Podcast | Tyrant Performing the ‘Reasonable Man’

Podcast | Tyrant Performing the ‘Reasonable Man’

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-maternal Tonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method [https://disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Twelve-Tools/Detection/Tool-01-Archetypal-Literacy/], 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 Unreasonable There 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. [https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal] The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a Mirror Let 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 Breaches The 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: Armenia Some 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 Kyiv Some 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 Inversion Asked 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 Verdict A 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 Disinfolklore The 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 Latvia Twice 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 Inversion Then 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 Arc Let’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 Sites It 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 Human Here’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 Strike Going 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 Apparatus Now 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 Names Against 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 Mana The 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 Tools Let 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 Cryptotypes One 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 Rebut What 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. Closing If 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 Death I’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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast | The Three Moves of the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine

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 Incident The 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 Archetypes The 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 Warfare The 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 Doctrine The 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 Archetype 13th 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 Disinformation Ukraine’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 Read Roman 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 Counter Five 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 Move The 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 Conquests Before 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 Tactic The 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 2026 Starobilsk, 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 Advantage The 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 Step What 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 Form Overnight 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 Voin There’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-Falsifies Now 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 Class I 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 Pole In 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 Absorption How 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 Discipline What 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 Historians I 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 Convergence One 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 Coverage Vatnik 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. Closing When 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast | The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection

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 Projection The 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 Bear Don’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 Provocation Second, 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 Command Third, 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 Mana This 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 Disarmament The 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 Archive I 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 Signatures Let’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 Hand The 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 Inversion Second 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 Operation Third, 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 Tell AFD 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 Sovereign I’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 Signature The 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 Conversion Seven: 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 Signature Eight: 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 Response Nine: 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 Poked Ten: 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 Check Eleven. 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 Reinforcement Twelve: 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 Corpus I 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 Machine Here’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 Signal Often 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 Logic It’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 Mirror The 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 Myth The 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 Wins The 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 Money I 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 Ukraine The 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast | Minsking Coyote Lawyer

Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign Trolling I 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 Corpus The second element is this archetypal literacy. On disinfolklore.eu [https://Disinfolklore.eu], the website, the main expression of my work, there’s what I archetype: the Disinfolklore Analytical Method as the 12-tool way [https://disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Twelve-Tools/]. 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 Maiden Some 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/on-the-origin-of-the-disinfolklore]. 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 Merciless [https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/mother-and-the-maiden-shelter-from] This 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore-10], 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 Method The 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-In There was a great article in Bloomberg published this week [https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-russia-disinformation-storm-1516-videos/] — 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 Ukraine This 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 MGB The 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 Lure The 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 Recounted The 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 Counter The 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 Theatre The 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 Corpus 7th 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 Shape Every 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 Lawyer The 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/podcast-the-creature-of-moral-ambivalence] Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe [https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast | The Creature of Moral Ambivalence and The Grandmother at the Checkpoint

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 Activity Just 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 Ukraine What 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 Folklore Last 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 Ambivalence The 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 Creature The 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 Simplification Three 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 Troll Consider 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 Landscape Consider 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 Gruff The 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 Disinfolklore How 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 Scandinavia The 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 Down The 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 Corpus I 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 Grandmothers Every 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 Leave You 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 [https://www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]