothers to Herder, and Herder’s call in 1777, where he wanted to find a means of uniting the ten historic mythological German tribes that Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about 40 years after the Common Era. He wanted a means of uniting them around a common culture. Herder, I have spoken about before, asked: where is our Shakespeare? In 1777. Out of this call emanated this great pouring of German culture, which 90 years later led to the first unified German state. The Grimm brothers answered this call, as did Goethe and later Wagner. It was their work — collecting folklore, putting to music these ancient legends — which led to the unification of the German state.The connection with Disinfolklore here, and with what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine, was that the Russians were doing the reverse of this. They were manufacturing a culture through these stories they were generating in this situation on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where I was for three years, and inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where they were creating this prison, brainwashing everyone in it and saying that they were the merciful sovereign, saving them from the wicked West of freedom and human rights and LGBTIQ equality and justice, all the rest of it. This is Disinfolklore, and the use of Disinfolklore — which Donald obviously uses as well to brainwash people — is the inorganic use of the same methods that Herder and the Grimm brothers used to unite the ten German tribes. That model of creating a national culture out of literature, the literature collected from songs from the folk and stories from the folk — that model was copied all over Europe: Ireland, Ukraine, Greece, almost every European nation state owes its existence to its own use of this model, creating a national culture and then claiming statehood and becoming states from the late 19th century on.The second answer is the 19th-century folklore collectors’ project, which I will give its own talk on. Men like MacRitchie and Kennedy, an anonymous correspondent of The London Magazine — I read many of these from the 19th century, who travelled to Scandinavia, to Ireland, to Greece, to the Orkneys, collecting folktales and writing them up for a metropolitan Victorian audience. Their interest was explicitly archaeological. They wanted the creature at its most pagan, the troll that most resembled a pre-Christian demon, so it could be analysed as a relic. The ambivalent troll woman of the older sagas was not interesting to them. The frightening underground creature that had to be defeated by Christianity was interesting to them. The collectors filtered the figure through their own theological needs, and the figure that emerged was darker than the folk had ever painted it.The third answer is the one I have been circling in this series and in all of my work: the English verb troll already had a pejorative hook inside it. The 1567 Fenton “trolls and corrupters of youth” reference that I talked about two weeks ago; the 1575 Awdeley Orders of Knaves, which I will take up in the next talk. When English readers encountered the Scandinavian folk creature, they had a verb waiting — a verb that had already named a category of bad person. The creature and the verb fused in the English imagination in a way that they had not fused in the Norse imagination. In Scandinavia, the troll was a class of supernatural being with a complex moral life, whereas in England, a troll was a kind of knave, and the folk creature arrived to be slotted into the knave category. This is why the popular English-language troll is the Billy Goats Gruff troll. It is not because the Scandinavian original was unambiguously evil; it is because the English reception system wanted a simple villain and had a category to put them in.My Innovation on the Three Billy Goats GruffThe interpretation I add to The Three Billy Goats Gruff is the one I have hinted at earlier: whether the troll is the hero, or the three goats crossing are the heroes, depends on your perspective. If you are in the inner realm and you do not want people to come in and adulterate your culture with their different aspect — you do not want them to adulterate the sovereignty or the security or the fertility of your inner realm. You do not want them to come in and steal your sons or your daughters in marriage and adulterate the bloodline. Then the troll is a hero.It is interesting to me that it is the troll most people, most children focus on, and yet the troll loses in this interaction. For the average MAGA voter or an England Reform voter, where the migrant goat coming over the bridge is the enemy, the troll should be the hero. It is quite a complex tale in that sense, where you have the goats as economic migrants just wanting to get some food on the other side of the bridge. Of course, when you tell that to your child it sounds so innocent — but that is the precise tale that Donald spoke at the bottom of the gold escalator in Trump Tower in 2016. That is the tale we hear a thousand times a day. That is the archetypal troll tale we hear among politicians.Politicians who, in many cases with good justification, are talking about the complexity of the migration debate. I listened to Meloni this week talk about all the different relationships between migrants and democracy and sovereignty and security and being manipulated by malign forces, and how this undermines our democracy — a really sophisticated critique. This troll tale does have that sophisticated critique, but I accept that most people do not see that when they first see films about it.The Moomins are not obscure. The Moomin novels have been translated into more than 16 languages. These are positive trolls, avant la lettre — positive trolls, way before NAFO. Tove Jansson was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966, and won it. They are very much part of the establishment. Finnish state Moomin-themed stamps have been issued. They have sovereign authority in every decade since 1992. The Moomins have their own theme park in Naantali and an entire museum in Tampere. There is also a small museum in Covent Garden in central London. Millions of Scandinavian children grow up with the Moomins as their primary image of what a troll is.In Finland and Sweden and Japan, where the Moomins are immensely popular, the word troll, in its folkloric register, retains its older sense. I mention this because when the English-language culture war of the last 20 years imported the pejorative troll into global usage, it imported a moral simplification that many of the cultures that the word passed through already knew was wrong. When a Finnish reader encounters the headline “Trolling Jail Terms” in 2010 — these are pop culture references to English pop culture, and Moomin trolls sitting by the fire. The cognitive work required to let the first picture override the second is real. In much of Scandinavia it has not entirely been done. The older picture is still available.The Code of Positive Trolls and Distinguishing Folklore from DisinfolkloreHow do you distinguish folklore from Disinfolklore? Mockers’ mocking tone, and the way she tells these stories of doom — that is folklore. The Code of Positive Trolls, this six-element test: generosity — is it generous? Right — is it ethically disciplined? Patient — does it provoke us into making urgent decisions, or is it a bit chilled? Mana, energy, and focus — i.e. mindfulness. Should we let this into our brain, into our inner mind, to affect us? Is there any wisdom in it?The Code of Positive Trolls can draw on the positive residue. I am not going to try to rescue the negative meaning of troll in our contemporary culture. I will stick with the Code of Positive Trolls because we all troll all the time. If you accept that as part of the definition, then we need a means to decide what is positive and what is negative. I use the six-element evaluative framework.When I wrote at the end of March 2022 in my “Let’s Compare Trolls” tweet — of President Zelenskyy as the arch 21st-century troll, compared to Duncey Putler as the arch 20th-century troll — I was using the Code of Positive Trolls to distinguish between the two of them. It is simply not right to sign into law and into international law, as Putler did in 2003, the state border of Russia and Ukraine, and then invade it and claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia. That breaches law. It breaches right. Therefore, he is the negative troll in that sense.The Moomin, the troll woman of the saga at the beginning, the petrified giant of Þingvellir in Iceland — these are folk figures that contain the possibility of a troll who is the giver of gifts to the traveller in the wilderness, not merely a taker of tribute at the bridge. All of us who have been following NAFO since its inception, and have been helping to keep NAFO in everyone’s minds, understand this. They are positive trolls, not merely takers of tribute on the bridge.If you are building a practice, you can build it with that residue. If you are fighting the public meaning of the word, you cannot win, but you can behave properly, and accept that you are trolling — for instance, if you are a NAFO member.The Troll Predominantly Negative, Even in ScandinaviaThe negative evidence is really not about rescue in the Scandinavian folk record itself. Even before the Grimm filter, the troll is predominantly negative — predominantly, not universally, but predominantly. Most of the sagas treat the creature as something to be defeated. The benign troll woman is the minority case, not the majority.The troll’s association with bridges is an association with toll-taking, with the forced extraction of resources. We go to the Strait of Hormuz with the forced extraction of resources from travellers who cannot go around. The troll’s association with darkness is an association with inversion of the sun’s moral order. In the Eddas, when Thor fights Hrungnir and Þrymr and Skrymir and the other giant trolls, the fight is presented as the legitimate defence of Asgard against encroachment. The moral geometry favours the gods. The trolls lose.In the moral folkloric reading that Janteloven codifies — Janteloven, some of you, I know I am not pronouncing it correctly. Is anyone there? We have a Tove. We have proper Scandinavians there who are going to correct me on all of this. I cannot pronounce Janteloven properly, but since I was introduced to it, it is amazing.Janteloven was first codified by a novelist, but the rules which it represents are the dominant means of keeping community together in Scandinavia. It is the Scandinavian social principle that nobody should think of themselves as special, that the community is the unit of moral reference, that outliers are suspect. The troll is the figure who lives outside the community. The troll rejects Jante. In the Scandinavian moral imagination, this is not neutral — it is the definition of deviance. The troll under the bridge is not just a robber, he is a heretic against the commune.When Scandinavians invented Facebook comment moderation tools and began prosecuting trolls under the Swedish penal code in the 2010s, they were acting on a folk intuition about the commune heretic that is more than a thousand years old.To be honest, the folk record shades slightly towards the negative, even in Scandinavia. The Moomin and the troll woman in the cave are real, but they are the minority. The Billy Goats Gruff troll, the mountain ogre, the bridge toll-keeper are the majority. The English reception system did not distort the original. It selected for the dominant moral reading.When the Two Streams Met: Negative Gravity Pulls Neutrality DownThe two streams that fed the word — the fishing stream of the angler’s running line and the folklore stream of the Scandinavian creature — had different moral centres of gravity before they met. The fishing stream was morally neutral. The folklore stream was morally ambivalent in the sagas, morally polarised in the Grimm-era reception, and morally recoverable only in pockets like the Moomins, the Icelandic landscape tradition, and indeed in Disinfolklore, the tradition I created.When the two streams met at the bottom of the hill — first in Elizabethan London, with Fenton and Awdeley and Fulwell, and then again in Usenet in 1992 — the folklore stream’s negative gravity pulled the fishing stream’s neutrality with it.Remember the meaning of neutral. The tra, the movement in there — neu-tral. It is no movement against this axis between right and the dream state, or right and trickery. The neutral is neutral: no movement.The angler of 1606 who fished for souls became, 400 years later, the troll under the bridge demanding his toll. The gospel bait — remember where the clergyman was comparing trolling for sinners to fishing — the gospel bait became the flame bait. The river became the comment thread. The strike remained a strike.The word, which could hold both the positive and the negative as late as 1891, when Andrew Lang was editing fairy tales and writing angling sketches and using troll in both senses without confusion — the word, in our lifetime, collapsed into the negative. It collapsed not because the language changed, but because the behaviour the word described had, at industrial scale and with state sponsorship, become negative in a way it had not been before.The rest of the series is the story of how that happened. In the next talk, in two weeks’ time, I will take you back to three English books in the 1560s and the 1570s, when the negative was already in the word, 300 years before the Grimm brothers picked up a pen. The Elizabethans had a whole taxonomy of troll knaves before Iceland was Christianised in any way that mattered for English literature.The Grandmother at the Checkpoint: The Luhansk CorpusI will leave the trolling at that. If you have the patience, I will quickly switch streams back into the archetypal stream and look at one of the archetypal readings of the Luhansk corpus, this 10,000 propaganda items which I collected and which is the empirical basis of Disinfolklore.From the Stanytsia Luhanska footbridge — back to the bridge between 2015 and 2018 — I watched the same woman cross a thousand times. Not literally the same woman: a grandmother-shaped, headscarfed, thin-coated, plastic-bag-carrying woman who came across at first light, stood in the queue to have her papers inspected by men with rifles, crossed into Ukrainian-controlled territory, went to Oschadbank — who thankfully got its assets back from Hungary today — went to Oschadbank in Stanytsia Luhanska to collect her pension, bought her medicine, visited the grave of her husband, and crossed back before dark. 10,000 of her crossed every day. I was the diplomat on the bridge, me and my colleagues, helping to secure her passage.She is an archetype. The grandmother at the checkpoint is the third most common character in the Russian occupation propaganda repertoire, after the folksy colonel and the Ukrainian Nazi. In my corpus of 10,000 items, 144 of them are tagged pensioner, grandmother. The occupier uses her in a very specific way. Because I was there for three years, every day, I can tell you she was not just an archetype. She was a real person that I interacted with, and had thousands of conversations with, and I still have the notes of those conversations. She was both a real person and an archetype in the propaganda, in the Disinfolklore the Russians were using to brainwash her and her neighbours in Russia-occupied Ukraine.Let me read one of them, 24th of May 2016, lug-info.com. This is a story I participated in several different times. “A man died in a long queue created by the Ukrainian Customs Service in Stanytsia Luhanska — People’s Militia. An elderly man died while waiting in a queue artificially created by the Ukrainian Customs Service at Stanytsia Luhanska crossing point, said People’s Militia representative Major Andrei Maroshko.”The man is real. The death is real. I walked that bridge. I may well have been around the day he died. I may well have been part of this episode. This bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska was in this biosphere reserve, this idyllic place which was not a border until the Russians invaded. The Russian occupiers are claiming this man died because of an artificially created queue by the Ukrainians. For a long time it was very confusing for me to understand. Being on the bridge every day, seeing the different tempo on different periods, it was very hard to know who was causing it. Eventually I did work out that the entire scene was created by the Russians in order to provide a platform for all of these stories, and to provide content for these stories. This is what they do. They create the distress and then they purport to solve it. We recognise that in a lot of these chaos merchants.Archetype Reversal: Kyiv Starves Its Own GrandmothersEvery word in that sentence is aimed at a specific target: the listener’s protective instinct towards grandmothers and grandfathers. The Ukrainian state grammatically creates the queue — not climate, not war, not the failure of both sides to staff the checkpoint adequately, or the fact that Russia wanted to create the queue so that it would have stories to tell, Disinfolklore in order to brainwash the population, so that seven years down the line they would be able to use them in meat assaults, because they would no longer see their Ukrainian neighbours as human beings. Not the fact that Russia shelled the bridge to rubble in 2015 and blocked its repair for years. Ukrainian Customs Service creates the queue, and the queue kills an old man. Therefore, unspoken but inevitable, Ukraine is the killer of Luhansk’s grandfathers.This is a classical archetype reversal. In any Indo-European folktale tradition, the elderly are untouchable. To threaten a grandmother is the blackest possible crime. Russian Disinfolklore uses this sacred category by positioning Ukraine structurally as the entity that threatens her. Every pension-queue death is folded into the narrative: Kyiv starves its own grandmothers.What is left unsaid? That Russia’s occupation created the need for the queue in the first place. That before 2014, Ukrainians crossed no checkpoints in Luhansk province. That the queue is the shadow of the occupation itself. That the woman in the plastic bag and headscarf cohort is crossing out of Russian-controlled territory because the Ukrainian state is where she can still collect a pension, see her doctor, buy medicine she trusts, bury her sister, visit her parents’ grave in the ground where her mother lies.Every one of those 10,000 daily crossings was a vote. They walked, carrying plastic bags and patience across a bridge under gun-sights, away from the Russian occupation, because life was better on the other side. No referendum in the occupation ever recorded this vote, but the bridge recorded it every day for years, and I was there and watched it.The counter story is what I saw: the dignity of the queue. The jokes told in it. The people who fed a cat — one of whom I managed to get out of there, Henry the checkpoint cat, who I wrote about in one of my first stories on Substack on Decoding Trolls. The chocolate slipped into a grandchild’s pocket at the checkpoint. The whispered message to the friend at the other side. These grandmothers were not Maroshko’s props. They were Ukraine’s witnesses, and real people. I will leave it at that for today, and the next time we will come back to a few more archetypes.Why People Stayed: Brave Refusal to LeaveYou have probably read this story, because especially with older people, it is their home. They were being boiled quite slowly in water by this Disinfolklore. I thought at the beginning, when they had to cross over into Stanytsia to get their pension, that they would then realise that their fellow Ukrainians were not ogres. The power of Disinfolklore is to convince you otherwise. They had to cross over because their life, their pension depended on it, but it was made such a vastly unpleasant experience by the Russians that it was not a very pleasant operation for them.Of course, over a million and a half people did leave, and they left within days of the Russian occupation in April 2014. There was, for instance, the last fast train. I do not know whether you have seen these amazing trains — they are much more comfortable than trains in most parts of Western Europe. The last fast train left Luhansk city probably around the 15th of April 2014. I knew people who were on that train. It is quite a famous train. A million and a half people did leave. Some of them left with their parents, their families.I met one amazing family who had this massive house and horses in Crimea, which they left — just left everything immediately, took as many horses as they could and headed to Luhansk in early March 2014. Then the Russians kind of followed them to Luhansk and took over, and they had to go to Kyiv with their horses. There are literally a million and a half stories of people who did leave, but a lot of people did not leave, for a whole really complex set of reasons. They would go over for their pensions.Certain people we know — at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I was encouraging friends of mine to leave immediately, and trying to help them find places in western Europe to live. These people, who recently were terribly affected when my apartment building in Dnipro was bombed two weeks ago, that I talked about, and my neighbour’s mother was killed in that attack — I often reflect on how brave these people were. These are younger people with the means to leave, with the financial means and the cultural means to go, but their attitude is: this is my home, I am not leaving. The Russians — this is why the Russians are still stuck a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv: because so many people refuse to leave. It is just friction for them, quite apart from fighting. I admire it greatly. It would not be my intuition, but it is a really interesting question, Wendy. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new series, and this is going to be the third episode of it, where I am going through what I call the Luhansk archive, the Luhansk corpus, which was the data set from which I generated the Disinfolklore analysis. I am going through the different archetypal identities in each of these stories.This is a core part of the analytical method: this idea I have of mobile armies of archetypes — really, archetypal identities. You have the signifier, you have the surface, the phenomenon. You have the gold in Donald’s office in the White House — that is surface. That is an archetypal identifier. Then you have the identity associated with it, which is what it is supposed to signify on the surface level, but also subconsciously.I talk in all my work about archetypes and archetypal identities and archetyping, but this mode of analysis was generated from this corpus, which I gathered, collected, and analysed, and tried to understand what on earth was going on when I first encountered it in eastern Ukraine.Why This Is Relevant to Ukraine: A War of SymbolsWhy is this relevant to Ukraine? We are all here for Ukraine. We obviously have the connection between Donald and America and Ukraine, which has just been spoken about. We also have, on the level of the war itself, that it is a war of symbols. It is a war of archetypes.When we see Russia sending a thousand humans to their doom each day, they are trying to affect and project archetypal identities into the minds of the decision-makers and the non-decision-makers like normal people like us. They are trying to impact the minds of humanity and to persuade us that they are strong. That sacrifice is being made — despite us knowing in this space that they are not strong — to try to convince people that they are strong. Strength and strongman is an archetype, and the archetypal identity is between Putler and a strongman, or between Donald and a strongman. Of course, we understand the true archetypal identity there is between, say, President Zelenskyy with the Ukrainian people and strength. That is also why it is relevant.The Ballroom: Folkloric Motif Before ArchitectureThis week, we saw the obsession with the so-called ballroom. This is the relevance of the Disinfolklore analytical method. As far as I am aware, nobody else has noticed this phenomenon yet, despite it being so obvious. You can get your eye in because you have been reading me or listening to me.The ballroom. The repetition of the ballroom — that phrase, that archetype, which we all remember from children’s stories, from Cinderella: you will not go to the ball, you will go to the ball, the slipper, Disney. That is the payload. It is everywhere in our information space, whether you want the ballroom built or whether you do not want the ballroom built. People this afternoon are sharing photographs of the gold in the Oval Office. By sharing a photograph of this gold in the Oval Office, we are actually participating in the embedding of an archetypal identity that we may or may not agree with. From the standpoint of the intelligence and the people who are trying to affect our moods, our intentions, and our motivations by using these archetypes, this idea of the ballroom — they do not care, because the energy is being continued, and the picture is being continued.What I try to do in all my work is just give us a bit of a guide, because I see it. I see the same energy, the same tactics that were used in eastern Ukraine, and it can help us understand what is going on in today’s world.I wrote a piece this week — I have been meaning to write it for a very long time — because of this obsession and this repetition, this mantra, like Hunter Biden. This is the point of it: whether you are for or against it — ballroom, ballroom. Yes, I could fall into that trap, but I am claiming a special exemption. I can use the archetype ballroom, ballroom, ballroom here, because I am trying to explain a perspective on what it means and its impact, and why suddenly this is in everyone’s minds — everyone who is tuned into the American infospace.The ballroom is a folkloric motif before it is an architectural one. We have to understand that. A lot of the debate is showing pictures of the destruction of the East Wing, which is one archetype: destroy the heart of American identity. Yes, if you want to destroy that, then you physically destroy the building. That is one element, one archetype. I am not focusing on that. I am focusing on this idea that a Republican Party — whose moniker, whose archetype is as a Republican — will be banging on about a ballroom.Three Inflections of the Ballroom: King’s Hall, Mead Hall, CinderellaIt is a folkloric motif. Three of its inflections are doing the work here.The first is the King’s Hall. Some of you know my Finding Manuland project, the exchange of mana. Part of my motivation to look for that was reading in Irish mythological tales. So many of them are set in the King’s Hall. It is a table replete with food, and it is about the exchange of what I call mana. Homer — the composite individual, Homer who toured, and the different other people who toured the coast, the western coast of Anatolia, of today’s Turkey — and spoke at certain festivals where food was exchanged. The king, the monarch, would pay for these huge feasts, and these tales — a bit like I am regaling you with a tale now — would be told. Those eventually were written down, and that is the Iliad and the Odyssey. We see it also in Indian culture. It was just a curiosity to me, because it is quite alien from most of our lives. I think it is important to sit down in a room — but for some people who went to older universities, or old boys, or Rotary Club, there is all this thing about food and the exchange of energy in those rooms, so there is part of that.The gilded Oval Office, his gold card, his own face engraved on it, his Mar-a-Lago, Rococo mirrors, and now his East Wing ballroom — they are all operating in the same gift economy of sovereign favour, in the same idiom of polished gold.I went once to the mansion that Yanukovych — who was president of Ukraine until he ran away in February 2014 — owned. I was expecting this mythical place that had been built. I think it cost maybe 100, 150 million dollars. It had a Spanish galleon on it. I do not think it had any zebras, but they were not there when I went to visit it. I was expecting to hate it, but actually I had never been anywhere like it. It was just every detail: from the gold loo brushes to the underground corridors, to the perfectly sculpted rooms to resemble the Holy Grail and suits of armour, brand-new suits of armour, all done — and then you move into modernity and John Lennon, a Steinway piano, and just beauty, and birds fluttering around, singing songbirds. It was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever been in. On the face of it, it seemed gaudy.I draw that in because, while many people advertise this gold and this royal stuff, we think we are making a point by saying it is gauche. There is a semiotic and archetypal reason why this is being done, and why it has the effect it has. Whether he understands it on the level I am talking about now or not, he does understand the effect of it on people. This is why he is where he is today.The second inflection is the Mead Hall, the room in which the king becomes the king. Many of us have perhaps wondered about Mar-a-Lago. It is just so sad. It is such a weird thing. Many of us would just prefer to be at home or be with our family and our pets, yet he wants to reside in this public space, because that is where the king becomes the king. It is Versailles. He is quoting, he is representing, Louis XIV in 2026. That is the antithesis. It is the reversal of the Republic. It is the reversal of 300 years of history. It is completely consistent with the idea to destroy and eradicate every memory of the post-World War II legal order, and indeed even the constitutional order before it. The reference is not generic luxury. It is the particular memory of a court that danced while the country starved. That is the citation by an administration whose Project 2025 and DOGE and all of that is about producing disequilibrium, and disequilibrium-analysing the entire globe all the time, while supposedly running a fake blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, except letting through — and this is where the axis of misogyny operating on the level of oligarchy let through this big Russian yacht the other day. Iran, Oman, and the United States colluded to allow through this oligarch’s yacht. That is the props.The third inflection is the Cinderella ballroom, the room in which status is confirmed. The whole passport thing is also part of this — the room in which the door closes at midnight on those whose invitation has expired. The presidential ballroom is by its nature a guest list. A Republican space by its nature is not.The Law of Similarity and the Gilded Monarchy SetI have talked a bit before about the law of similarity: things that look alike are treated alike. This is why we fall for trolls, why we look at photographs of people and think we are looking at something real. It is very important in disinformation. The gold leaf, the crystal, the Rococo mirroring produce similarity by association. It is the archetype of monarchical sovereignty.I posted this yesterday morning. The eye reads the whole, and the unconscious reads the king, the monarch. Read alongside the long-link “to the King” Truth Social post, where he is archetyping himself as king; the AI-generated crown portraits; the Mar-a-Lago oval; the gold card; the military parade — the ballroom is not an ornament. It is the missing room in a coherent set. The set’s archetypal payload is gilded monarchy.Adjudicated against the Code of Positive Trolls, the ballroom fails generosity, because it is exclusionary by definition. It fails right, because it inverts the meaning of the White House, the building it is bolted onto. It fails patronisation. A folktale is being installed where a constitution used to stand.Archetyping and the R-CH Element: The Sovereign’s RodAbout an hour later I posted this bit, and this was the essence of my fourth-anniversary speech and the move I made, which is very important to my work and the idea of archetyping. You have that R-IC, that R-CH element in archetyping. Monarchy at the end of it: R-C-H. Right, writ, rule — all from the early Indo-European root to stretch a rod, straight, a straight rod, which symbolised sovereignty.When President Zelenskyy was inaugurated, there is a picture I often share of him. In his right hand — always in his right hand — he holds a mace, a right rod with an orb at the top of it: the symbol of sovereignty. When Charles became king, likewise, in his right hand. These are the accoutrements of Indo-European sovereignty. They go back 6,000 years. Why is this relevant? They go back 6,000 years to Ukraine, to Zaporizhzhia, to Mykolaivka village on the right bank.We now know this because these symbols are used to manifest kingship in every Indo-European culture, from Celtic Ireland through now Germanic Britain — formerly Celtic Britain — to India and to Iran. We know this because we have the seals, the writing, the language, the rit; our “right” sound is in there.The rik, the rich element — it is also in rich, rich person. The rik element performs the same function as the rik element in archetype. It is also in archetype. It is in monarchy, an archetype. It installs the rik encoded in the archetype being used. This is one of my big insights over the past year. The ballroom archetype is the folkloric trope of the monarch — the rach in archetype and in monarch, right, Reich. This is what is going on here.Disinfolklore works through deeply encoded archetypes that penetrate our minds and recode what we perceive as right, as Reich. We begin our political career as a Republican. We believe in the rule of law. We think the best thing ever was the American Revolution. We call our party the Republican Party. Then 30, 40, 50 years later, if you are Lindsey Graham, you spend the whole day banging on about a ballroom. What you are doing by banging on about that ballroom is installing a new idea of what is right. You are not saying that out loud. The clue is, if you use the word archetyping. If you say: what is he doing? Well, he is archetyping American democracy now as needing a ballroom. What is really going on underneath there is this same change which I saw going on in eastern Ukraine.The Russians are not letting up in current Ukraine. They are still trying to convince people that what is right is that Ukraine should capitulate, and that somehow, if they capitulate, Russia will stop bombing Dnipro or stop eviscerating Ukraine and killing people. I have reason to believe President Zelenskyy and others see this and understand it and are not going to let it happen. This is why this is relevant. It all, for me, originates on this journey that I began in Luhansk.The Eighth Archetype: The Grammar of Passive VictimhoodI wanted to talk about the grammar of passive victimhood. This is the eighth archetype that I have been talking about. I have done two episodes on this. One did the first to fourth, and then last time, two weeks ago, did fifth to seventh.From September 2014, when the first Minsk Protocol was signed in the wake of MH17, until the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Russian outlets in Russia-occupied Luhansk used one sentence in variation every single working day. In my corpus of over 10,000 documents, the formula appears 511 times, to be precise. It is the most repeated formula I have ever catalogued, and the formula is this: “Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.”Why is this relevant to today? Or, on the other hand, why is talking about fake ceasefires in Iran relevant here? Because it is the same trick. These are the same linguistic tricks. It is the same strategy. In some cases it is the same people — Paul Manafort, for instance — providing the content, the strategy, for Donald, for America.“Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.” Five words. Let me take them apart one at a time, because each word is doing Disinfolklore work. Kyiv — not Ukraine, not the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Ukrainian state. Reducing Ukraine to its capital city performs a geographic demotion. It archetypes the real state as a single belligerent municipality, the way a medieval chronicle might speak of Prague or Novgorod.The purpose is not to report the war. The purpose is to install in the occupied population a stable emotional identity: we are the ones attacked, they are the ones who attack. Once that identity is stable, any Ukrainian counter-offensive is self-evidently criminal. Any Russian expansion is self-evidently defensive. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was not a new story to the people of occupied Luhansk. It was the eighth year of the same sentence.The counter is a different sentence: “Russian forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” The agent is named, the violation is stated, the duration is marked. The listener’s mind is offered a different grammar and begins to build a different story.The Invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the Factory MasqueradeThe next is the invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the factory masquerade. In November 2015, I picked up a four-rouble newspaper from a kiosk. They were using roubles there — they changed between November and December 2015 from hryvnia back to Russian roubles in occupied territory while I was there. I picked it up from a kiosk in Stakhanov, which it was called. It was Kazachi Vestnik.It is important to note that Stakhanov itself was a rebranding, a re-archetyping. Most of us may not know very much about Russia, but we will remember this mythological Stakhanov guy who did a lot of work in one day. Kadiivka was the Ukrainian city, and that was rebranded, re-archetyped as Stakhanov. The archetypal identity there is to make it very familiar to people, to remind them, to re-encode their minds, and to provoke in their minds this memory of the past, of the Soviet past. It is the attachment of a new name to an existing place, to a modern European city, and then to identify with that the past and the present of the terror. That is what I mean by archetypal identities.It was called Kazachi Vestnik, the Cossack Herald, edition 5,500 copies weekly, published since November 2014. Russia started their occupation in February 2014, according to the European Court of Human Rights, and of Luhansk in April 2014. In November 2014, it established this newspaper. That was three months before I arrived there and encountered this ever-intensifying information space, which looks very familiar now when you look at the American information space.5,500 copies weekly. Again, this is November 2014, not November 1814 or 1890. It was just really curious to me that they would use newspapers even then. Its masthead described it as the official printed source of the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guards. Platov, if the name does not immediately surface in your mind, was a 19th-century Don Cossack ataman, a hero of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon. He was picked out deliberately from the deep well of Russian folk memory and hung above the masthead of a small-town occupation newspaper 200 years later.Why? Because Stakhanov, the town itself, is named after a Soviet coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, who in 1935 was turned into a Stalin-era labour hero for mining 14 times his quota in a single shift. Stakhanov, the name, was a Soviet propaganda fiction layered onto a real miner. The town was built on factories, coach-building, mines. The men who lived there were, for three Soviet generations, industrial proletarians, not Cossacks. There were no Cossack stanitsas in Stakhanov. There was no Platov lineage. There was a coach-building plant.This is the invented Cossack in action — one of the most documented archetypes in my corpus, 444 items tagged, and one of the most brazen. Russia’s occupation did not just seize the territory, it rebranded the inhabitants. The welder became a Cossack. The pensioner became a stanitsa elder. The miner’s son became a Cossack — a warrior of the warrior caste that had never existed in that place. The newspaper handed him his new identity in four-rouble weekly instalments.This is the classical move that historians of nationalism call the invented tradition. Scottish kilts, as we know, were Victorian. The German folk songbook was assembled by Herder and the Grimms, who I have spoken about previously. The Welsh Eisteddfod, which my niece participated in, was largely an 18th-century theatre. None of these inventions were unique to Russia. What is distinctive about the Russian case is the analogy with people we know who went MAGA. This is not a case of organic or inorganic positive nationalism, which most European countries went through following Herder — this model which was invented by Herder, or the original piece of Disinfolklore, the faked Ossian tales, which were created in Scotland and which I have talked about before, and which became a phenomenon across the whole of Europe and inspired these movements that then led to the creation of the first nation states.It is all right for Eric Hobsbawm to be a bit sniffy about this, but this is how we create a community through stories. What I realised — and this is the power of Disinfolklore and the Disinfolklore analytical method — is that the apple doesn’t lie. No one is above the law. Every single one of these elements of our identity as Americans is in the open air being assaulted, and a new Reich is being installed in our minds, a new idea of what it means to be American. This is precisely the modus operandi in Russia-occupied Ukraine.Why did they choose the Cossack? They chose it because the Cossack is a deep archetypal character in Russian folk memory. He is the frontier warrior, the border guardian, the man of the Don and the Dnipro. He is, in Russian iconography, the one who stands between the motherland and the outer realm. To dress the men in Stakhanov as Cossacks is to cast them, without their consent, in a role. It primes them for the role’s next scene: to defend, to fight, to participate in meat assaults, to be sent across a river — the Donetsk River — with a rifle, to go and kill their fellow Ukrainians, as they did in their hundreds in Kreminna on the 11th of March 2022.I did not know that in 2015. In 2015, this was just a weird phenomenon that I noticed was unusual, and I did not understand it, but I understood something rum was going on — just as I understand something rum is going on when a US president tweets, as he did about eight hours after I wrote about how the ballroom is about to re-archetype the Republic as a monarchy. He wrote that “Two Kings” tweet — and again, everyone shares it, and this is problematic. They share it with a moan, but they keep it going. This primes them for the next scene.In 2022, the invented Cossack is also a changeling archetype. It swaps the identity in the cradle. It is also a merciful sovereign archetype: the occupier claims to be restoring something that was stolen. It is a fake state liturgy archetype, because the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guard is a paper institution — with a uniform and a newspaper and no legitimate lineage whatsoever.The counter, as with all invented traditions, is to name the factory. When a man in uniform claims his grandfather was a Cossack, ask what his grandfather actually did for a living. Ask him what the name of the town means. It is not Stakhanov; it is Kadiivka, and it will be Kadiivka again. Ask him where the coach-building plant went. It is now destroyed by Ukraine, by HIMARS strikes. The invented Cossack dissolves when the actual grandfather is summoned back into the room.Water as a Fertility Weapon: Dumézil’s Third Function Under ThreatThe next one I wanted to talk about was water as a fertility weapon, and Dumézil’s third function under threat. I have talked before about this amazing French comparativist who, in the 1930s, suddenly worked out that at the foundation of all Indo-European traditions is a tripartite split of our communities into sovereignty, security, and fertility. The monarch or the priest; then security, the warrior; then fertility, the farmer, the woman, prosperity. Those three. It is always those three. Manifest, for instance, in the Indian caste system.The third aspect of it is the fertility function. This is what Russia is doing when it steals children. It is deliberately subverting the fertility function. It is attempting to destroy the reproduction of Ukraine, of the community. This is an age-old weapon.Georges Dumézil, the French Indo-Europeanist, argued that every Indo-European culture organises its self-image around three functions: sovereignty, which is the legal-magical authority — magical authority, Donald is a magician in this sense, a magus. He gets millions of people to share his memes about a ballroom and to talk about a ballroom yesterday. That is as magical as you get. Security, the warrior. And fertility, prosperity, the provider.Russia’s propaganda in occupied Luhansk performs all three. The function I want to speak about today is the third: fertility, prosperity, the water and the grain. Very apt today, given the second ship apparently delivering grain to Israel, Haifa — stolen Ukrainian grain — because the corpus shows something distinctive. Russia mobilises water as a weapon and then positions itself as the only hydraulic saviour.I know this myself, because we spent about a year in eastern Ukraine in the early years of the occupation trying to solve water shortage problems. The story we were operating on was that the water shortage problems had occurred as a result of the occupation. Then through accident, basically, the diplomatic mission I was a part of discovered it had always had water problems. As I got to know Ukraine better and the Soviet legacy better, especially going to visit the elected hromada leaders in southern Zaporizhzhia, in areas which are now temporarily occupied, the stories I would hear from the elected officials were striking. Literally, if you wanted to get water, in many places it came in tankers. That whole area around southern Zaporizhzhia, for instance, is extremely dry.One of the big things which these new decentralised communities had to solve after they were established in 2014 — which I loved going to meet them and hear about, these heroic plans, all funded by USAID, the European Union, and the central government in Ukraine — were the result of leaders in all of these communities trying to solve problems which had been embedded structurally in them. For instance, access to water.We discovered in Luhansk that actually these water problems were historical. The Russian story coming from the Russian side was constantly trying to get us, me as a diplomat, to engage and solve problems and pay for water pumping stations. The water pumping stations were on one side of the river, the occupiers on the other side, and they were always being blown up. There were always these stories to do with water.What Russia was doing there, I now understand, was hammering away at this third function, the fertility function, which is a perennial function. 306 items in my Luhansk well — which I call “the well,” the corpus. There is a photograph of me by a well in Luhansk, a really old-school kind of well, which any of us who have been to Ukraine and travelled around will remember seeing everywhere — all around Chernobyl, all of those villages. Every house has a well. It is exactly the kind of well we would have seen as children reading folktales in New York or London. 306 items are tagged by water infrastructure, and most come from occupier-aligned outlets — luginfo.com and dninews.com.Let me walk you through the plot arc they collectively tell. While I was reading and collecting all of this, I was also participating in many of these stories, going to see pumping stations when, say, people from the World Bank or from aid agencies were visiting. We might be asked to be there too, and to guarantee what we called windows of silence, under which the Russians would not shell. I spent a lot of time standing around helping with these windows of silence, or going to pumping stations, talking to the heads of the pumping stations, just trying to understand these really complex systems. Actually, it was pretty simple what was going on in the end.Three Acts of the Hydraulic SaviourThis is a really typical story; I participated in so many of these.Act 1, November 2015. A group of European experts is brought to inspect the water infrastructure of the self-declared LFR, Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The spokesperson framing the visit is Vladislav Deynego — whose hand I once had to shake, and at the time it really fascinated me that he, if you Google him, has the appearance of Trotsky in the 1890s, or of a ragged Russian intellectual from a Tolstoy book. The whole aesthetic — I now understand — was a flex. It was a style. It was an act of archetyping, like Melania wearing gangster moll chic to archetype herself as Alphonse Capone’s moll. I did not understand that then. It was just a real matter of curiosity to me.He was the occupier’s envoy to the Minsk trilateral contact group. The subtext was: the international community is here, looking at the plumbing, finding it acceptable; Russia is a responsible hydraulic custodian. This is a mirror of what I was doing on the other side of the river, because none of this really ever happened on their side of the river — no one in their right mind would go there, and could not go there. There were no guarantees of safety. If you read the media, they were trying to archetype themselves as a normal republic, like Kosovo — a group of people who had managed to achieve statehood and were just, with the help of the international community, developing — whereas in fact this was a military occupation masquerading as an organic republic, like Ireland establishing itself or like the United States establishing itself.Act 2, February 2017. Plotnitsky — who was the Russian-occupier leader, and both of whose parents died from picking poisonous mushrooms (again, one of my early intimations that something folkloric was going on) — and Zakharchenko, who was the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, issued a joint statement, which was pretty rare, because they all hated each other. There was a lot of stuff about them joining together and uniting and all this nonsense, which was trying to make them seem like organic entities. They issued a joint statement in February 2017 demanding that Kyiv let the republics’ — again archetyping as republics — observers carry out inspections of industrial facilities on the Ukrainian-controlled side. The chutzpah of that. Notice the grammatical reversal: the occupier demands inspection rights over territory it does not control. Where have we heard that before? It is the same chutzpah we are still getting now.Act 3. The republics are now in hydraulic guardianship. The Minsk envoy of both Russian-backed statelets insists on ecological inspection of mines in the Kyiv-controlled Donbas area. The language has escalated from “demands” to “insists.” Each repetition is a ratchet. I am just choosing at random, but there are hundreds of these, day after day.The Wound and the Bandage as a Single GestureWhat is happening here? Russia is weaponising Dumézil’s third function. Water, pensions, mines, gas, grain, the fertility of the land are being moved onto the propaganda stage, and Russia is auditioning for the role of the provider. Not just the warrior — these were the daily briefings, the shelling count I talked about two weeks ago. Not just the sovereign — the people’s, the folk’s republic liturgy, where they talk about establishing courts and banks. But the father of the land, the hydraulic monarch who ensures the harvest.What did Donald do in California? He ordered them to release billions of gallons of water, which then caused havoc, not only because they should not have been released then, but also because farmers could not — the water was not available when they needed it this season. This is, again, Donald using the same old tricks.This is classical Indo-European propaganda. The Vedic king was responsible for the monsoon. The Roman emperor was responsible for the grain ships from Egypt. This is, again, the Disinfolkloric element of what the Russian-mafia-run government of Israel is now participating in: this Russian mafia installation of these same archetypal stories. It is really horrific to see the grain — this whole grain thing — but it is the same tale. It is the same story. The Tsar was father because he stood between his people and the famine. Russia in 2015, 2017 is writing itself into this oldest script. It creates the problem, then it offers itself as the merciful sovereign. This is, again, what Donald does. It is the same game, the same trick, day after day.Every European expert who inspects LFR pipelines is a certificate of hydraulic legitimacy. Every demand to inspect Ukrainian mines is a bid for fatherly custody of the river. Meanwhile — this is the dark cemetery — in 2014, Russia blew up the water pipeline at Petrovske with its own artillery. In 2015, it shelled the Donets River filter station 13 times. This is the place I spent a lot of time in, trying to sort out the aftermath of these shellings. After February 2022, it occupied the Kakhovka dam, as we all know, and destroyed it, flooding a whole province, killing billions of sentient beings — but archetyping itself as the father in this.Meanwhile, the hand that plays the hydraulic saviour is the hand that is causing the problem, that breaks the pipe. This is the single most important thing to understand about Russian Disinfolklore. On the third function, Russia performs the wound and the bandage as a single gesture. The water crisis is manufactured so that the water saviour can claim custody of the manufacture.The counter is specificity. Name the pipe. Name the shell that hit it. Name the date, the coordinates, the brigade. Disinfolklore thrives in abstraction: “the ecological situation,” “the infrastructure,” “the republic’s observers.” Every specific pipe you can name is a counter-liturgy.The Soviet Revenant: The Great Patriotic War SquareThe perennial one: the Soviet revenant, the Great Patriotic War Square.In European folklore, the revenants are the dead who will not stay dead — the walking corpse, the ghost with unfinished business, the ancestor who shows up at the door, dirty, uninvited, demanding the bread from the hearth. In Russia-occupied Luhansk, there is a revenant in every public square, and his name is the Soviet Union. It is a “his.” In my corpus, 285 items are tagged Lenin, Soviet memory.Let me read you one of the smallest and most revealing. 7th of August 2015, luginfo.com. “Press conference announcement. At midday, the official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, Taras Kolotkov, on the situation along the contact line. Address: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square 9. Ploshchad Geroyev VOV 9.”Read the address again: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. This is the address the occupation uses to send correspondence to a briefing on shelling. The address itself is a Disinfolklore item. It is doing the work here before a single word in the briefing is spoken.The Great Patriotic War — this itself, this is the Russian name for what the West calls the Second World War. It is the Eastern Front. 27 million Soviet dead — and I think most of us who have been watching their military tactics in eastern Ukraine understand why so many people died, and unnecessarily. The most sacred memory in Russian public life, the memory that the Soviet state and then the Putin Federation curated for 70 years, is the ultimate moral foundation: we defeated Nazism, we saved the world, we paid in blood, we are the good side of history. Most of us will understand. The United States provided, what was it, like 14,000 ships, 20,000 aeroplanes, et cetera — and that is why they were able to hold the line.When Russia occupies Luhansk in 2014 and summons journalists to a briefing, it does not use a neutral address. It uses Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square, because the address does three things at once.First, it archetypes the occupation as the spiritual continuation of the Soviet victory. The men standing at the podium in 2015 are, by spatial association, the grandsons of the men who took Berlin. To attend their briefing is to attend a memorial service.Second, it casts Ukraine, the enemy of the briefing, in the only remaining role left by the liturgy. If the LFR is standing on Great Patriotic War Square, then Ukraine, grammatically and spatially, is cast as the Nazi. The square makes the bogeyman. The bogeyman makes the invasion.Third, it summons the revenant. The Soviet Union is officially dead. It expired on the 25th of December 1991. But in Luhansk’s Ploshchad Geroyev, it is not dead. It is walking. It has an address. You can post a letter to it. This is why in my corpus you will find Victory Day parades, Immortal Regiment processions, St George ribbons, Stalin-era Young Guard imagery, and Komsomol-style youth formations all persisting in occupied Luhansk, as if the clock had not turned.The Soviet revenant — who for me is personified by this guy, Vladislav Deynego — is the spine of the occupation’s emotional architecture. It is how the occupation persuades its captive population that they have not been conquered, but returned. The cognitive move is brutal. Most residents of Luhansk lived a substantial part of their lives in the USSR. Many grieve its loss. The Russian occupation offers them, in the form of public squares, parades, flags, and vocabularies, the feelings of the lost thing. It sells them a ghost, and the ghost is warm.The counter is to remember what the USSR actually did. The Holodomor. The gulag. The suppression of Ukrainian language. The deportations. The stagnation. The queues. The revenant is sentimental. The real dead are not. Name the ghost. Ask what year it died. Ask why it is walking.The connection there I would make with Donald, and this attempt to install monarchy just at the time he is at 33 per cent in the polls — that is the ghost which is walking through the White House. Next time you see someone posting all that gold in the Oval Office and going snobbily, “Oh, this is so gauche” — reflect for a second, or as you look into the Rococo mirror, reflect in its reflection for a second, and see: this is what the Russians did after the Second World War, and what they did in Luhansk.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe