Part One. Principles of Infolklore, Episode 3: Volya’s Nest

The Most Valuable Position in the Room

Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered:

“I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.”

The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why:

“Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.”

For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room.

I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution.

The Name Came First

This series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice.

I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolklore. You will see that in my last podcast.

So Infolklore creation is a first-order creative practice. It is not just counter-Disinfolklore. That is where I was three years ago, when I created the portmanteau Disinfolklore to describe what I had witnessed in Russia-occupied Ukraine: stories which communicate a sense of meanness directly into our inner minds, using archetypes. That is Disinfolklore, and it is all around us. There is no shortage of it. I would not have bothered to create the creative practice of Infolklore if Disinfolklore were not affecting our world in so many different ways, whether it comes from Russia or America or Brexit England. Disinfolklore is everywhere we look. It is pickling us in its nonsense and in its manipulations. So we not only need to learn how to identify it and understand how it works, which is part of my mission. We also need a means of countering it, in the sense of creating a world in which we are pickled in Infolklore instead.

Infolklore is a first-order creative practice. Making the true stories, not just refuting the false ones. Those words were written before I had ever read a Volya transcript. And when they were written, the practice of creating Infolklore had exactly one validated specimen anywhere on earth: the Battle of Kyiv study I spoke about in the last episode. If you look back at my fourth-anniversary podcast for Volya, you will find it on Disinfolklore.net, where I post my podcasts every week.

I also post weekly podcasts on PowerofMana.net, which is the Finding Manuland Atlas side of my work, the linguistics side. You cannot understand Russian disinformation, or any form of disinformation, without looking into the linguistics that underpins it. Russian disinfolklorists learn linguistics. In fact, linguistics graduates in Russian universities study Disinfolklore. They study propaganda, what they call combat propaganda, as part of their course. And the reason they do it is the reason you must too, if you wish to understand, underpin and create a system that will help us interpret and create an Infolklore-saturated universe instead of a Disinfolklore-saturated one. That is why you must study it, and that is Finding Manuland at PowerofMana.net. You can subscribe to my work there, at Disinfolklore.net and at DecodingTrolls.net. My main site is Disinfolklore.eu.

So here is this episode’s claim. While the name Infolklore sat waiting for specimens, this station built the practice’s operating system. The working rules everything else runs on. The evidence shelf, the source grading, the wish filing, the correction ceremony. You, on Volya Radio, built all of it without the name. Here is the evidence.

First, an update on the reading. In episode one I gave you the scale. When I described you to yourselves in those first episodes, the close reading behind them had covered many of your shows. Now all of the shows are part of the analysis.

What Are They Trying to Tell Me

Now the toolkit proper. Where would you send a truth-seeking audience for evidence? These Volya shows send it straight into the aggressor’s own channels, and they teach the frame for reading what it finds there. Here is This Week in Absurdistan, one of the station’s long-running news marathons, on Rosstat, the Russian state’s own statistics agency:

“We never look at it from the perspective of this is the unvarnished truth from Russia. We look at it in the perspective of what are they publishing here and what are they trying to tell me? What kind of story are they trying to tell me?”

What are they trying to tell me. I consider people like Mockers much more expert than people like Mark Galeotti, who is pulled in to talk about Russia all the time but who knows nothing about Ukraine, or indeed Russia, in the way that Mockers does. So on Volya we are asking what are they trying to tell us. That is source criticism, the discipline scholars take degrees in, taught as a morning reflex, and aimed at enemy numbers as well as enemy words.

And when the enemy admits a terrible thing, the admission becomes a floor. Here is World at War, the strand where the war’s hardest numbers get read, on the abduction of Ukraine’s children:

“These are the 100% provable cases with data, that the Russians themselves say 700,000 plus children and women have been abducted to Russia.”

And in the same breath:

“Even the UN, which has lowballed these numbers, admits that that is extremely low.”

That was from a December 2024 episode. Seven hundred thousand, from the abductor’s own mouth. Many of us will remember the day that was publicised. I have the receipts. I have the screenshots, as probably do most of us who listen to Volya regularly. Our phones are full of screenshots of the evidence, of the receipts. The one number the Russists cannot dispute becomes the floor under the charge. The Russists’ confession is the minimum, and the truth sits above it. And it is almost unbelievable to people who have not been paying attention, as many of us who try to explain these matters to people in our real lives find continually.

Nobody here pretends this reading is a grim duty. On the morning of Operation Spiderweb itself, the day Ukrainian drones smuggled deep inside Russia burned the bombers on their own airfields, someone in the Volya room said “the biggest pleasure at the moment is also reading Russian Telegram channel.” That was June 2025. Verification on this station is not a defensive crouch. It is a craft, practised with visible enjoyment, on the enemy’s own material.

Then the discount turns around and comes home, which is the part that would astonish any propaganda ministry on earth. Here is Ukraine News and russia’s Hybrid War, a show whose own title spells russia with a small r, on our side’s frontline news:

“For the last 12 months, the OPSEC, the operational security, when it comes to the front lines in Ukraine, has improved so much that 90% of what we hear from the front lines, it’s only something that the Ukrainian military wants us to hear, or it’s a Russian narrative. So everything that comes from the front lines, we have to take it with a grain of salt.”

This is especially relevant at the moment. We have recently had the final announcement, after six months of great, well-kept OPSEC, of Ukrainian advances, and there are now discussions about whether new advances are about to be announced. All of us repeat, again and again, that we would rather not know these things until they are properly confirmed. OPSEC is operational security, the discipline of telling the enemy nothing useful. Grain of salt, aimed at our own side’s good news, because good security means curated news. Everything gets graded here on Volya. Friendly sources included.

And in the same segment, the tool I find most elegant: enemy silence used as the debunk. A panic was running that day about a Russian breakthrough, and here is how it was closed:

“On Russian telegram there was no party there was no elation if that was a legit breakthrough of the front lines you know the Russians are going to go crazy with it but and they did not which told me that you know it’s not as bad as people trying to pan it out to be”

That is the 12th of August 2025. No party on the enemy’s channels, therefore no breakthrough. The absence of celebration, read as evidence. The mirror of the admission floor: what the enemy cannot help boasting about, and what he fails to boast about, both testify.

The enemy’s fakery, meanwhile, has been dismantled so many times on these shows that it now comes with an org chart. Here is SBU-Owls, a show named for the owls, this community’s word for whatever keeps mysteriously catching fire inside Russia, on the men who stage false captures of Ukrainian villages:

“These guys, their sole purpose is to penetrate and to be able to plant a flag somewhere so they can take a picture for propaganda purposes, say that we have seized this territory. But they’re calling them flag bearers.”

That is from August 2025. Flag bearers. The fake capture is now a staffed position in the Russian army. Once a room has read that job description aloud, no capture photo works on it again.

The Question That Survived Its Spelling

The oldest question in law is cui bono. Who benefits. On these shows it is asked so routinely that it has become a named question, and I can prove that with a spelling mistake. Here is the host of Sunday Morning in Luhansk City, one of the Sunday shows that gives a wounded city’s name the top of the title, running the question on the Houthis and coming up empty:

“I really actually have no idea what they get out of this to be frank I can’t answer the Kweebono question on this one I don’t know who benefits from this”

That is Sunday Morning in Luhansk City, in September 2025, on Volya. The Kweebono question. That is the machine transcription meeting two thousand years of Latin, and I am keeping the spelling. Two things in that sentence delight me. A tool is real when it is allowed to return I don’t know, and there it is, run to a null, on air, no verdict forced. And a vocabulary is real when the machine starts misspelling it, because that means it is spoken, not written. Your Latin lives in the mouth.

The Shelf

Now the institution. The fan-fiction shelf, your own invention, and the answer to the most dangerous substance in wartime information, which is your own wanting.

A wish is not a report. Every propaganda channel on earth files its wishes as news. This community files them as fiction, out loud, under a genre label, and the label flashed past once in episode two, in the clause “just my fan fiction.” Here is the institution behind the clause. The same week the bombers burned, a host on SBU Crime and Punishment and the Boom Report was dreaming about the Kerch bridge, Russia’s illegal bridge to occupied Crimea:

“But hopefully the GUR or the SBU will broadcast live from Russian CCTV cameras when the thing starts going like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, right? And the spans start dropping. That’s my fan fiction. What do you think, Will?”

That is from June 2025. The GUR and the SBU are, of course, Ukraine’s military intelligence and its security service. The Tacoma Narrows is the American bridge that famously shook itself to pieces on film. The wish is spoken, savoured, and filed as fiction in the same breath, and then handed to Will for review. The filing is a real act, done by name:

“Anyway, fan fiction I suppose Wendy put it put it under fan fiction back to you”

Decoding Disinfolklore, May 2026. Put it under fan fiction. A shelf implies a librarian, and the shelf keeps score, because sometimes reality reaches up and promotes a title. The shelf’s authors know their record is being audited:

“I haven’t come up with any fan fiction just as late because You know, I don’t want to ruin my record of guessing pretty well”

That is Kvetching, Ukrainian Culture and Book Club, on the 29th of June 2026. A record of guessing pretty well. A batting average, protected, for material filed as fiction. And on the very last day of this archive, the 5th of August 2026, on Decoding Disinfolklore, the whole system passed through one sentence:

“Our own Will Thiel does a lot of really excellent analysis and I put into nest his analysis of his fan fiction, what he’d like to see happen. As anyone who follows him knows, some of what he does say has come to pass.”

August the 5th. The shelf and the nest in a single sentence, and fiction being promoted to non-fiction, with the promotion announced. Hope, filed under fiction until reality promotes it. I contend no newsroom on earth runs a cleaner system for handling its own desires. The wanting is not suppressed, which never works. It is labelled, enjoyed, shelved and scored. And it is the opposite of Disinfolklore.

A Year of Wednesdays

Fifty-three of these 1,121 broadcasts are this show, Decoding Disinfolklore. That is a year of Wednesdays. And on Wednesdays, the tools move in both directions.

Some I brought to the room. The incoming troll radar, with its rule that your own doubt is itself data. If you don’t mind me quoting myself, and let me do my accent properly:

“If I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them.”

That is January 2026. Reading the absence, which asks what word is missing from an account, and who benefits from the hole:

“The word that wasn’t there. For eight years the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk, occupation, was missing from almost everyone’s mouth.”

Also Decoding Disinfolklore, July 2026. And the mirror. In June I read you Putler’s own words and named the trick in them:

“The president of the Russian Federation invokes Goebbels in order to accuse the West of being Goebbelsian.”

And the proof came from the man himself, who had described blame-shifting a few answers earlier:

“He told you the trick. He told you its name.”

That is Decoding Disinfolklore, June 2026. Accusation in a mirror: read the aggressor’s accusation as his confession. Naming a deployment is most of defeating it. Name them, and the power halves.

But here is what the whole archive taught me about those Wednesdays. The room did not learn the method from me. Listen to what I actually said in July, introducing the red scrub-out, a practice I use of crossing out the enemy’s image in red before sharing it, so that their meme travels without its face:

“If we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out like I do. I scrub it out in red if I need to so that you hardly see anything of it.”

And in the same passage, this admission:

“What I tried to do in my work consciously and what many other people like Mockers and many of you do also unconsciously.”

That is from July 2026. There it is, in my own voice, a month before the archive ends, and a month before I understood it was the claim of this whole episode. Consciously in my work. Unconsciously in yours. The method was in the room before the method had a name. My Wednesdays put words on your weekdays.

The Oracle and the Nest

Every toolkit is best seen against the thing it replaces, and the replacement on offer these days has a name. Under every contested post, someone is asking Grok, the AI chatbot bolted onto the platform, to rule on the evidence like an oracle, so they do not have to read it. This February my show watched it happen to a real video the machine had called fake:

“The number of people who in this thread just was like Grok, is this real? And Grok had said no, it’s not real, that it was a skit, when it wasn’t a skit. But yet all of them take whatever Grok says as it being 100% factual. And they don’t do the search themselves to figure out whether or not what they’re seeing with their eyes is real.”

I reckon this was Ming, who is really Grok’s worst nightmare. That is from February 2026. A simple search proved the video real. The oracle had said fake. The crowd believed the oracle. And then a teacher in the room graded the oracle the way this station grades everything:

“That should be your starting point, not your end point in terms of research. That’s what I used to tell my students, you know, go ahead, look at Wikipedia, but go to the original sources.”

That is probably Wendy.

“At least with Wikipedia, they, you know, list references at the bottom.”

That is from February 2026. Graded below Wikipedia, on the one criterion Volya Radio cares about: no reference list. The oracle answers so you do not have to read. The nest exists so that you can. Two architectures for trust, and this community picked its side nineteen broadcasts out of twenty.

The Toolkit Leaves the Room

In episode two, last week, I promised you a clip with 175,000 views, and here it is, in one sentence. A story that flattered Ukraine was flying around the timeline until a host read out the first comment under it: “This thing has 175,000 views, 1601 reposts. It is not true. Just look at the very first comment.” That is on Booms and Woe, in June 2026. The debunk was sitting under the fake the whole time, one scroll away, and the room was taught to look there first.

That habit does not stay in this room. In March it reached national television. Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, presented Ukrainian anti-drone interceptors as American technology. Here is Sunday Morning in Ukraine on what happened next:

“He was sitting there trying to claim these anti-drone interceptors as US technology and like, bro, you literally have the Wild Hornets watermark on your effing video. I guess the community notes and the mocking was a little too much for him and he actually did an on-air correction.”

That is from the 8th of March. The Wild Hornets are, obviously, the Ukrainian drone builders whose watermark was still on the footage. Community Notes is the crowd fact-check on X. Watermark spotted, notes attached, mockery applied, and a Fox News host ends up performing the ceremony this station performs as routine: the on-air correction. The toolkit went out through the audience and came back holding a correction from one of the biggest studios in America. You did that. Not with an army of fact-checkers. With habits.

The Name Was the Easy Part

Gather it up. The nest holds the receipts, and the top of the room belongs to Ukraine’s evidence, not the hosts’ own work. The enemy’s channels are read with pleasure, his admissions and her admissions taken as floors, their silences as debunks, their fakery filed by job title. The oldest question in law is asked by name, cui bono, and allowed to answer I don’t know. Your own wanting is labelled, shelved, and scored. Your corrections run at the pace of a weekly ceremony. That is an operating system. Generosity runs all through it, because every tool in the kit is handed to the audience the moment it works, and insight, the noticing itself, is given away as equipment.

I spent months looking for Infolklore’s working machinery in the libraries of the world and across the entire world’s media, and episode one told you how that search ended. The operating system was never on those shelves. It was pinned to the top of a morning Space on X, above a room with a bad back and a cat. Many cats. You built it without the name. I only brought the name, Infolklore. The name was the easy part.

As some of you know, I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mainly on Disinfolklore.eu, and you can subscribe to my work on Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net and DecodingTrolls.net. I also sometimes post on X. I will come back to more of the Principles of Infolklore next week, inshallah.

Part Two. The Third Question

The second thing I want to talk about today is something that James posted and brought to my attention earlier this week. It is a book called Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine.

The Bridge

As many of you know, I spent three years of my life on the broken bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. Most of the ten thousand civilians a day who crossed it, between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine, were older people, older women mainly, crossing for pensions and for family, through the queues and the cold and the shelling, because that was what living required them to do. Sometimes I gave one of them an arm across. A woman of seventy, for instance, one day. I have a photo of me guiding her. She is blind. I was wearing my bulletproof vest and my helmet. Helping her across was nothing really, a few minutes of my working day. But what was being done to her, and to a million people like her, by the stories broadcast at them from one end of that bridge, took me years to learn to read.

This week I read the book James brought to my attention. Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine, published by Springer, with a foreword by a chap called James Pamment, M-N, Pamment, of the Psychological Defence Research Institute at Lund University in Sweden. Its first substantial sentence: “Truth is becoming increasingly scarce in our environment, much like clean water.”

Truth as water. The image my entire framework lives inside. If you go to my website, Disinfolklore.eu, and go behind the splash page, the first page, you will see the search function. Put in Luhansk Well. I have spent years building an archive I call the Luhansk Well, and years hunting the clean water I call Infolklore, the tale that feeds the well we all drink from instead of poisoning it.

I saw wells the way we used to see wells, those of us who grew up in north-western Europe and perhaps America, in the illustrations in folktales and fairy tales. I saw these wells everywhere in Ukraine, in Luhansk. I remember one Saturday in particular, driving all around the Chornobyl exclusion zone, not inside it but around it, and all of those amazing villages, every single house with the kind of well that every folktale illustration has had since the Brothers Grimm first published theirs in the nineteenth century. That is what I was getting at. The clean water in the well I call Infolklore, the tale that feeds the well we all drink from instead of poisoning it, like Disinfolklore.

So I am developing a Disinfolklore system outside Ukraine, and the authors of this book are developing a counter-disinformation system inside Ukraine. The authors and I have never met. We have spent a decade drawing from the same war, they from inside Ukraine’s institutions, I from that bridge in a Luhansk forest. And reading their book, I kept finding the same discoveries, made twice over, in two different vocabularies. This episode walks through those twin discoveries one by one. And then it comes to the one discovery that has only been made once, on my side of the river, and what it would mean to carry it across.

For years that bridge was the only pedestrian crossing between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. A long walkway over the Donets, a river we have known since antiquity, with a section blown out of the middle, patched with wooden steps and iron balustrades, for want of a better term, that pensioners climbed in the heat and in the ice. Ten thousand pensioners and civilians a day is a small town’s whole population, walking this broken bridge, in both directions, daily.

I was there for the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose monitoring mission watched the security situation along the contact line. The mission’s watch ran from 2014, and I was inside it until April 2022. I was posted to that bridge from 2015 to 2018, then to Dnipro, one of the few Westerners ever to live and work in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I stood on that bridge. I filed reports from it. And almost every working day for three years, I crossed into the occupation and read what the occupation published about itself.

In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and demands a toll before it lets you cross. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and does not own the river. It controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And whoever holds that crossing holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or returnee. Citizen or separatist. You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it.

At Stanytsia Luhanska the toll was paid by pensioners. In hours. In winter cold. In the humiliation of asking permission to walk into, and out of, their own country.

The Testing Ground

The book calls Ukraine “a key testing ground for a sophisticated form of information warfare.” I called the bridge ground zero of the same testing ground years ago, and standing there taught me what the machine being tested was actually for.

After the February 2014 invasion, Russia held more than a million Ukrainians inside roughly ten thousand square kilometres of occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, and even more in Crimea. One enclosed population. One information space. One master source. No exit. No laboratory in the history of persuasion has had those conditions. And the machine that ran there was not built to spread lies. Lies were the surface. Here is how I have put it in my own manuscripts:

“Russia’s great insight was that an entirely new culture could be created using Disinfolklore, broadcast constantly through every medium into a captive population’s minds. Russia set out in April 2014 to hack the identities of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine.”

The verb I used is hack. The object is identities. The date is April 2014.

Disinfolklore is my name for the narrative form this machine runs on. Folklore-like archetypes weaponised to carry lies, exploitative mental models and coercive control into minds. An archetype, for anyone new to this, is one of the old story-shapes, the characters and plots that thousands of years of telling have worn so smooth they work on us below the level of noticing. The Bear. The Bridge Troll. The Mother and the Maiden. The machine’s product is not a changed belief. Its product is a changed identity.

One woman shows the whole mechanism. Take a Russian-speaking Ukrainian woman from Mariupol, a mainly Russian-speaking Ukrainian city. In Russian Disinfolklore she and her child, the Mother and the Maiden, were held captive by Ukrainian Nazis. Another archetype, and one which some people mistake for a real thing. It is an archetype. A story form, not a real thing. And her captivity was Russia’s stated cause of war. On the morning of 16 March 2022 she is sheltering with her daughter in the basement of the Drama Theatre, the building where generations of Mariupol met for tea and Swan Lake, with the word CHILDREN painted outside in Russian, just in case the Russians could not read their own language, in letters big enough to read from the air, indeed from space. A Russian aircraft bombs it. And here is what the machine does next, in my manuscript’s words:

“The moment the bomb dropped, Russian Disinfolklore banished our archetype from the Inner Realm. Suddenly, she was among the Nazis deserving of extermination.”

The archetype, that is, of the Russian in Ukraine held hostage by Nazis. The moment the bomb dropped, Russian Disinfolklore banished her from the Inner Realm of Russia. She was the reason for the invasion. The moment the bomb falls, she is reassigned to the category the invasion came to destroy. A machine in the belief business could not survive that contradiction. This machine did not break stride, because it was never in the belief business. It is in the identity business, and identity, in its hands, is the weapon it uses to brainwash those who become subject to it. It is reassignable at will.

The dead of Mariupol are a range, not a number. Fifty thousand to one hundred thousand killed. A range, because Russia did not count them. The shame of genocide and contempt for Ukrainians meant the killers kept no count of the killed. No count of the number of people it banished, with its bombs and its starvation, from the Inner Realm of Russian-speaking Ukrainians deserving of Russia’s protection to the Outer Realm, the moment they were killed.

The book knows this machine, of course. Its foreword states Russia’s goal as pressing Ukrainian sovereignty to the point where “the history, identity, and autonomy of a people can be erased.” And its case files hold the pattern the Centre for Countering Disinformation itself named the information alibi: Russia pre-accuses Ukraine of the crime it is about to commit, so that a ready-made counter-story is circulating when the crime arrives. The book documents pre-accusation running before the bombing of that very theatre. The same theatre. The machine wrote her alibi before it killed her. I catalogued the same move for years from the bridge under my own name for it, Provocation Logic. Some of you will remember the series of six talks I did, after James’s question before Christmas, on the Provocation Logic Cycle. The abuser’s oldest sentence: look what you made me do to you. Twin discovery number one, and hold on to it, because near the end of this episode it turns into something bigger than either of our names for it.

The Book, and How to Read It

Look at who wrote this book. Anatolii Marushchak is a human rights researcher in information and cyber law who co-founded the International Information Academy, a Kyiv research body he advises without payment. Anayit Khoperiya is the serving deputy head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation. Mykola Balaban is the serving deputy head of the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, and a historian of memory with a doctorate on Lviv in 1941. Stanislav Petrov is a cybersecurity lawyer who spent two decades inside Ukraine’s security institutions. Two of the four run the institutions the book describes. It is the record of what Ukraine actually did, under bombardment, written by the people doing it.

And it must be read as what it is. Not one more case study. There is no other country on the planet that has gone through what Ukraine is going through and has gone through. Ukraine is the place where the identity-hacking machine was built and proven, before MAGA, before Brexit. So Ukraine’s answer is not one national system among many. It is the state of the art, the best any state on earth has yet done against the perfected form of the thing, the perfected form of Disinfolklore. Which changes how every page should be read. Where Ukraine’s response falls short, that is not Ukraine falling short. That is humanity falling short. The book is the high-water mark of all of us.

What Ukraine Built

The story begins with civil society, not the state. In March 2014, as the fakes flooded in after Crimea, teachers and students at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where the idea of Russia was invented in the 1690s, launched StopFake, a volunteer fact-checking project built on one rule anyone can follow. Trace the claim to its source and publish what you find. VoxCheck followed. Detector Media mapped the Russian networks. Texty.org.ua did data journalism that Amnesty International has called some of the most reliable in Ukraine. I implore you to look at Texty.org.ua. They do great work, and I support their work strongly, with as much as I can afford to. The regulator banned retransmission of Russian state television in 2014 and blocked the big Russian social networks in 2017. I was in eastern Ukraine all that time, and I remember those moments, and the protests that came from the West: oh, Ukraine is censoring information.

The state’s dedicated institutions arrived last, and then arrived twice in one month. In March 2021 the Centre for Countering Disinformation, the CCD, was created under the National Security and Defence Council, the body chaired by the President that runs Ukraine’s wars. Putting it there was the point:

“The formal institutionalization of the CCD under Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council represents more than a bureaucratic milestone. It sends a clear signal that disinformation is treated as a strategic threat alongside cyberattacks or conventional military aggression.”

Most governments file disinformation under communications, or under culture, or under nothing at all. Ukraine filed it beside missiles. Ukraine was correct. That same month the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, the CSC, known publicly as Spravdi, was established inside a culture ministry, deliberately at arm’s length from the security services, so that journalists and civil society could work with it without working for a spy agency. Its survival handbook for civilians, Dovidka.info, went live on 23 February 2022. One day before it was needed.

Then the full-scale invasion, and the system went to war. Work that had taken days began taking minutes. A daily message box so that ministries, the Presidential Office and the military spoke with one voice. The Security Service blocking seventy-six bot farms holding more than three million fake accounts. Three million false people, switched off. The CCD tracing whole campaigns rather than single fakes: Black Hole, a metaphor planted on Telegram and grown into fabricated videos and falsified American news broadcasts, mapped and published as a pattern. UkrLeaks, dozens of interconnected accounts in several languages, attributed by name to Vasyl Prozorov, a sanctioned former Ukrainian officer in Russia’s service. A School of Strategic Communications training more than two thousand civil servants on curricula formally accredited by the civil service agency. Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency co-hosting strategic-communications weekends in Lviv. And in 2024, a joint CCD and NATO threat assessment presented to the Ukraine-NATO Council, the first such assessment NATO has ever prepared with a non-member state.

Now watch four of this system’s finest moments closely, because they share a shape.

Russian propaganda turned an elderly Ukrainian woman, filmed greeting soldiers with a Soviet flag, into an icon of the Russian World. The CSC did not rebut the symbol. They found the woman. They interviewed her, published her real story, and the symbol was abandoned. They did not argue with an archetype. They re-personed it. They gave the icon back her name, and the Mana, the emotional charge the symbol carried, drained out of it.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency treats its own casework as information defence. Russian propaganda feeds on the corruption story, so, in the book’s words, the very act of uncovering and punishing corruption “denies the enemy this narrative resource.” Not a debunk. A starving. The narrative dies because its referent is taken away.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry, with Estonia, built a teaching tool called the Distortion Test. You upload a photograph of yourself and answer questions about recent disinformation. With every wrong answer, your own image warps on the screen in front of you. Image-magic, the oldest sorcery there is. I talked about it in my talks on the laws of sympathetic magic before Christmas, which draw on cutting-edge, peer-reviewed cultural psychology.

And the CSC works with the Yellow Ribbon resistance movement on a platform called Tyvukraini, You Are In Ukraine. A secure browser and a free VPN, run into the occupied territories, against the occupier’s digital-passportisation portal. Inside it, Ukrainian language lessons. By the middle of 2025, hundreds of adults and children were studying Ukrainian through that platform, from inside the occupation. The occupier hacks identities. Ukraine answers with a language class through a tunnel. The book’s own sentence on it deserves quoting whole: battles over connectivity, identity, and truth are as central as battles over territory.

Re-personing an archetype. Starving a story of its referent. Teaching with image-magic. Defending identity with language. Every one of these is a move at the level where archetypes and identities live, made by people with no theory of that level, because no theory of that level exists in their field. Hold that thought too. Ukraine’s best practitioners already fight at the third level by instinct. What nobody has ever handed them is the instrument that makes the instinct teachable.

They Already Know

What separates this book from every Western equivalent I have read is its candour. The authors do not claim their system wins. In their forward-looking chapter, they say this:

“As the information environment becomes more crowded, faster, and more aggressive, it is increasingly clear that simply reacting to individual fakes no longer works. This approach may help to correct a particular falsehood, but it does little to address the broader problem. It resembles treating visible symptoms while leaving the root cause untouched. Over time, this reactive logic exhausts institutions and allows hostile actors to keep the initiative.”

That is the deputy head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation, publishing that about her own field, in wartime. They report that modern operations are built so correction cannot touch them, campaigns that “easily slip through mechanisms that depend on a clear distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false.’” They name the hardest terrain: Telegram is the primary news source for over seventy per cent of Ukrainians, and on Telegram there is no moderation to appeal to and no partnership to negotiate. They name the human cost: a society at risk of “believing nothing rather than everything,” with 46.2 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians deliberately avoiding war news during six months of 2025. Nearly half the country, looking away, because looking hurt. They concede the occupied audience outright: the information war inside the occupation is “essentially lost for now,” and liberation will bring the task of reintegrating citizens “subjected to intensive propaganda,” or what I call Disinfolklore, with no method named. And they concede the analytical ground itself. The phase in which an adversary studies an audience and works out what it will find credible, they write, “can only be detected by clandestine operations of the intelligence communities.”

The question of why a story lands has been formally handed to the spies.

And then, once, in one paragraph, the authors ask the question themselves. “It is rarely enough to simply point out that a claim is false. What matters just as much is understanding why certain stories resonate, which fears or frustrations they tap into, and where trust is already fragile. By identifying these points of tension in advance, it becomes possible to move from crisis response to prevention.”

Why certain stories resonate. Asked, in their own words. Named as the road from crisis response to prevention. And then the book moves on, because no instrument for that question exists anywhere in their field. Later, in the same chapter, they even name the missing competence: narrative literacy, “which allows people to see how stories frame politics, identity, and social dynamics,” requested in one clause, with no method, no taxonomy, no course and no measurement behind it, because nobody has built them. The ceiling of the state of the art is not a blind spot. It is a stated vacancy. They have written the job description.

The Third Question

So the whole field, theirs and everyone’s, stands on two questions.

Is this claim true? That is fact-checking. Its unit is the claim, and Ukraine answers it as well as anyone alive. Who is running this operation? That is FIMI, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, the European framework the CCD adopted in 2023. Its unit is the deployer, and Ukraine now works it at the level of joint reports with NATO.

The third question is the one handed to the spies and asked once, in one paragraph, in the whole book. Why does this story land, in this population, now? Not who sent it. Not whether it is true. Why it is believable before anyone checks anything.

That is the folkloristic question, and the reason it can be answered in the open, without a single clandestine operation, is that a population’s stock of stories is public. The operator does not invent the fit between a lie and a mind. The operator finds it, in the same shared inheritance of tales we Indo-Europeans all carry. Anything found by looking can be found again by looking.

One artefact shows the third level working on us rather than on the occupied. Four words. Don’t poke the bear.

When I first heard this “Don’t poke the bear” troll, it was from a senior American military officer, in Sievierodonetsk, in the now destroyed Mir Hotel. He said it to me one night. I cannot even remember the year, maybe 2015 or 2016. He was a retired lieutenant colonel from the American military, and I had to ask him what it meant. When he explained it to me, I did indeed feel like secret folk wisdom was being passed to me. Don’t poke the bear.

There is nothing there to fact-check, because the phrase asserts no fact. There is no deployer to attribute, because the man who said it to me was not a Russian agent. He was a decent officer repeating something that felt like wisdom. The first question cannot touch it and the second question finds nobody. What those four words carry is an archetype, the Dangerous Animal that cannot be reasoned with, only avoided, wearing the feeling of grandmother-knowledge. And in my manuscripts I state what I watched it do: “And it worked. For over two years, this single phrase held.” Held, while the gap between what the West could do and what it did stayed open. And people died in that gap. Hundreds of thousands of people died in that gap. A fairy tale about a bear did work that no missile could have done.

Now the twin discovery that matters most, because it makes the third question answerable rather than merely askable. The repertoire is finite.

I know it from my side of the Donets by counting. The Luhansk Well holds ten thousand seven hundred and nine unique items from the monitored information space of Russia-occupied Luhansk, 2014 to 2018, the occupier’s outlets and the Ukrainian and international reporting alongside them, every occupation item anchored to the public address it was published at, each item read against a codebook of archetype families. The bridge troll, the gatekeeper I stood in front of for three years, appears one thousand four hundred and fifty-eight times. One item in every seven. Andrei Marochko, the fake republic’s daily military briefer, performing the liturgy of statehood, five hundred and seventy-nine items. And the threats sort, over and over, into the three functions that the great comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil traced through the whole Indo-European world, the same three the folklorist Timothy Tangherlini found organising modern legend. Your safety. Your bread. Your children. The cells of my codebook are named for them.

And the book knows it from its own side, by counting too. The CSC published a chronicle called How the Russian Information Ship Sank, built from its daily digests across twenty-one months of full-scale war. Its central finding: within the first two months of the invasion, the Kremlin had already deployed almost the full spectrum of its toxic narratives. Everything after was re-activation and recycling of familiar themes. The full spectrum in two months. Recycling ever since.

Two archives. Two counts. One finding. The repertoire is finite. And finite is the most hopeful word in this episode, because a finite repertoire is learnable, what is learnable is teachable, and what is teachable can become exactly the narrative literacy their book requests in one clause.

I will leave it there for this week, and I will continue both of these narrative vectors next week, with your indulgence and with a bit of luck.

Continued from":

First in series:

The Poison and the Antidote

The poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything Russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote.

Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything: we are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce.

Two coined words in that quote. Disinfolklore is my name for folklore-like information told with meanness — stories built to bend our moods and our intentions, our attitudes and emotions. Infolklore is the positive kind: true stories, told with generosity, told by someone with real stakes in a real problem.

The first kind, Disinfolklore, is an ocean, and we all swim in it every day, and it’s what motivates all my work. Because we swim in this ocean, I decided to try and work out what this ocean consists of. The second kind turned out to be scarce, almost to vanishing. This episode and this mini-series is the story of the search for it — the search for Infolklore. Months and months and months of failure. The best-loved books in the English language going into a machine, one after another, and coming back stamped: no.

Automating Disinfolklore

And for those who haven’t been listening: what I’ve been working on since January is actualising my long-held plan, which is to automate Disinfolklore detection — and, in our detection, to create an automatic engine that will enable us, in times to come, to plug in a module the way today we may surf the web or look at ChatGPT. In the future we will have cognitive modules. And what I’m trying to build is for the… So that when we are confronted with the vast amounts of information, and information flows that continue to increase, we will have a means of interpreting it really quickly — as quickly as we really need to. And so I call that cryptotypic engineering, or Automating Disinfolklore.

So, my attempts to build this machine. I started off with the 10,000 propaganda items that I collected and hand-coded in Luhansk, which I talk about a lot, back in 2015. And so for much of the year I’ve been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart.

Where the search ended was really not in any library on earth. And I went through so many texts and types of narrative, from EUvsDisinfo to war college reports to all kinds of different narrative forms. And the search ended, really, in this room, with Volia Radio. And it ended with you. With us. And this whole mini-series is our own practice — but I’m just a bit part in this, with just this short time once a week. The whole series is Volia’s own practice, read back to us as principles. And this first episode is how I came to be reading the Volia Radio transcripts.

Great thanks to all at Volya Radio for their great support of my work over the years!

Teaching a Machine the Two Kinds

So for much of this year I have been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart: Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral. A frontier model — one of the big AI systems, the kind that can read a whole archive before breakfast. And you teach it by feeding it specimens. What I’m doing is creating training pairs for a locally held large language model. Well — not, I mean, it’s locally held, but it’s held in a data centre somewhere; but it’s proprietary.

And here is the real Disinfolklore, and you learn its smell — which I first scented when I was in Russia-occupied Luhansk in 2015 — and real Infolklore, teaching the computer to learn the smell of it, the scent. And half of the job has been relatively easy, in the sense that I’ve managed to gather together a corpus of hundreds of millions of artefacts in Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese: hundreds of millions in each of these languages, and in Hindi, in Dravidian languages, in MAGA language. So that gathering together, that corpus, was relatively easy — the easy half. The graph tells us something about the world we live in, which won’t be a surprise to any of us on Volia Radio, but it also tells us about my motivation in all of this work, which is to try and do something active about it. And I’ve been on this task in various forms since 2015, as I gradually worked out what was going on.

And here is how I described the task to you last month. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy — everything we hear from Strelkov will do. We’re going to kill you all. Basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. I’ve spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes; even — maybe Ming will appreciate this — P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster.

The Reject Pile

Wodehouse had company in the reject pile. Sherlock Holmes went in, failed. War college reports went in, failed. The Battle for Kiev study — which I’ll get to in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut report — towards the end, the Battle for Kiev study done by John Spencer, a friend of the channel, did go in. And that was really my only piece of archetypal Infolklore: a serious piece of military analysis, by serious people, about the defence of the capital.

But what I’m trying to do is build a system that will recognise the archetypal content in any sized lexical unit. And so it needs to be really flexible, and needs to be able to be trained on lexical units which aren’t all in the same format. So that particular war college report gave me a lot of hope — but then I tried others, and it just didn’t work.

The EUvsDisinfo stuff didn’t really work. And for the same reason that an academic from the information school in Melbourne found that fact-checking doesn’t work: because it’s a different narrative form. You have to counter magic with magic. So if Disinfolklore manages to meld itself into our minds and alter our intentions and our moods, our attitudes and our motivations, through a means that most of us don’t really understand or can’t detect in real time, then Infolklore — which is a creative practice rather than a countering practice — has to do the same thing. And fact-checking just doesn’t do it. So there’s a lot of value in EUvsDisinfo’s work; it’s the format it presents.

And so my own witness writing went in. It failed too. And it failed in its own particular way. The person who named the framework — me — cannot be its neutral witness. And so, I built the instrument; I cannot also be the specimen that calibrates it. There I sat, month after month: a machine hungry for the positive kind, and a whole civilisation of shelves unable to feed it. Conan Doyle could not feed it. The finest comic novelist in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, could not feed it. The war colleges of two continents could not feed it. And I could not feed it myself.

The Wodehouse Failure

The Wodehouse failure deserves its own telling. And for those who aren’t familiar with P.G. Wodehouse, he wrote about a hundred — 110 — about the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster: a slave owner, or rather a gentleman, and his servant. And it came closest of anything. And the way it fell short taught me, really, what Infolklore actually is, in some respects.

On the 19th of May I proposed to the frontier model the Jeeves and Wooster series as a training corpus for the positive kind, for Infolklore. I was confident that if any books in the English language were going to pass, it would be these sunlit, kindly, perfect books. And the adjudication that came back was, on its face, glowing. Jeeves is archetypally saturated: he’s the trickster servant, the clever slave of Roman new comedy, a figure the stage has carried for more than 2,000 years, still quietly running his master’s life. Bertie Wooster is the holy fool, the indulged innocent, whom the plot punishes and protects in equal measure.

When I say archetypally saturated, I mean the stories are full of the old shapes — characters folklore has kept alive for millennia because they do something for us. And on the Code of Positive Trolls, Wodehouse passes everything: generous on every page, patient, non-coercive. Nobody in those books is ever mean to anybody. Temperamentally, Wodehouse is the exact opposite of Disinfolklore. Yet still, it had to be turned away.

And I felt this refusal personally. Those books have been friends of mine for decades. I turn to them in times of stress and difficulty because they’re so light, they’re so easy to read, they’re so pleasant, they’re so joyful. But the machine had a reason, and the reason was right. One leg was missing: real stakes. Nothing in Wodehouse refers to a real problem in the real world. Nobody in the Drones Club is under fire. Aunt Agatha, terror that she is, never shelled a city. The stories are true to human nature, and true to nothing that is actually happening to anyone in the real world.

That near miss sharpened the definition. And here it is, the finding that the whole season, the whole search, paid for. Infolklore must be true. It must be soaked in the old story shapes. And it must be told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. All three legs, no exceptions — not even for Jeeves.

Lexical Units, and the Twelve Tools

Those of you who are interested in the Disinfolklore analytical method can look at disinfolklore.eu, my main site. The twelve tools, the twelve-tool way, goes into detail there on each of the different elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method. And that is essentially what I’m looking for in lexical units. When I say lexical unit, I mean a sentence, a word, of any size — and it could be a 20,000-page article, or a one-page article. What I’m building must work, must be sensitive enough to work on every kind of lexical unit, and indeed on images themselves. So that’s the goal I’ve set myself, and it may take me years.

The Code of Positive Trolls

So, the code, plainly. I keep saying passed and failed, so you’re owed the test itself. The test is the Code of Positive Trolls. I trademarked it in February 2020 with the European Union trademark body — both Code of Positive Trolls and Positive Trolling. And I established a Twitter account in February 2020 as Positive Trolling, and then I switched, changed the name, in May 2021, when I started actually… So I trademarked the Code of Positive Trolls as a moniker in February 2020, two years before the full-scale invasion, and it’s been the engine of everything I’ve done intellectually since.

And here is how I put it in a February piece called Archetyping Bad Faith. There’s a key core module in the Disinfolklore analytical method, which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline, or right. The first element is generosity. Six practices — they’re old practices, far older than any of us or any of our languages — carried into the information battlefield. In plain English, they are these. Generosity: you give more than you take, and you protect people from harm. Ethical discipline, or right: you tell the truth, and you hold yourself to the rules you would hold anyone else to. Patience: you can wait, and the waiting does not sour you. You actually notice what is in front of you.

Say them once, because the whole series hangs on them: generosity; ethical discipline, or right; patience; Mana, or energy; focus; and insight.

The word trolling frightens nobody in Volia Radio. But for newcomers: in my book, trolling is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind. Any. Advertising is trolling. Courting is trolling. A joke between friends is trolling. The question is never whether someone is moving your emotions — everyone is moving your emotions, including yourself. The question is: which kind of a troll are you?

And the test takes all six practices at once. Fail any one, and the story falls to Disinfolklore. Whole — there’s no partial credit. In practice, the place where the bad stuff fails is nearly always the same. They’re almost always negative trolling. They lie a lot, and so fail especially the second limb in the six tests: ethical discipline. I wrote that in November 2022 on Substack, where — disinfolklore.net, powerofmana.net, which is the linguistic element of my work, and decodingtrolls.net — you can subscribe.

For the record, the formal definition of the poison in one breath. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic demands of Disinfolklorists. Hold on to that little four-part engine: moods, intentions, motivations, attitudes. That’s where every story does its work on us. Both kinds work there. Only one of them works there with your interests at heart.

The Breakthrough

So, the breakthrough. Months in. Holmes rejected. Wodehouse turned away. The war colleges bounced. And one day I stopped feeding the machine literature and news, and served it one of the Volia shows instead — whole, as broadcast. The timestamps, the jokes, the swearing, the cat. The cats. Isn’t it interesting and curious that all three of our daily broadcasts — Will’s, Mockers’ and Firefella’s — have cats who sometimes meow? And today Mockers’ cat meowed, and my cat paid attention to that meow. I digress.

So Will was on, and Will told the tale of the Russian general who was shot in a lift while visiting his mistress. Some of you might remember that morning. And Will, en passant, dropped this line: you could say he died of a lack of family values. The machine’s verdict came back immediately: archetypal Infolklore. First serving, first listen. The thing that Conan Doyle and Wodehouse and the war colleges of two continents could not produce, Will produced en passant, in one sentence, on a weekday morning.

And here’s my published gloss, word for word. That is perfect Infolklore rapping. It’s what Volia does every day — what all of you do. That one joke is doing three jobs at once. It’s true: the general was really shot. It is archetypal: the mighty man undone by his own appetites is one of the oldest tales our species tells; it’s older than writing. And it’s told by people with everything at stake.

In truth, the machine was confirming something already noticed. Back in March I made a recording about one of our own, and its title says it all: Archetypal Infolklore, Mockers. From March 2026. The pattern held every single time a Volia show went in. Every time. The needle that months of literature could not move went straight to the top of the dial for Volia.

Think of the company you beat. The greatest detectives in fiction. CNN. Fox News. Every newspaper in the world. Al Jazeera. Anything I could find. YouTube — guys on YouTube. The finest comic prose in our language. And a morning Space with a bad back and a cat, running on donated time, cleared the bar they could not touch.

There is a mechanism underneath this, and it earns one more receipt, because it explains how the same war story can be poison in one place and medicine in another. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Ruschists can be Infolklore when told by Mockers — Mockers’ mocking tone. I wrote that in January 2026, in Pensées 126 on Substack. The content can be identical. The kind is decided by the telling: by tone, by intent, by discipline. Which is exactly why this community can retell enemy material all morning and be practising Infolklore, while the original published… And that is you. That is this room.

RIA-Melitopol: The Same Verdict, at a Cost

One other source had already earned the same verdict, and earned it at a cost none of us here has paid. RIA-Melitopol, the news channel of the occupied city, ruled archetypal Infolklore in May 2026. I had spent the first months of the year of the war reading RIA-Melitopol and trying to amplify their information. I used it as leads when I contributed as the only named main source in the international community’s first report on crimes against humanity and war crimes in Ukraine, which was published on the 9th of April 2022 by the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism mission, commissioned by 40 nation states. And I’m acknowledged as one of the main sources at the beginning, and a lot of the leads I got, I got from RIA-Melitopol — and that entire report, with the exception, really, of the drone safaris, which nobody imagined would come, although some of us imagined such terrible things might arise from an urge to finish off Russia early on, before things like drone safaris arose.

But RIA-Melitopol — and I’ve continued to read it now; it’s called RIA-Pivden and it operates out of free Zaporizhzhia city. And every morning, alongside Volia shows, the city of cherries, Melitopol, speaking up under occupation: terse, coded, written by people who can be arrested for writing it.

The occupation apparatus told the world what that channel is worth — as did The New Yorker, when it featured a story about it in June 2022. The occupation apparatus told us in March 2022, in its own language, which is the language of hostage-taking: armed men came for the channel’s editor, and when they did not find her at home, they took her 75-year-old father. Then came the offer. Look at what they wanted. They did not try to silence RIA-Melitopol. They tried to buy it. The fake mayor of Melitopol promised its editor a glittering Moscow career in exchange for the outlet. She refused. The channel has trolled and tortured — metaphorically speaking — the occupiers relentlessly ever since.

The two kinds of story are the same instrument pointed in opposite directions, and the enemy knows it better than anyone — which is why the enemy tried to purchase the instrument rather than to break it. And the final episode gives that story whole, with the record beside it. RIA-Pivden’s, or RIA-Melitopol’s, morning posts and Volia’s morning shows are doing the same work, and have been doing the same work for years. And neither room knew the other existed. That channel’s practice sits beside Volia’s through this whole series, and in the final episode the two meet.

The Scale of the Thing You Have Built

So the search ended in this room — metaphorical room, the Volia room — and then the reading began. The numbers first, because you should know the scale of the thing you have built. 1,121 shows. 3,203 hours. If you sat down today and listened without sleeping, you would stand up in the spring of 2027. All of it is now transcribed into a text a machine can read: timestamps kept, the mishearings and mid-sentence repairs left in place.

Out of that reading come principles. And a principle at this stage is a modest thing: a practice you actually perform, described plainly, with the receipt attached — the show and the minute where it was done. Not a statistic, not a measured claim: a description offered back to the people who did the thing, for your own judgment. You are the source. You are also the judges. The machine reads at a scale no human can, and that is all it does. It is not, and cannot be, the decider. The noticing came from you, and the judgment goes back to you. If I have described the practice wrongly, you will tell me. Correction will be worn the way this community wears corrections — which is a story for the next episode.

Eight Families of Principles

So, eight families of principles came out of the reading of just 400 transcripts — and Firefella’s morning shows, and also Ming, and Awana, and Will, and Yeni, and all of you, with Heather obviously in the background. Heather, and others, who make the whole thing and keep it going. These map the episodes of this mini-series.

One. Truth discipline: how this community handles the truth, hardest always on its own side. It gets two episodes, because it earned twice the weight of any other family. The second element in the Code of Positive Trolls is right, ethical discipline. That’s why. First, the discipline you turn on yourselves — the corrections thanked and counted, the good news quarantined, the bad news aired at once. Then the toolkit you hand every listener, because these shows do not just verify, they teach: they teach verifying.

Second principle: law and legitimacy. The standard is international law, argued out loud constantly, every show, target by target — and the stated destination of this whole war is a courtroom in The Hague.

Third principle: death and dignity. How the dead are carried and named, one ledger for the victim and another for the aggressor, and how memory is defended against the deadliest thing of all: getting used to it.

Four: naming and renaming. Absurdistan, the fake mayor, the pseudo-referendum — and what a name can do before a single claim is even argued.

Next, the comic register: why the laughter works, where it stops, and the receipts that sit underneath every joke. One flash of it from Mockers this month: traditionally, no casualties, as per usual; so, you know, just to note, that it’s just that terrible debris again.

Community and hearth: the daily liturgy, the roll-call of place names with Kyiv always in the roll, the pirate ship, the antiphon said imperfectly and said anyway — the whole vessel that reassembles a scattered world into one room before the first item of news is read. You know the sound. You built the sound.

Next principle: generosity. The money, the fundraising, the shotguns bought and driven, the ambulances, and all the work done for all of the people helping on the ground in the war. The rule that the station keeps nothing for itself. As an aside, I regretted that we didn’t have access to the first two years of Mriya Report. But then I remembered: the hosts of Mriya Report determined so much of what we said, and cut us off when we mentioned things like Brexit, or when we criticised things those quite sterile hosts wanted us to say. There was very little Infolklore in Mriya anyway. So Volia managed to free us all from those constraints, and I no longer regret not having access to those data streams.

Occupied voice: the register of a city that keeps saying its own name in the present tense. Melitopol is Ukraine. Not will be — is. The series finishes where those last threads join: an occupied city, and a diaspora radio that never met, converging on the same practices from opposite ends of the same war. Different language, different length, different risk — the same rules. When two rooms that have never spoken arrive at the same rules, the rules are telling you something.

So that’s the first episode.

Episode Two: Hardest on Ourselves

It’s wrong to say I’m impartial, because I’m very partial. I know right from wrong. But you can still report correctly, not put the gloss on things. That was said on the 24th of February, in the marathon episode to celebrate — or commemorate, rather — the anniversary marathon.

It’s one sentence long, and it’s the constitution of everything I found in this family of practices. Just the order of it. The side comes first: I’m very partial, I know right from wrong. There’s no pretence of a view from nowhere, no newsreader’s mask — and this is what adulterates every other source, that. In the same breath, the obligation: you can still report correctly, not put the gloss on things. The side is declared, and the accuracy then runs against the speaker’s own interest. That’s the principle.

Infolklore: true stories, told with generosity, by people with real stakes. Disinfolklore is the negative pole: stories which communicate meanness to bend our moods, our intentions, our motivations and our attitudes. And the gate between them is the Code of Positive Trolls. Six practices: generosity, which is giving without meanness; ethical discipline, which is keeping the record true; patience; joyous perseverance, or Mana, or energy, which is keeping going and staying glad about it; focus; and insight, the noticing itself. The gate takes all six. Fail one, and the story falls to the other pole. The practice that fails most often out there in the wider world is the second one, ethical discipline, or right. So this episode and the next are about how… The next episode is the toolkit.

The Smallest Grain: One Clause Checked

I could throw in a couple of tart comments about late-stage capitalism, but actually… I don’t think that’s accurate, because what Russia is practising isn’t capitalism.

The joke was free, the applause was waiting, and it went in the bin, in real time, on air, because it wasn’t accurate. That’s ethical discipline at the smallest grain there is: one clause checked against the world.

The Direction of Error Rule

Now the second grain, and this is the one I contend is the signature of the whole community. Call it the direction of error rule: whatever flatters our side carries the heavier burden of proof. Good news is quarantined until it develops. Bad news airs at once. Here it is stated as policy, on Accidental Ukrainian: when good things happen for Ukraine, I’m usually slow to talk about them, to make sure that they fully develop; when bad things happen, we talk about them right away. That was from September 2025.

Read that against every propaganda operation in history. They all run the other way: their good news sprints, and their bad news suffocates. Here the delight and the quarantine arrive in the same sentence. Listen to Mockers receiving a gift of a story: oh, what absolute golden news, it’s just beautiful — but of course we’ve got to wait for confirmation from everybody and everywhere. September 2025, on Booms and Woe. Golden news, and the brakes go on before the sentence ends.

And the community names the trap it is defending against, names it exactly: one of those stories that’s too good to check; when I read it, I believed it immediately. From Accidental Ukrainian, January 2026. Too good to check. When I read it, I believed it immediately. That is the confession of every one of us who’s ever shared a story because it felt right. The difference here is what happens next: the wanting itself becomes the alarm. I mean, for me, I know that right at that point I have to step back, and have to double-check sources, and see — if it is just because I want it to be, doesn’t mean it’s going to be. That’s Accidental Ukrainian, March 2026. Just because I want it to be doesn’t mean it’s going to be. The strength of the desire is the trigger for the hardest verification.

And it’s not theory. It fires on air, on the very clips the whole timeline is flying around. And the next episode holds a full specimen: a viral clip that flattered Ukraine, 175,000 views, debunked. The rule even governs the tally of enemy aircraft. A missing man is not a dead man. A self-crashed jet is not a kill. And a friendly success gets capped in the very breath that delivers it: but two out of nine, not brilliant, but not completely useless either. Booms and Woe, November 2025. Two out of nine, not brilliant. Nobody rounds it up.

The community knows exactly why it pays this price. The economics of it were stated outright on Ukraine Chat: if you’re proved to be an honest broker and giving honest news, then people are going to continue believing you — rather than if you’re going to be crying wolf all the time, exaggerating all the time, then people are just going to get pissed off and go, you know, I don’t believe a thing coming out of your mouth. That’s from October 2025. Credibility is the asset. Every inflated count spends it. Every quarantined golden story banks it. Four years in, this community is rich.

The Third Grain: The Tribe Itself

Now the third grain, and the hardest one: the tribe itself. The audit turned inward, and each host is hardest on their own country, with numbers attached. Here is the specimen, and I give it to you whole, because it’s a masterpiece of the form. We’re total s**t. We’re s**t. We raised $37.3 billion in 2024 to 2025 alone, and we’ve given $1.5 billion in aid the entire four years. That’s dog s**t, Yeni. Booms and Woe, November 2025.

That is a host talking about their own country. $37.3 billion raised. $1.5 billion given across the whole year. The numbers are attached. The verdict is unprintable and exact. No enemy gets audited harder on these shows than the speaker’s own flag. And that is what keeps the support credible rather than hagiographic.

And beside the inward audit sits its twin, the competence rule. Contempt for the enemy stays moral. It never becomes intellectual. Here it is in one line: so we’ve got to remember that they aren’t f*****g stupid, they’re just b******s. That’s September 2025. B******s, yes. Stupid, never assumed. Because the moment you sneer at your enemy’s brains, you corrupt your own threat assessment, and your information starts working on your moods at the price of your judgment.

So the enemy’s real advantage gets named plainly, even when it hurts. A weapon as part of the drone wall is the fibre-optic FPV, and unfortunately the Russians still maintain a very large qualitative advantage in that category. That’s Will, with Grandpa Roy, December 2025. A very large qualitative advantage — conceded without flinching. That sentence protects Ukrainian lives. Flattery on that point would cost them.

Corrections Worn as a Badge

So what happens when the discipline slips? Because it does; everyone errs. And here is where this… Thank you, Daniel. I’m happy to stand and correct it. October 2025. Thanked. Not resisted. Not buried in a follow-up post nobody… Thanked by name, on air. And not just thanked — counted.

The show’s own feed announced one episode like this: this includes an on-air correction from Will (his fifth, for those of us who are counting). Booms and Woe, then Will and Ming, October 2025. His fifth, for those of you who are counting. The tally is a running bit, a running joke the whole audience is in on. Fallibility, credibility — converted into a joke, and the joke into a bond.

Correction is invited back in the same breath it lands: keep us honest, I really welcome that; yes, I stand corrected. This Week in Absurdistan, then Booms and Woe, May 2026. And the discipline runs even where the correction helps the other side, even into the enemy’s legal position: I just wanted to correct the record, in case, you know, they go after us for defamation. Booms and Woe, October 2025. That is the exact place a proper… A community that has understood something simple, and once said it out loud: changing your opinion when facts and evidence present themselves is not normally considered to be a major fault. January 2026, Booms and Woe.

I contend the mechanism here is worth naming. An operation built on deception — so it would violate the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is ethical discipline, or right — an operation built on deception cannot pay out on error. If your operation runs on lies, every admitted mistake is a structural crack. So you admit nothing, and your record silently rots.

Remember, I said I trademarked this in February 2020. Anyone can look it up: EUIPO. Look up Positive Trolling and Positive Trolls. And so this philosophy which you follow — you and Volia follow independently, obviously, of me and my influence — but it is the same thing, the same phenomenon, the same aspect of information warfare that I identified in February 2020, that everyone in the Volia community also identifies, has identified, even if they don’t name it, and integrates into everything we say on air.

A community running on truth can pay out freely. Each correction costs a moment of pride and buys a permanent record. That’s why a correction thanked and tallied is a ceremony of trust, and not a humiliation. It is the audible sound of the book’s balance.

Inside the Single Sentence

The same discipline goes finer still, down inside the single sentence. On these shows, epistemic status travels with the finding, per item, in front of the conclusion. And when something is invented, it is labelled as invention before the sentence can finish its work. My favourite specimen in the whole corpus is a joke interrupting itself: unconfirmed sources — ha ha, this is a joke, this bit — unconfirmed sources point to Steven Seagal. That’s from December 2025. Ha ha, this is a joke, this bit. Mid-sentence. A fabrication offered for laughter inside a sourced segment, and even that must not travel one clause without its label.

The official hedges get kept in rather than smoothed out, and the keeping-in gets celebrated. According to preliminary data — oh my goodness, I said it — as of 8.30 this morning local time, air defences shot down and suppressed 58 of the enemy drones. Booms and Woe, then Will and Yeni, December 2025. Speculation carries its own tag: just my fan fiction, June 2026. The source’s reliability is graded in the same breath as the story it carries: it’s uncorroborated, however, it’s kind of a crazy one; I need to look up the exact quote. Sunday Morning in Ukraine, 18th of July 2020. Five words: I need to look up the exact quote.

Hope Rationed by Evidence

A lot of people think, oh, it’s going to be okay, we don’t need to do anything now. That’s the problem. Exaggeration breeds complacency. And that’s a bad thing — also on the flip side, obviously, dooming too much. Then people just go, well, what’s the point? And they don’t advocate either. So you have to be grounded. Ukraine Chat, October 2025.

Despair demobilises now; euphoria demobilises later, when the promised date passes and nothing happened. Both are avoided. So the war’s trajectory gets described in deliberately unglamorous figures: it’s not going to be a knockout, it’s a strangling motion, it’s a suffocating motion. No date, no knockout. A strangling motion moves morale without writing a cheque it cannot cash.

When a forecast gets made, it comes with thresholds, and its working shown: Russia could possibly lose between 8 to 15 brigades in the next 3 to 5 days, and that’s not me being optimistic, that’s not copium, I’m running the numbers. Accidental Ukrainian, September 2025. The threat is conceded: it’s all possible, even the tactical nukes, it’s possible; then there’s a greater-than-zero chance that it will happen this week. This Week in Absurdistan, 12th of June 2027.

The Occupied Register

I want you to hear the occupied register of this same practice, because the pattern this series ends on begins here. RIA-Melitopol, the channel of the occupied city, posting under the aggressor’s guns in February 2023. Germany and Ukraine: Germany handed over generators and medical equipment to Melitopol; together we are preparing for life after de-occupation. February 2023. I remember that. I amplified that text myself.

Generators staged for a day the post does not name. That is hope in the occupied register: no date, no promise, just the equipment ready. Preparation spoken in the present tense. Liberation never given a deadline it could miss. Rationed hope is the only kind that survives contact with a long war, and it’s the only kind that keeps perseverance joyous, which the code demands, for years on end. You cannot stay glad on hopium; the crash always comes. You can stay glad on evidence.

The Four Practices, Side by Side

So, gather the four practices side by side. Partiality avowed, and accuracy run against interest. Corrections worn as a badge. Uncertainty spoken with the finding. Hope rationed by evidence. One discipline applied at three grains, and the harder check always falls on the flattering side.

I’ve listened to hundreds of hours — as all of you have — of all of you, and all of us, doing this, or trying to do this. Not on special occasions: every day, every morning, as routine, the way other stations do the weather. And when I want to hear the whole… I’ll leave it at that for today.

Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the Sorcerer

So on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem, the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the sorcerer, and it’s featured in Indo-European stories for millennia.

And since early March 2022, Putler’s magical, manipulative powers have been noticeably on the wane. Nothing has gone right for him — even for those who dutifully surrendered to his bespelling needs. I first noted how President Zelensky’s magical powers to curse, outwit and humiliate the sorcerer Putin were growing, in proportion to Putler’s loss of power, by the end of March 2022.

And as I wrote then, on the 23rd of May 2023: until recently I had ignored Putler’s apprentice, the Chef, who is now at the height of his powers. Every day since 2012, the Chef’s trolling Disinfolklore has featured across global media. His Disinfolklore even got Trump and Brexit voted in. Only now, instead of the Chef’s Disinfolklore being the concealed trolling output of his St Petersburg Disinfolklore war-magic production factories — the Internet Research Agency — the Chef today is the star of the show himself.

Why, and how, has this happened? The answer is simple. So I wrote, on May 26th, or 23rd, 2023: Putin’s Rasputin, this turbulent priest of the St Petersburg underground, is ready to take over the chariot. These days the magician apprentice doesn’t even disguise himself, or his ambition. Just an iPhone and grainy footage, and his every muttered thought — and trolling grandfather glasses — is front-page news across the earth.

The Chef Saucerer has sacrificed 100,000 Ukrainians’ lives since 2016. And like every Indo-European monarch for millennia, he boasts of the human sacrifices he’s made. From these sacrifices his power and authority emanates. The magician Chef has vaporised entire cities in central Europe — Popasna, Bakhmut, and the rest. Seventy-five thousand Ruschists have died at his command in six months of Bakhmut. And before this, his Nazi-worshipping soldiers, in his Nazi-branded Wagner Group, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

Yet the Chef’s power as the Apprentice Magus is such that the New York Times and the rest breathlessly quote, and report verbatim as truth, his every bespelling utterance — like they did before with the butcher Putin of Grozny. Then, now, they do with the Chef. Unknowingly, Western leaders and opinion formers promote the Chef, as before they promoted his sorcerer master, Putin. Every Western website reference eulogising the butcher of Bakhmut, with his trolling grandpa glasses, is echoed back into Ruschist information spaces as evidence that the West respects the Chef and will accept him as the new sorcerer monarch.

The Chef’s Internet Research Agency bespelled America and England. That was his time as Putler’s apprentice. Now the sorcerer master, Putler, who created him, cannot destroy the Chef without destroying himself. Nor can Putler promote the Chef while being certain that, once promoted, the Chef won’t destroy Putler. That is the plight of the sorcerer. So: the Chef Saucerer against the Chief Sorcerer.

Why I Bring This Up: Two Tellings of One Story

So why do I bring this up? Two summers ago I wrote about Putler’s plight, and it’s the oldest story we have about power changing hands, and Putler was living out its darkest version. Now, in the past few weeks, Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped into the same story. He’s living out the bright one. The two tellings sit at opposite poles of a single tale that is 6,000 years old, and watching them side by side tells us almost everything about the difference between the two countries.

Georges Dumézil. A master holds a power, and an apprentice grows into that power. One day the apprentice is ready to make his own way, and the master still needs him. How do the two part without one destroying the other? That is the whole plight, in one question. The young one always rises — that was never in doubt. The only question the story ever asks is whether the rising costs a life.

The Mahabharata gives the good answer, and it’s worth holding in mind. The demons free the apprentice from the master’s belly, and they do it without killing the master. Both men honour the bargain. Nobody dies. The power moves, and the two who carried it are both still standing when it settles. That is the rare ending. The plight is dangerous precisely because that ending is rare.

The Dark Telling: Putler and the Chef

Look first at the dark telling, because you already know it. Putler was the chief sorcerer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chef, was his apprentice — the alchemist who turned mercenaries and African gold into power the master could use. By the summer of 2023 the apprentice was ready, and the master would not let him. Prigozhin forced the question the crude way, with a mutiny: the march on Rostov, a column pointed at Moscow, and for one evening the master submitted to the apprentice in front of the whole world. Then the plight resolved the way it resolves when there is no honour in the room. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell out of the sky — allegedly. The master kept his power by destroying the apprentice. That is what the passing of power looks like when a society is sick at the top: paranoia in the palace, blood on the runway. It is the serpent’s answer to the question. This story offers a far better answer, too.

The Bright Telling: Zelensky and Fedorov

Now the Ukrainian side, and the same story turned to the light. Mykhailo Fedorov — whom I never forget — comes from Vasylivka, which is right on the contact line in Zaporizhzhia. He has stood at President Zelensky’s side for seven years. He built Diia, and the state that fits into a phone. He built the Army of Drones, and he’s the face of the modern, un-Soviet way of fighting this war. Six months ago President Zelensky moved him to defence, and he moved him there to do a hard thing, which was to break the paralysis with the old command. On the 15th of July, President Zelensky dismissed him. The official reason was a cabinet reshuffle. The real reason was a fight that had frozen the top of the war effort, between Fedorov and the commander-in-chief, the last powerful man of the Soviet military generation.

And here the ancient story shows its shape, because the people did not accept the dismissal. Crowds filled the squares, three generations deep. Fedorov’s trust rating leapt from 35 to 65 per cent in a single week, and 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the dismissal was wrong. Within days, President Zelensky dismissed Syrskyi instead. Well — the crowds had their scalp. They stayed in the squares anyway, and they remain in the squares, although I look forward to hearing an update from Lexicon, still calling for the young man to be given his seat back.

Magister and Minister: The MN Vocabulary of Rule

Read that through the old frame, and every piece falls into place. Zelensky is the Magus I have been archetyping him assince the end of March 2022 — the magister, the master. In Dumézil’s map of our societies, the first function is the one who holds the magic and the law of rule. And the ministers — the magister, minister — the ministers serve directly under it. That’s hardwired into our language and into our governance for 6,000 years, since this idea of organising community was formed in Mykhailivka, which is the village about 20 kilometres south of where Mykhailo Fedorov grew up, and the place where Alexey Nikitin’s paper, published in Nature on the 5th of February 2025, put beyond all reasonable doubt the origins of the Yamna, from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate — in that community, on the Dnipro.

The words themselves carry the story: magus, magister, minister, monarch, mandate. The whole vocabulary of who may rule carries the MN sound, because that is the sound our language family has carried its idea of sovereignty on since before writing. Fedorov is a minister under the magister. That is not a clever overlay on the news; it’s the story’s own word for where he stands. Fedorov is also the apprentice, and his seat is the warrior’s seat: defence is the strong right arm every sovereign needs and every sovereign fears. He is ready. He is trusted. He carries a power the master cannot make for himself. That is the apprentice of the plight, exactly.

The Demons Whispering

And the demons are whispering. On the Ruschist side I named them once as the men of the Ozero Cooperative, the grey figures around the throne. On the Ukrainian side they are the wily remnant of the Soviet-era power bloc — and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular; that a minister the people love is not a minister but an heir; that the one who broke the old command will one day break you.

And I remind you of Veronica, who runs under the callsign Luna, and whose father was an Opposition Bloc councillor and now, it is reported, serves the occupation administration. Veronica, whom Yermak consulted over the past few years on every major appointment in government, supposedly because he believes in her authority, her capacity as a medium — though some of us might be quite sceptical about a lawyer doing that, and perhaps might suggest, or suspect, there’s a certain amount of tradecraft about it. We’ve now seen the texts between Yermak and Veronica from after Yermak was defenestrated, metaphorically speaking, at the end of the year. She advised him to speak to our friend, President Zelensky, and suggest to President Zelensky that Fedorov, if he takes Yermak’s seat in the presidential administration’s office, might just become the next president of Ukraine. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? Yermak was given these lines by Veronica.

So when I say that on the Ukrainian side they’re a wily remnant of the Soviet bloc, and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular — we actually have the texts, in which this very odd character, under the name Luna, is actually suggesting that Yermak manipulate President Zelensky, the sorcerer, in this way. The plight always has the demons in it. Their whole work is to poison the moment power passes, to turn a handover into a killing.

The Sorcerer’s True Bind

Here is the sorcerer’s true bind, and it’s worth being fair to President Zelensky about it. He’s not a tyrant clutching power. He is the master who raised this apprentice, who promoted him on purpose, who wants him to rise. On one hand he wants to hand the reins on. On the other, the same voice says: not yet. He’s not ready. Or the country’s not ready. Or the war cannot spare the fight. This is why the 15th of July was not a Prigozhin moment. It was the master pulling his apprentice back from the threshold at the last second, unsure. The plight is not always the master’s cruelty. Sometimes it’s only the master’s doubt.

The Martyrdom Bump: Yemos and the Sacrificed Twin

Now, the martyrdom bump in the polls — and here the story goes deeper still. There’s a number the sceptics are right to poke at, and the poking leads somewhere older than the poll. In one week, Fedorov’s trust went from 35 per cent to 65 per cent. The pollsters at Rating asked five days after the sacking, at the peak of the feeling. A cool head calls that a martyrdom bump, and says it’s not a settled new judgment of the man, it’s a surge that comes when somebody is sacrificed. The cool head is right. I share that scepticism, and I want to go one step further with it, not around it.

The word martyrdom carries a story our culture has been telling for 6,000 years. The oldest king in the whole Indo-European world is the one who dies first: Yemos, the twin. Born on the Ukrainian steppe, not far from where Fedorov grew up, before our ancestors carried his story out across the earth. He is the sacrificed, and by being sacrificed he becomes lord of the dead, and leads all those who die after him along the road and the path to death. He is Yama in the Vedas, Yima in Iran, Ymir in the Germanic world, and Donn in Ireland. He is Jesus in the Christian religion, and Donn, who keeps the house at Tech Duinn off the western coast — born, according to the mythological record, of the daughter of the monarch of Scythia, that is, ancient Ukraine: twelfth century, 800 years before Nikitin’s Nature paper in February 2025 demonstrated that all living Indo-European languages emanate from there, along with these mythological tales, where they occur in more than one tradition. He is Odin, who hangs on the world tree and gives himself to himself, and takes a day of our week as his fee.

In every branch of the Indo-European family the pattern is one pattern. The one who undergoes the sacrifice is not lessened by it. He is crowned by it. His death becomes the road every other death then follows. And beside the sacrificed twin stands the other one, the twin who survives: the lawgiver, Manu, who builds the culture on the sacrifice. His name in India is Manu; in Ireland, Érimón; Mannus in the Germanic tradition — and we, as native English, Germanic-language speakers, even call Germany after Mannus. We’ve already met him in this piece, because the MN is at the root of the whole vocabulary of rule too.

So look again at this and last month with the oldest eyes we have. The magister performs a sacrifice. He sets the young man down. The young man does not cling. He’s offered a soft landing, an advisory chair, and he turns it down. He takes the full political death and walks out. And the people do the thing our people have always done at the death of a self-sacrificing lord: they exalt him. The bump is not a polling trick, I contend, laid over an old story. It is the old story. Martyr’s Mana surges at the moment of the sacrifice. It always has.

The sceptic and the mythologist end in the same place, which is rare enough to mark. Both of them know the 65 per cent is the martyrdom effect. The only question either of them has left is whether the surge hardens into a real and lasting sovereignty, or fades as the feeling cools. In the old story, it hardens on one condition: the sacrifice has to be honoured, and the lord has to be restored.

Where the Story Splits

So the story splits at the end, and the split is the whole point. Putler’s version ended in Disinfolklore, the poison-telling, where the master survives the handover only by killing — allegedly. Zelensky’s version is not finished, and it can still go either way. If it ends the way the Mahabharata says it should, it will be the bright telling: the apprentice freed and restored, the old bloc set aside without a killing, master and apprentice both left standing, the bond kept, and the people’s will the thing that freed them.

I think it will end that way. I think Fedorov does regain his seat; that President Zelensky comes out of this with the strength to push the old bloc aside for good; and that the modern team gets built. If that is right, we are watching the rarest ending the oldest story has to offer: the plight resolved without a death — as just happened in England, and previously with Leo Varadkar in Ireland, and indeed with President Biden in the United States.

And notice who does the freeing. In the Mahabharata it’s the demons who free the apprentice from the sorcerer’s belly, and then the apprentice honours the agreement with the sorcerer by using the power of eternal life to restore him. And on the streets of Kyiv, it is the people. That is what a democracy does to this ancient story. The demons become the citizens, and they free the young man — not with mutiny, but by standing in the square until the master remembers he wanted to let him go. That is the whole difference between the two countries, said in one line. On one side the plight is resolved by murder in the dark. On our side, it is being resolved by citizens in the daylight. The same story our ancestors told 6,000 years ago; the opposite ending. It’s still being written in the squares. Let’s watch which way it goes.

Outflank, Don’t Rebut: The Architecture of the Book

So I wanted then to go back to the fourth episode of Outflank, Don’t Rebut. Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. So I’m going to give the architecture of the book, and then we’ll go straight into it — straight into chapter one. So, the architecture of the book. Chapter two states the method in a single chapter, so we have it in our hand before we apply it. The method is: outflank, don’t rebut.

I should maybe just say: I’m Decoding Trolls. I tweet on X at Decoding Trolls, as Disinfolklore. You can subscribe to my work on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net — and disinfolklore.eu is my main website.

So the method is outflank, don’t rebut. The chapter explains why rebuttal amplifies the apparatus, the Ruschist apparatus, and why foundation defence dispossesses it. It’s a methodological introduction that the rest of the book leans on.

Chapter three walks us through the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore method, and since you will be meeting this framework for the first time, I will introduce each tool plainly, and use the Cheburashka artifact, the Muslim Emperor artifact, the Europe Projection artifact, and the Mariupol Boat artifact — with Daria Dugina as the star — as the four worked examples that demonstrate each tool. By the end of chapter three we’ll have the method’s whole instrument set in our hands, and we won’t need to take it on credit any more.

Chapters four, five and six are the foundation-defence chapters. They’re where I explain the Manuland thesis, the Moon Foundation, the River Substrate, the Trita myth. These chapters have the most linguistic content in them. I’ve written them, I hope, so that a reader who has never read a word of Indo-European linguistics can follow every step. If at any point I’ve failed at that, you can butt in.

Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian decolonial voices, principally those collected and analysed by Erica Marat and Aizada Arystanbek. Chapter eight brings the decolonial voice from the place the apparatus can least afford to hear it — not the periphery, but the centre of the wound: Ukraine itself. Larysa Yakubova, in the view from the epicentre. Chapter seven dispossesses the Ruschist apparatus from the east; chapter eight dispossesses it from the centre.

Chapter nine names what the Ruschist apparatus is doing at state scale. The three mechanisms are coercive control, the abuser’s playbook, and the system of dual-use moments that cumulatively produce a genocide without ever requiring an individually criminal act. Each is a substantive framework with its own working history, and each will be introduced plainly.

Chapter ten is the technical chapter on cryptotypes, where I do the linguistic work most carefully. If you skip a chapter, this is the one to come back to. It’s the chapter that contains the method’s deep-grammar instrument, and it contains, near its end, the specific finding about the apparatus operator signature — like Dugin — that I want a careful reader to register, because that’s the key to outflanking, not rebutting.

Chapters eleven and twelve are the constructive chapters. Re-archetyping, which Volya Radio does every day: re-archetyping is the move by which the apparatus’s archetypal claims are not just dispossessed, but replaced. And the production of Infolklore, which Volya does every day — my coinage for the positive counterpoint to Disinfolklore. It uses the same substrate the apparatus parasitises, but uses it in observance of the Code of Positive Trolls: that is, generously, ethically, patiently, mindfully, with focus, and with insight.

Chapter twelve asks what the symmetric code means for the 1945 international legal order, for the Geneva and Hague Conventions, for the UN, for the ICC, and for the human rights NGOs. Outflank, don’t rebut — said one more time, with the equipment now to do it. That’s the architecture.

The Artifact Read Again

So let’s look at the artifact again. With the architecture in place, let’s return to Dugin’s Cheburashka artifact. Let’s read those sentences one more time, attentively.

Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He’s a toxic mutant, a demon of the moon. His true name is Shed bar Shemot, Shed Satan — the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the Ruschist child. He’s not a bear. He’s not a hare. He’s a rootless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish, though. He’s a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the Russian archetype. That’s Dugin.

And when you’ve read them again, ask yourself the following. Is the writer of these sentences a philosopher? Or is the writer of these sentences an actor playing a philosopher, in a production whose script requires that a beloved children’s character be smeared as a Jewish moon demon? Whatever your answer, register that you’ve just made a code judgment. You’ve judged the sentences for the energy they carry. You’ve judged them for generosity, for whether they tell a truth, for whether they show patience. You will, by the end of chapter three, know that you have applied the Code of Positive Trolls, the six-perfections ethical instrument that sits at the methodological heart of the Disinfolklore approach. You will know what you have done. You will know how to do it again. And you will know, the next time you encounter an artifact like this, what to do with it. You will not rebut it. You’ll recognise it, name it, and you will outflank the Ruschist apparatus that produced it. That’s the Disinfolklore approach.

The Method: Outflank, Don’t Rebut

Now, the method itself. Outflank, don’t rebut. A friend of mine, after reading the first complete draft of the Cheburashka artifact, sent me a single line: all right, you’ve made me believe that Dugin is an apparatus operator and not a philosopher — now what do I do about it? That’s the right question, and this chapter answers it. The answer is three words: outflank, don’t rebut. That’s the whole method. The chapter that follows will explain why those three words are not just a soundbite. They are a methodological commitment with consequences. The commitment is the method.

Why Rebuttal Amplifies

The instinct of a well-trained Western reader faced with the Cheburashka artifact at the end of chapter one is to refute it. Of course it is. The Western reader’s training has been, for several centuries, that an argument is met with a counter-argument, that a claim is met with a refutation, that a sophistry is met with careful dismantling. This is the disciplinary instinct of the academy, of the law court, of the editorial page, and of every parliamentary debating chamber. It’s the instinct that the Western intellectual stack is built on. It is, in most of its applications, the right instinct. In the case of the Ruschist apparatus, it’s the wrong instinct — and here’s why.

The apparatus’s outputs are not arguments. They’re deployments. An argument is a piece of intellectual work whose purpose is to convince an audience of a proposition. A deployment is a piece of communicative work whose purpose is to produce an effect: to recruit, to demoralise, to confuse, to capture, to corrupt, to terrify, and to elicit the response that licenses the apparatus’s next move. Arguments and deployments look similar on the page. They have sentences, they have nouns and verbs, they make claims, they cite sources. The well-trained Western reader, looking at one of the apparatus’s deployments, sees the surface of an argument and reaches automatically for the counter-argument.

That reach is the error. The counter-argument does not engage with the deployment’s actual mechanism. It engages with the deployment’s cover story — the argument-shaped surface the deployment wears. Engaging with the cover story leaves the mechanism intact. Worse: engaging with the cover story transmits the cover story to the engager’s audience. Every Western academic who carefully refutes the Foundations of Geopolitics explains to a fresh audience what the Foundations of Geopolitics says. Every podcast host who patiently dismantles the Fourth Political Theory explains, in dismantling it, what the Fourth Political Theory says. Every Cheburashka rebuttal essay published in the New York Review of Books — and I expect there to be several by the time this book is in print — will explain to a new audience that the apparatus’s senior operator has declared Cheburashka a Jewish moon demon. Most of those new readers will not have known. The rebuttal is the transmission.

This is not a Russia-specific observation. The same phenomenon is well documented in twentieth-century scholarship on propaganda. Jacques Ellul, in his 1962 Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, observed that propaganda’s first task is to occupy the mental space of the rebutter. Once the mental space is occupied, the propaganda is doing the work, regardless of whether the occupant has prepared against it. Hannah Arendt observed the same. So did Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Romance philologist whose diaries of life under National Socialism, collected in LTI, are the canonical study of how a totalitarian apparatus colonises a culture’s vocabulary one word at a time. Klemperer’s point — and Arendt’s, and Ellul’s — was that the vocabulary of the apparatus is itself the apparatus. To use the apparatus’s vocabulary, even to refute it, is to extend the apparatus’s reach.

The same point recurs in twenty-first century communication scholarship: the legal scholar Danielle Citron’s work on amplification cascades; the Berkman Klein Center’s Network Propaganda, 2019; Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers, 2024 — all converge on the conclusion that the act of rebutting a deliberately constructed disinformation deployment is generally more amplifying than ignoring it. The asymmetry is structural. The original deployment lands once, in its intended audience. The rebuttal lands many times — once for every member of the rebutter’s audience who would not otherwise have encountered the original. The apparatus, in modern attention economics, is paying the rebutter’s distribution costs.

The intuition that one must answer falsehood with truth is a good intuition. The intuition fails specifically in cases where the falsehood is structurally designed to elicit the response of truth-telling as its primary distribution mechanism. The Cheburashka artifact is exactly such a case. It’s too grotesque to persuade any Western audience of anything — but its grotesqueness is its distribution mechanism. Western intellectuals will refute it. In refuting it, they will explain it to their audiences. Some fraction of those audiences will register the apparatus’s Cheburashka-is-a-Jewish-moon-demon claim as the kind of thing the apparatus’s primary philosopher says. A smaller fraction will register that something about Russian children’s culture has been targeted by Western liberals, because in their hearing it’s the Western refutation that is most loudly talking about Cheburashka. A still smaller fraction will perhaps drift in the apparatus’s direction. The apparatus does not need a majority. It needs that drift.

What Outflanking Is

The structural answer is to deny the apparatus the distribution mechanism it’s engineered for. Don’t rebut. Outflank.

Outflanking is the alternative move. It’s the methodological commitment that we will not engage the apparatus’s deployment on its chosen terrain. We will not print that picture of that Russian who’s just been kicked out of France in every tweet complaining about that Russian. We will not reprint Donald’s tweets archetyping himself as God, or Jesus, or who knows what. We will not engage Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics on geopolitical doctrinal ground. We will not engage his Fourth Political Theory on political-philosophical ground. We will not engage his Cheburashka demonology on theological-symbological ground. Engaging on the chosen ground is what the deployment was built to elicit.

Instead — and here is the substantive method — we’ll work at the substrate. The apparatus’s deployments depend on, and ride upon, certain symbolic and linguistic substrates that the apparatus did not invent and cannot own: the Indo-European cognitive vocabulary; the river-name family that names the home of the Indo-European language family; the Trita myth, the oldest Indo-European story, the story of the hero who recovers what the serpent has stolen and restores it to the cosmos. These substrates are real. They are old. They are linguistically and archaeogenetically documented. And this is the substantive point: they do not belong to Russia. They belong to the steppe homeland from which the Indo-European language family radiated outward roughly 6,000 years ago, which is broadly the territory of present-day Ukraine and the adjacent Pontic-Caspian steppe.

The Manuland Thesis

I call this the Manuland thesis. Manu: an Indo-European root that surfaces across the family. In Sanskrit, Manu, the first Vedic king of India. In Latin, manus, the hand that conveys power, or touch, and what it commits to. In Germanic, Mannus, the founding figure named by Tacitus — the Roman historian Tacitus, in the first century AD — as the ancestor of the Germanic people; Mannus had three sons, one of whom is Irmin. In Welsh, Manawydan, and in Irish, Manannán, two preeminent pre-Christian deities of Celtic-language-speaking Wales and Ireland respectively. Manuland, in my naming, is the territory whose deep substrate is held in those Manu, MN, MN sounds, and the words and concepts they write. It is the substrate the apparatus claims for the Eurasianism doctrine. It’s not the apparatus’s substrate to claim. It’s the substrate of ancient Ukraine.

Names are not the whole of it. The founding figures of six of eight living Indo-European branches carry the MN sound: Manu, Mannus and Manannán; Iranian Aryaman; Hellenic Minos; Armenian Menua and Manavaz. By Bruce Lincoln’s rule, a feature shared between the Indo-Iranian east and the Celtic west is inheritance from the common source rather than late borrowing. The founder-name pattern reaches back to the Yamna from Zaporizhzhia themselves.

The pattern also carries a number. Take every founding figure across eight branches, and ask how likely it is, given how often the MN sound occurs in these languages at all, that this many founders would carry it by accident. On the generous roster — any standard founding figure — seven of the eight branches carry the pattern, at odds of about one in a hundred billion. On the strictest roster, chosen sound-blind by role alone — the primary first man or first king of each branch, whoever that is — three of the eight still carry it: Manu, Mannus, and Érimón in Ireland, at odds of around one in 2,400. One coincidence is one event. Six is a system, and the system has a probability attached.

Relocating the Substrate

Outflanking, then, is the move of relocating the substrate from Moscow to where it belongs. The apparatus claims that Russia is the civilisational core of the Eurasian space. The outflanking response is not: oh, but it isn’t, because here are five counter-arguments. The outflanking response is: the substrate the apparatus is claiming is located in present-day Ukraine, and here is the linguistic and archaeogenetic evidence. Once the relocation is in the reader’s hand, the apparatus’s claim collapses without rebuttal. There’s no claim to rebut. The claim was always parasitic on the substrate. Once the substrate is correctly located, there’s no claim left to engage with. That’s the central move of the method, and everything else in this book serves it.

Chapter four shows us the MN substrate. Chapter five, the DN substrate, the river-name family — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Danube — the family that the Indo-European family named the home territory with. Chapter six shows us the Trita myth at work, which we see every day in Ukraine. Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian voices that say Eurasianism is not a heritage we share, it’s a colonial fiction imposed upon us. Once those four chapters have been read, the apparatus’s substrate claim has been outflanked from the north, from the centre, from the east, and from the actual evidence base. There’s no substrate claim left for the apparatus to deploy.

The deployments themselves — Cheburashka, the Muslim Emperor, the Europe Projection, the Mariupol Boat, the Amnesty report, Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear — every fresh artefact the apparatus produces continues to surface. But without their substrate, they surface as the apparatus’s improvisations, not as the recovery of ancient ground.

Name the Deployment, Then Do the Substrate Work

The reader who has read this book, and who is countering the next deployment, recognises what they’re looking at. They register the move. They strip the Mana. They don’t rebut. They do not transmit. They do not amplify. They name the apparatus’s improvisation for what it is, and they move on with their work.

A natural objection to don’t rebut is: are you saying I should ignore the apparatus’s deployments? Are you saying I should let the Cheburashka artifact circulate unchallenged? Are you saying I should pretend the Eurasianism doctrine does not exist? No. Outflank is not ignore. The two are opposite moves. Ignoring is the choice to act as if a thing is not happening, to refuse to acknowledge it, to bracket it out of analysis, and to leave it to other people. Outflanking is the choice to deal with the thing thoroughly, but to deal with it at the substrate level rather than the surface. Outflanking takes more work than rebuttal. Rebuttal is one essay. Outflanking is a whole methodological apparatus.

I quoted it in full at the start of chapter one, and at the end. I named it for what it is: a tender object of childhood affection recoded as a hidden enemy, by means of antisemitic coded vocabulary, an invented pseudo-Hebrew etymology, and an attempted hack at the foundation metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate, invoking the moon to justify the hack. I did not rebut a single word of it. I named what it is, and moved on to the substrate. That’s the move. Don’t argue with the apparatus’s claim. Name what the deployment is doing, then do the substrate work.

The substrate work is this book. The reader who finishes this book has acquired, by the end, the linguistic and historical and methodological equipment to do the substrate work themselves. The next Cheburashka — and there will be one soon — is to be met by them with the same move. Name the deployment. Name what it is doing. Decline to engage on its terms. Direct the reader’s attention to the substrate. Watch the deployment lose its purchase.

The Amnesty International Report, 4 August 2022

The first long-worked example I will give the reader, of outflanking applied to a real case, is the Amnesty International report of the 4th of August 2022. That report — issued by the world’s most august human rights organisation, founded in 1961, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 1977, 38 national sections, three million members — claimed the Ukrainian armed forces, by stationing their military personnel and equipment near civilian objects, were putting civilians at risk. The report deployed the same structural move as Daria Dugina: the provocation logic.

The Amnesty Ukraine team resigned almost immediately. They issued a public letter explaining that they had not been consulted, that the report’s methodology was unsound, that the report misrepresented. The report was lightly amended in a follow-up statement. The substantive position was maintained.

Over the following nine months I wrote on Twitter a great deal about this report. I tried at first the generous read. Amnesty, I argued, was a well-governed organisation that had made a serious mistake, and well-governed organisations correct serious mistakes. What one was looking at in August 2022 was a serious but recoverable governance failure. I held that read for a long time. I kept holding it until it became clear, by June 2023, that the institutional response was not going to be a correction: senior management was going to defend the report; the Ukraine team had been sacrificed; the institutional capture was visibly, in the institution’s own behaviour, complete.

In June 2023 I wrote: what destroyed Amnesty’s brand wasn’t the initial issue, amplifying eight-year-old false Russian Disinfolklore that Ukraine purposefully lures Russia into attacking schools. It was the institutional inability to get to grips with the mistake. So Amnesty sacrificed its local staff, while keeping those who had fallen for Russia’s Disinfolklore, and then misrepresented international law.

There is the outflanking move applied at institutional level. I do not, in that paragraph, rebut the Amnesty report. I name the deployment. I name the institutional pathology. I refuse to dignify the deployment by treating it as a debatable position. I cite the discriminating evidence — the resignation of the Ukraine team — and I name the falsifier of the generous read, the institutional non-recantation, and I move on.

The Amnesty case is, in technical terms, the same provocation-logic deployment as Daria Dugina’s Mariupol boat artefact. The same line, the same structural move, the same code-failing logic, deployed by an ostensibly neutral Nobel laureate NGO instead of by the family member of the Russian apparatus’s senior philosopher-operator, stroke actor. The structural identity is what matters. The deployer class is interchangeable. The apparatus’s deployments have the same shape across the captured NGO, the captured electoral party, the captured podcast host, the captured academic. The book’s whole point is that the deployment is the unit of analysis, not the deployer.

What Amnesty headquarters refused to do — the recantation that would have restored its standing — is the institutional move that the symmetric code in chapter twelve prescribes when an institution discovers that it has deployed Disinfolklore. Recant immediately. Name the deployment. Restore the Ukraine team. Retract the report. The institution that does that survives the deployment. The institution that does not is captured by the deployment. Amnesty’s Secretariat, in 2022 and the years following, chose institutional capture over recantation. The book is not pleased to say this, but the book has to say so. Naming the institution’s capture is part of the outflanking move, applied at an institutional rather than an individual level.

And I’ll leave it at that for this week. Thank you so much for listening.

Continued from:

First in series:

This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on linguistics, which is amazing. But I’m going to turn back to the first character, really, in this entire story. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m aware that for the first thirty episodes I mentioned this bridge a lot. I’m equally aware that for the past thirty episodes I haven’t mentioned it a lot. And it’s a really important character in the story. The story of Disinfolklore, and the story really of anywhere anyone you know exacts a toll. Whether that is an emotional toll or a literal toll.

We see the structure of the toll troll at the moment in the Strait of Hormuz, in a geographical location. But we also see the structure of the toll in anyone we know who is, basically, a lot of work. Anything you have to do to get through that resistance in order to do your job, or get the cats out, or get the children to school. This is the structure of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.

Of course, I didn’t arrive at this understanding straight away. It’s taken me years and years and years. As some of you know, I was a diplomat there, working for the international community, between 2015 and 2018. And the bridge at Stanytsia was a real bridge and a metaphorical bridge. On one side were the Russian occupiers, the bridge trolls. On the other side were the Ukrainian defenders.

So I’ve been doing this series, one of the several series I have ongoing here, which I started a few weeks ago. We’ve gone through three episodes so far, and this is the fourth. It’s called The Bridge at Stanytsia.

The bridge at Stanytsia

Russia’s occupation administration in Luhansk cast itself as a kindly guardian of a broken bridge it had helped break. And that inversion of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper posing as protector, is how a crossing gets used to rewrite who you are when you walk across it.

There is a bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, and for years it was the only legal way to cross the contact line into Luhansk region. A long wooden walkway, part of it blown out, with steps and ramps that pensioners climbed in the heat and the cold to reach the other side. I stood on the bridge. I filed reports from it. So when I tell you what was done with it, I am not reading you a theory. I’m telling you what I watched. And then I’m going to show us the words that were published about it by the occupiers.

The old story comes first. In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and it demands a toll. A riddle, a coin, a piece of you, before it will let you pass. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and it does not own the river. It simply controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place it controls everything. Whoever holds the bridge holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Are you a refugee or a returnee? A citizen or a separatist? You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it.

And this is the position, for example, both Donald and Netanyahu find themselves in. Donald launched this illegal war against Iran thinking that he was the bridge troll. And now it turns out that the Iranians are much more experienced, with millennia of experience and understanding of this essential structure. The bridge Donald wants to cross at the moment is simple. He just wants the war to be over, because it is an absolute catastrophe, for all the reasons most of us know. I think the figure is something like thirty billion dollars’ worth of American materiel destroyed by Iran in the last two weeks, according to satellite imagery that was released by Iran but taken from China. Because, again, Donald has exacted a toll on Planet Labs. Planet Labs grew out of an entrepreneurship project at my business school in Oxford, around 2010, when someone had the idea of building shoebox satellites. It was incomprehensible a year ago that this satellite imagery would not be available to the world. But it is unavailable to us. We can’t see it. The Chinese have helpfully released it.

And so the toll which Iran is now exacting on Donald, as they escalate with perfect tempo, works like this. They know Donald is desperate to get this war over with. But every time he is ready to pay a price, the toll goes up. And he gets trolled. The arch troll gets trolled into doing another action, bombing somewhere. Yesterday, bombing Iraq with Saudi Arabia. And then the toll goes up. This is an essential archetypal structure in international relations. And it plays out in the micro and the macro.

Here in Stanytsia Luhanska is how that archetype was actually used.

In June 2018 the occupiers’ own news outlet, Luhinfo, ran this story, and I’m quoting it. The Luhansk Folk’s Republic, this is the fake occupation authority, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, as it did successfully, “urges to restore Stanitsa bridge, as people are dying of heat in queues at the checkpoint.”

And believe me, it was extremely hot there, many times, all through the summer. I stood there. I patrolled the one and a half kilometre stretch between the government-controlled checkpoints, across through this beautiful forest, on a path where spent munitions were scattered. Mostly older women and children crossed, and had to walk that one and a half kilometres of no person’s land to reach the bridge, and then the other side of the bridge. And the winter is ridiculously cold. This is part of the toll the Russians erect. They’re experts at this. They did it in Moldova. It is the concretisation of their occupation, part of the techniques they take out of a box whenever they occupy a territory. You see it in Georgia, in Abkhazia, as well. When I see photographs of what goes on there, it reminds me so much of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge.

So this is a news article in the Russist propaganda media in June 2018. And they quote their so-called negotiator, this guy who archetyped himself, he looked like Trotsky, I’ve spoken about him before. “We spoke about the two people who have died at the checkpoint outside Stanitsa Luganskaya because of the heat on June 24th, on the Ukrainian side. They are mostly elderly people who cross the contact line to receive pensions.”

Because the Russists paid a tiny allowance to people in occupied Luhansk, and then people would cross the bridge to collect their pensions. Under Western pressure, Ukraine was forced for a long time to pay those pensions. Which in turn enabled the occupation, and encouraged people to stay inside the occupation when really they should have left, however horrific it would have been to leave everything behind them. Because it has only gotten worse.

Two people died in the queue on that date. That part is true, and it is terrible. But look at who is speaking. The administration that fronts the Russist occupation, the side whose forces are dug in at one end of the broken bridge, has stepped forward as the grieving advocate of the people crossing it. It urges restoration of the bridge. It frets about the elderly in the sun. It points across the river, at the Ukrainian side. The troll under the bridge has put on a red cross armband and is weeping for the goats.

That is the bridge troll inverted. And the inversion is the whole trick. The gatekeeper does not stop you with a club. It stops you, and then tells you it is the only one who cares that you were stopped. The toll it collects is not a coin. It is your understanding of who broke the bridge.

Here is a second piece, from two years earlier. March 2016, the Russist outlet Riafan. Headline: “OSCE members headed by Hug fled from the Luhansk Folk’s Republic after receiving complaints.” The monitors, I was one of them, are walking from the occupied side towards the government side, and a civilian appeals to them. This is where the Russians stage events, where they shoot at people and blame the Ukrainians. And to set that up, they get people to speak on camera, in front of people like me. A real grief, someone did die. And again, pointed in exactly one direction, at exactly the moment the monitors are about to cross to where they could see for themselves. Stay on our side of the bridge. Do not cross. In one sense they are saying, don’t leave us, don’t abandon us. But in the other sense they are saying, if you abandon us, the Ukrainians will start shooting. And this did not happen in reality. The gatekeeper does not only control who passes. It tries to control where the witness looks.

This is folklore-shaped storytelling, built on archetypes we already trust, turned to capture us instead of shelter us. And the thing about an archetype is that the same figure can be turned either way. Donald on the bridge is the bridge troll protecting Americans from all the criminals coming from abroad. From another perspective he is the uber bridge troll, until he met his match in the Iranian trolls. A curse on all of their houses. A guardian of a crossing can genuinely protect the people who cross it. Or it can pose as that guardian while it is the one holding the gate. You cannot tell from the costume. The costume is identical. You tell by what it actually does. Who blew up the bridge? The Russians. Who keeps it broken? The Russians. Who profits from the queue? The Russians.

That is why the Luhansk operation worked so well. And I mean worked. It was so complete a piece of stagecraft that for eight years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation. Look at the outlets’ own language. The occupiers’ press names the occupation almost never. Somewhere between nothing and three in a hundred mentions across the whole period. Even the Ukrainian side climbs only to about a third by 2018. The word for what was happening lagged years behind the thing itself. That is what a good bridge troll buys you. Not the bridge. The name.

Most of us have learnt, for instance, that Russia was occupying most of eastern Europe after Yalta. But still, I have this experience of having to explain it to friends. This was a military occupation, of most of the countries that constituted the Soviet Union too.

And here is what seeing this gives us. The moment we notice that the one expressing the most tender concern for the people in the queue is the one standing at the gate, that is the moment the spell loosens. You get to ask the question the costume was built to stop. Who controls this crossing? What does it do, not what does it say? Ask that on every bridge, real, rhetorical or metaphorical, that you are asked to cross. The troll only collects the toll for as long as we agree to pay in the only currency it accepts, our belief that it is on our side. We can stop paying. We can name the crossing for ourselves.

So that is the bridge.

The kindness of the captor

This little story is about the kindness of the captor. It reads the merciful sovereign archetype through a plain test. Protection can shelter you or capture you. And you tell which by what it does to your freedom, not by how kind it sounds.

Here is a sentence from a man who, by his own account, wanted only the best for the people of Luhansk. December 2017, the occupiers’ own news service, lug.info. The head of the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, Pasechnik, is at the Alchevsk steelworks, restarting a blast furnace that had stood cold for most of the year. He congratulates everyone, and he says the main task of him and his entire team is “to raise the well-being.”

Raise the well-being. It is the kindest line you can imagine. A leader who feeds you, who lights the furnace, who wants your children warm. That is exactly what a good sovereign sounds like. And that is the problem we are going to sit with today. Mercy is not the tell. Mercy is genuine, and it is common, and we should not become the kind of person who flinches at kindness. The trouble is that the very same act, protection, can shelter a woman or it can capture her. And you cannot tell which by how kind it sounds. You tell by what it does.

So let us hold Pasechnik’s furnace next to a second item. May 2018, a Ukrainian outlet asks who will treat the schoolchildren being taught to shoot at a military range in the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The report, sourced to the occupiers’ own military commissar, says 150 pupils of the tenth and eleventh grades, fifteen and sixteen years old, were taken to a firing range and put through initial military training. One hundred and fifty children, learning to shoot.

And I went to some of these places. When the part north of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge was de-occupied in July 2014, after MH17 and the sanctions, the Russians had to withdraw. They just didn’t have enough soldiers. They left this vast swathe of Luhansk unoccupied. And a Russian colleague brought me once to one of these children’s camps. I’ve been thinking about it this week because of the troll going around from Balitsky, which ABC covered in America.

So, the same word. Protection. He raises the well-being. He also puts children on the range. The furnace and the rifle are the same governance, wearing the same kind face. The protector who shelters your town is preparing to spend its sons.

And this is why the word never came. Across those years, the people running the occupation almost never called it an occupation. Their outlets reach for the word almost never at all. That is the lag of the whole story in the archive, and the merciful sovereign is a large part of why. A power that lights furnaces, runs victory parades, pins medals on its men and sends sick children to hospitals does not look like an occupation.

So we need a test that mercy cannot fool. And it is not, is this kind? It is, after the kindness, is she freer or more bound? Can she decline it? Can she leave? Can she vote it out next year? Did the child come home, or go in deeper? Run it. The furnace warms the town. She cannot leave. The training warms no one. It sends her son towards a line he did not choose. Protection she cannot decline, cannot walk away from, cannot vote against, is not shelter. It is a wall with a warm side.

And to be fair to the test, watch it clear a real protector. January 2016, the Ukrainian TV channel 112. An advisor to the Security Service of Ukraine says they are ready to release all detainees.

And this is what I will leave us with on this front. No credentials are required. When a power is kind to you, do not argue with the kindness. Let it be kind. Just ask the one question the costume cannot answer. Am I freer now, or further in? Can I say no to this? Could I leave? You do not need to be an analyst to ask it. You only need to remember that protection is judged by what it does to your freedom, not by how it sounds. Keep that question in your pocket, and hand it to the next person who tells you they only want the best for you.

Back to Outflank Dugin

So, back to Outflank Dugin. We’re close to the end of the first chapter.

Let’s look again at the Cheburashka artefact. A small, big-eared puppet is a demon of the moon. A children’s character has a true name in invented pseudo-Hebrew. A puppet who could not be more obviously a child’s friend has no parents and no nationality. He is, and the sentence is verbatim from Dugin, “a rootless cosmopolitan.” He might be Jewish, though. He is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. Those are the words of Dugin. Cheburashka is sent to destroy the Russian archetype.

The thing that is happening here is not the writing of a philosopher. It is something much older. It is the Russist apparatus, through one of its named senior operators, doing what the apparatus has always done. Taking a tender object of childhood affection and recoding it, in its audience’s mind, as a hidden enemy.

The word cosmopolitan in Soviet political writing does not mean what it means in English. Anna from Odesa has written about this as well. Cosmopolitan is the code word Stalin’s apparatus used in its rootless cosmopolitan campaign of 1949 to 1953, the campaign that arrested and executed Jewish writers, doctors, intellectuals and party members across the Soviet Union, under the pretext that they were cosmopolitans, loyal not to the Russian motherland but to Jewish or Western or deracinated interests. And when I write that russophobia has its origins in antisemitism, this is yet another example of how anyone they want to other becomes branded, archetyped, as Jewish or Western or against them. The word is not innocent. It has had its head turned in Russian political language since the late 1940s. Anyone who uses cosmopolitan of a children’s puppet in 2026 knows what it means. The phrase Dugin uses, Cheburashka “might be Jewish, though,” finishes the sentence the word cosmopolitan began, just in case you didn’t get it. Then the demon naming finishes the paragraph. Then the moon finishes the whole.

The moon. And here I will start the technical work that the rest of the book elaborates, how we will outflank.

The moon is not a random target. I’ll explain why properly in chapter four. For now I’ll only say this. There is a deep grammar at the bottom of the Indo-European languages, the family that contains English, Welsh, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Russian, Ukrainian and seven other living branches. And one of the rules of that grammar concerns the moon. The moon, in the deep grammar, is the foundation metaphor of the mind. The Indo-European cognitive vocabulary, mind, meaning, manner, an old word for power, human, monarch, mandate, mantra, money, moon itself, all reach back to one ancestral root. The root that meant moon in the language spoken on the Ukrainian steppe roughly six thousand years ago. The Indo-European speaking world has, since then, treated the moon as the master metaphor for the medium that transmits meaning. The meaning of one word shines through another word, like light shines through the moon. As our minds shine through our bodies, so the moon shines through the sun’s light. I’m asking you to take on credit, for one chapter, the assertion that the moon is the foundational metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate. Chapter four does the work.

For now, register what it means about the artefact I read you. The apparatus’s senior operator chose, of all loci, the moon. He did not invent a demon of the rock. He did not invent a demon of the wheat field. He did not invent a demon of the iron ploughshare. He invented a demon of the moon. He chose the foundation. He chose the deepest possible substrate to try to hack. And that is the proof. The very fact that the apparatus’s manufactured philosopher reaches for the moon, of all things, to legitimate a fake demonology of a children’s cartoon character is itself evidence, at the level of the apparatus’s own selection behaviour, that the moon is what my framework says it is. The foundation of the mind. The hack reveals the cryptotype it tries to hack. Hackers select targets that matter. Dugin chose the moon. That choice gives the game away.

I call this principle, with a deliberate echo of the medieval mystics, as well as of the phenomenon in data analytics that powers artificial neural networks today, reversion to the mean. The reversion to the moon-based metaphor. It is my arch play on words, referencing that phenomenon of data analytics where mean itself emanates from the moon-metaphor semantic signalling system too. The apparatus reverts to the moon foundation whenever it needs depth.

The phenomenon is not new. It is what every prior fake and real religious doctrine production in the Indo-European adjacent cultural space has done. From Akhenaten’s brief solar monotheism in fourteenth century BCE Egypt, to Ahriman in the fifth century BCE Iranian Avestan reform. From the Druj, the Lie, carved in stone in the sixth century BCE Persian rock relief at Behistun, which I’ve spoken about before, to the Inquisition’s witch trials in seventeenth century Catalonia. The technique is the same. The locus is the same. The moon is the place the apparatus reaches when it wants the patina of ancient ground.

And I’ll just mention, en passant, as I have before, that Yermak’s medium’s call sign on Telegram was Luna. And we all saw that thing a few weeks ago, where the fake Russist security services operative releasing the video called himself Lunan. It wasn’t his real name. He chose this name. What I’m talking about here gives us lenses to decode what we are seeing in our information space, and to make decisions about how we react to it. Because this tell, this use of the moon as the substrate, will come up again and again. And when it reaches for the moon to justify terrible things, you know what you are looking at.

And so Putler made his speech this week, and he’s going back a couple of centuries. When I talk about outflanking Dugin, not rebutting, what I mean is this. Let’s not enter into discussing what happened in 1733 or 1833, or Stalin this and Stalin that. It is all just nonsense. You outflank them. And because of the degree of complexity of the nonsense they spew, from Putler down to Dugin, down to what they teach in Russian schools, and Will gave a good discourse on that this week, you really have to go quite far. That’s where I go. Six thousand years ago, to the village of Mykolaivka on the banks of the Dnipro, where that Nature paper last year by Nikitin determined that all the living Indo-European languages emanate from there and from around it. So if we’re going to outflank Dugin or Putler, then let’s start with the real word for the moon.

The wise counsellor

I want to turn now to the Dugin-as-archetype observation I made last week. The archetype the Russist apparatus has cast Dugin into is the wise counsellor, the figure who stands at the elbow of the monarch and tells him what to do. In the Indo-European inheritance he goes back at least as far as Merlin to Arthur, Aristotle to Alexander, Chanakya to Chandragupta Maurya, Nathan to David, and the Brahmin court priests to the Vedic kings. The role is honoured. The image is silver-bearded. The associated vocabulary is wisdom, depth, tradition, mystery, ancient knowledge.

That archetype is the role Dugin has been cast in by his apparatus. The casting was not subtle. From the late 1990s, when Foundations of Geopolitics was distributed inside the Russian Academy of the General Staff, his apparatus began establishing the image. Orthodox priestly robes for ceremonial appearances. A studied manner of speaking, with theatrical pauses. A vocabulary that reached at every opportunity for the deepest available references. Heidegger, Schmitt, Guénon, Evola, Plato, the Vedas, Sufi texts, the Orthodox liturgy. A theatre of Tradition, capital T, deliberately invoking the right-wing Italian and French esoteric currents he had read while resident in western Europe in the 1990s.

The Western press, when he was introduced to it, treated this casting as if it were real. Profiles in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere, from the late 2010s forward, described him as Putin’s Rasputin, Putin’s brain, Russia’s most influential thinker, the philosopher of the Kremlin. All archetypes. Tucker Carlson, sitting opposite him in Moscow in February 2024, introduced him as the most famous political philosopher in Russia. Each of these framings is the apparatus’s own marketing copy, lifted into Western respectability discourse by Western interviewers who did not, evidently, pause to ask whether they were reading the costume rather than the man.

The casting director’s masterstroke was the family business construction. The senior philosopher-operator does not stand alone. His daughter, Darya Dugina, was raised inside the Russist apparatus from the start, trained as an English speaker, deployed as a co-presenter on Russist state television. In the early months of the full-scale invasion she was sent on apparatus tours of Mariupol where, in a boat off the fallen city, where the state she was defending had just murdered up to one hundred thousand native residents, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, she delivered to camera the Ukrainians-bombed-themselves line, which I’ll dissect in chapter three. She presented Russist state messaging, this actor, speaking fluent English to international audiences like us, while her father provided the metaphysical depth on the home channels. They were not two operators of the same apparatus by accident. They were one household operation, with two specialised members carrying complementary apparatus content. The English-language audience encountered a young, articulate, beautiful philosophy graduate daughter, whose existence alongside her wise, bearded father established the franchise as something more than a single man’s project. The Russist apparatus, when it captures a philosopher, captures the family line.

Her death, en route from a literary festival outside Moscow in August 2022, then permitted the apparatus to install the next image layer around the surviving father. The bereaved philosopher. The targeted intellectual. The martyr-adjacent figure whose tragic personal loss was somehow taken as evidence of his philosophical importance. Tucker Carlson reached for the line directly in his promotional copy. The Ukrainian government, he alleged, murdered his daughter. The casting director, which is to say the apparatus, had built him a halo.

What matters about all of this is that the philosopher framing is a production. It has a casting director. It has a costume. It has a backstory. It has a daughter who served as a supporting character. It has a sanctioning state and an interviewing state. It has, in Carlson’s promotional copy and in dozens of similar Western pieces over twenty years, a marketing strategy. None of these elements is evidence that the man at the centre is a philosopher. All of them are evidence that the apparatus around him is in the business of manufacturing the appearance of a philosopher.

And this is the central claim of the chapter, and indeed of the book. The wise counsellor archetype is being manufactured in real time, by a state-deployed apparatus, around an actor who is playing a role to the apparatus’s specification. That is my opinion. I’m entitled to it. My opinion is protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The role exists because the apparatus needs it. The apparatus needs it because some thinking head needs to appear attached to the Russist apparatus’s serial enterprises, so that those enterprises do not look like the brutal, acquisitive violence they actually are. The role’s content is incidental. A children’s puppet demonology is fine. A pseudo-Hebrew etymology is fine. Lenin’s body removed from the mausoleum and replaced with a sarcophagus for the still-living president, surrounded by the flags of conquered European states, is fine. What matters is that the actor keeps producing the appearance of philosophical depth, while the apparatus keeps doing what the apparatus does. Murder. Genocide.

The wise counsellor production is not assembled from nothing. The Russist state apparatus draws, for its metaphysical alibi, on a specific twentieth century intellectual lineage that the Western reader is rarely shown. There is the Russian cosmism tradition of Nikolai Fyodorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Alexander Bogdanov. There is the noosphere doctrine of Vladimir Vernadsky, the Ukrainian-born geochemist whose vocabulary the apparatus has gradually annexed across the past half century. And most directly there is the painter-mystic Nikolai Roerich’s tripartite pneumatic, psychic, hylic hierarchy of human types, a Theosophy-derived schema in which a spiritual elite is licensed to direct the lives of the less awakened masses. Theosophy was invented by Helena Blavatsky, who was born in Dnipro. I have visited her house in Dnipro. And again, I remind you, this is about outflanking these people and their nonsense. The Dugin-Surkov apparatus did not invent the substrate it operates from. It appropriated a hundred-year-old Ukrainian and Russian mystical infrastructure of pneumatic elite metaphysics, and grafted onto it the security services apparatus that produces twenty-first century deployments. The wise counsellor archetype is being installed inside a building that was already standing.

And for those who read the Veronika story, the medium with the Luna Telegram handle who was directing and advising Yermak, this will all seem very, very familiar. One of her posts published this week concerned Fedorov. She advised Yermak, this was all over the question of who should succeed, to go to our friend, I think she referred to President Zelensky, and suggest that Fedorov would make a great successor, or words to that effect. Basically, to manipulate President Zelensky into not appointing Fedorov. Of course, the whole thing backfired when Fedorov was appointed defence minister. And so again I see the footprint of an operation where everything they touch goes wrong.

The reader who wants to see where the apparatus’s metaphysical confidence comes from should read Roerich, though I wouldn’t advise it, Vernadsky, the cosmists, or the Dnipro-born Ukrainian Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. And don’t get me wrong. She was pretty amazing. She saw many things which we still haven’t quite sorted out, and I don’t downplay her or what she achieved at all. However, she did make up a lot of stuff about Tibetan Buddhism. She didn’t have access to what we have access to today. And she made up a lot of stuff about the Egyptians. The reader who has these books will recognise, in every Dugin output, the lineage the output is drawing on.

Don’t rebut. Outflank.

So what I’m asking us to do is to stop refuting him. We don’t need to write an essay explaining that Cheburashka is not actually a Hebrew-named moon demon. The artefact rebuts itself. The point of the artefact, for the purposes of this book, is to establish the apparatus’s nature beyond any need for further argument. After chapter one, you will not see the philosopher frame the same way again.

What I’m asking us to do instead is to start noticing where else the apparatus shows up. The Russist apparatus’s outputs are not limited to Dugin. They appear in the writings about archetypes of Surkov, the ex-deputy prime minister of Russia, which I’ll analyse in chapter ten. They appear in the slogans of European populist movements that have absorbed and re-exported the fourth political theory framework. The Alternative für Deutschland leader Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear deployment reads as if it had originated in the same source as Dugina’s Mariupol speech. Which of course it had, structurally, if not by traceable transmission. They appear in the speeches of the Russist Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, in the editorial line of Russist Today, in the briefings of the Russist foreign ministry, in the daily output of half a dozen named Telegram channels, and in the comment-thread persona fleets that argue every Western news article into the ground.

And once you have read the Cheburashka artefact and registered what it actually says, you will start seeing the others. The apparatus’s signature is not subtle. The phrase don’t poke the bear is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase legitimate Russian interests is the apparatus’s signature. The phrase one cannot reduce a complex situation to good and evil is the apparatus’s signature. Multipolarity is the apparatus’s signature. Civilisational sovereignty is the apparatus’s signature. Traditional values is the apparatus’s signature. You will start, slowly, to find the apparatus. The apparatus is more present in Western intellectual life than we had previously noticed. This is not a paranoid conclusion. It is an empirical observation. The apparatus has been working at the Western intellectual stack for at least twenty years, and has in places succeeded. This book’s task is to give us the equipment for noticing the signature when it appears, the manner in the mean, and for what to do when it does.

I’m not going to argue with Dugin. The book is not going to argue with anyone who repeats the apparatus’s signatures. It is not going to set out a polite both-sides account of Eurasianism, as if Eurasianism deserved an even-handed treatment. The point of don’t rebut is don’t rebut. We will not rebut. We will outflank. And it is not going to be neutral. I’ll not pretend in this book to be neutral about whether the Eurasianism doctrine is an imperial fiction. It is an imperial fiction. The Central Asian scholars whose work I draw on say so plainly, from inside the region the apparatus pretends to speak for. The Marat and Arystanbek text from Kazakhstan that I lean on for that chapter is published by Cambridge University Press. Cambridge is not, generally, where one looks for the firebrand position. The firebrand position, in this case, is the position of the responsible scholarship.

And the book is not going to refer to the apparatus’s spokespeople by their full diplomatic-register names every time. Druidey Don, Duncey Putin, Sorcerer Dugin, Chief Sorcerer Putin, Chef Saucerer Prigozhin, Maid Maryon Simonyan, the bridge troll, the wise counsellor, the philosopher. These are the working monikers I have used in my Decoding Trolls writing across some 67,500 original posts since February 2022, and they will recur here. They are not childish. They are mana-stripping, and that is the technical term I’ll explain in chapter three. For now: when you remove a public figure’s gravitas vocabulary and substitute a comic working name, you remove the figure’s symbolic energy. You strip them of mana. You make the apparatus harder to deploy through them. This is part of the outflanking method, applied at the level of vocabulary. We see it when people archetype Donald as a clown. We see Iran doing it to Donald, to great effect.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not on the side of Iran in this, the mad mullahs. A plague on all their houses, on MAGA and Donald and on Iran. This is a classic tragedy, foreseen and inevitable. Inevitable because of Donald’s personality and the wiliness of the Iranians. Foreseen because of understanding that psychology, understanding the bridge troll, understanding how easy it is to provoke Donald. And understanding that Iran’s strategic objective is not only to concretise its alliance with China and bring China into the Middle East, but to destroy American power in a way that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were not able to do. Knowing these things, this is the absolute catastrophe we are living through at the moment. But let’s focus on outflanking Dugin, and those around him, and those in our lives who deserve to be outflanked rather than rebutted.

Where I write this from

And I’m not going to be impersonal. I’ll tell us what I know from where I know it. I worked on that bridge, in the grey zone. I left Ukraine before the full-scale invasion because I had read the situation, it turned out, correctly. My father read it correctly too, and advised me in early December 2021 that the invasion was going to happen. He had no access to secret sources. He read the tea leaves and parsed the data. And I judged that the evacuation in the aftermath of a full-scale invasion would be a disaster. So it proved, for the OSCE. I worked from the OSCE office in Dnipro from 2018 to 2022, covering Zaporizhzhia and the surrounding oblasts, watching the Russian imperial apparatus being assembled.

I’m now in the information space what I would call a pseudo-combatant. And I take that word literally enough to register that someday my work might be noticed. I tell you all of this so that you will know I’m writing from a position of personal stake, not from a position of intellectual entertainment. The discipline matters because I have lived inside the rooms the apparatus operates in. And the disciplines of the framework, the Code of Positive Trolls, the symmetric ethical instrument I’ll introduce in chapter three and explore in chapter twelve, are not academic instruments. They are the disciplines I’ve used to keep my own mind from being captured in the same rooms.

This book is, in a real sense, the manual I wish I had been given when I crossed the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in 2015 and started reading what the apparatus was pouring out of occupied Luhansk every day.

So I’ll leave it at that for this week.

Continued from:

First in series:

It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do

For six months now I have been training a neural network to build the training data for a local language model. The model’s job, when it is ready, will be to read wartime information and sort it the way I do: into Disinfolklore, Infolklore, and Neutral. I have been working extremely hard on this and the progress has been remarkable.

One challenge sits under everything. We are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce.

I developed both concepts, starting from the propaganda that flooded Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine from 2015 onwards. Disinfolklore is the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds. It works on their intentions, their motivations, their attitudes and, importantly, their moods, without their ever knowing. Infolklore is its opposite: the tale that feeds the well we all who listen daily to @Volya4UA on Twitter spaces drink from instead of poisoning it. Most of us were together in the Mriya Report days, and while you were watching the war I was developing these ideas from the very material we all looked at each day.

Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy. Everything we hear from Strelkov will do: we are going to kill you all, basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. We have spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes. Even, and Ming will appreciate this, P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster.

Great thanks to James and Wendy for hosting Decoding Disinfolklore every Wednesday. We’ve been going now for fourteen months every week!

Three sources lit the instrument up.

The first was written by a friend of the show. John Spencer jointly wrote the definitive account of the battle for Kyiv, a nine-thousand-word study. The moment I fed it in, the model recognised it as the best match for Infolklore it had seen.

The second is a channel that still publishes every day: RIA Melitopol, now RIA Pivden, working out of Zaporizhzhia city while Melitopol is temporarily occupied.

The third is Volya. In particular Will and M’ockers. In particular M’ockers, who wears her archetype on her moniker. Her whole method is: well, that will teach you to invade Ukraine. It is the complete opposite of the dark well.

So a couple of weeks ago I recorded one of the Volya shows and put it through the method properly. It was the episode where the tanker fella told the whole history of the alumina campaign which his fellow Tanker Fella @realLangerDan had begun. And I am not really writing about that campaign here. I am writing about the pattern he was describing: a small group of people moving together, creating a great campaign, and the campaign moving monsters.

The Trita pattern

That pattern has a name. Most of us in the pro-Ukraine space carry an archetypal model of how the world works, and it works by the small person being victorious. There is another pattern, the Vritra pattern, the serpent who holds the waters back and always wins. Both patterns live in every Indo-European language culture. Celtic, Armenian, Iranian, Indic. In England it is St George and the dragon. In India and Iran the hero is sometimes called Trita, and every Hollywood happy ending is the Trita pattern working out.

It is not mysterious. You do not have to have read about Trita. You just carry the pattern. Most of us on the pro-Ukraine side recognised from the very beginning that Ukraine was going to win, because there is no other choice. There is not a world in which Russia wins. Our certainty through the long struggle becomes clearer when one reads about the Trita pattern, which I came across in the work of one of the foremost Indo-European specialists, Bruce Lincoln, while researching Disinfolklore.

So here is my analysis of what the tanker fella and everyone on that show were doing that particular day.

On day one of the full-scale invasion, one man posted one question. Why is our country still shipping alumina to Russia when there is a war on? Nobody important answered him. He just tweeted, like all of us small people do, into the blackness. Three years later there was an investigative journalist on the story, more than thirty MEPs signing declarations, a government investigation and a vote in the European Parliament. And a couple of weeks ago the show told the story in its own words. The first line of the episode was the best summary anyone could write. “It’s amazing what regular people can do, isn’t it?”

The moment I heard that, I knew I had my perfect case study.

The two acts of naming

As all of you know, I study wartime stories. As all of us do. We have become experts in it. I had to laugh this week when M’ockers chimed in with “did you see that?” about some particular explosion somewhere, and the tanker fella was able to describe it immediately. This is the kind of knowledge most of our friends in the real world would balk at. They have no idea any of this is going on.

I have spent years building a method for reading these stories. The method has a simple engine: two acts of naming.

The first act: name the story. Not the topic, the story. Wartime information runs on story patterns far older than any of us. Some are older than writing. When you name the pattern correctly, the noise drops away and you can see what the piece of content is actually doing.

The second act: proof it. Take the conduct the story carries and hold it against the standard our grandparents wrote down after 1945. The UN Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Law of the Sea, the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Story plus standard gives you a verdict. Either the tale feeds the well we all drink from, and I call it Infolklore. Or it poisons the well, and I call that Disinfolklore. Or it is neither, and the method says so and moves on.

When I teach a computer to do this automatically, this is the structure I give it. It loves it.

First act: Trita against Vritra

Start with the alumina story, because it fits one of the oldest patterns we have. In the Rig Veda, the oldest long text in our whole language family, there is a serpent called Vritra. His name means “the coverer.” He coils around the waters and holds them back. The rivers stop. The world dries. He produces nothing. He only withholds. Against him the tradition sets a hero. In the oldest layer of the story that hero is Trita, which simply means “third”: after Manu, the human, and Yama, the twin, comes the third brother, the younger one, the one nobody bet on. He has no army. He frees the waters anyway. And the seven rivers of ancient India run.

The campaign story has the same shape. A flow that should move was being held. Not the alumina, which flowed freely, too freely. What was being held back was the truth about where it went, and the sanction that truth demanded. Around the flow sat a coil of reassurances. Don’t worry, it’s only for tin cans. Don’t touch it, the jobs. There’s an investigation, wait for the investigation. A hundred days and counting. That is the Vritra conduct. Nothing created. Everything covered.

Then the third brother turns up. One tanker watcher with a tweet. Then a website. Then a handful of listeners. Then M’ockers and her enthusiasm for the campaign from the very beginning. Then journalists, the Irish Times and the OCCRP, who found the receiving smelters’ military contracts. Then the public lobbying register, which anyone can read at lobbying.ie and which showed the scale of the pressure from the other side. Then thirty MEPs.

The campaign called its own method “polite persistence.” I cannot improve on that name. It is exactly how the third brother fights. He does not become a serpent to beat a serpent. He keeps asking for the waters until the waters move.

Second act: proof it against the standard

This is where the campaign shines, and I do not think we even notice it ourselves while it is going on.

Someone said on air: you have to have a solid argument, you have to base it on facts. That is the first mark of the bright side. Fabrication is the serpent’s tool, never the third brother’s. The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ethical discipline. We do not get anywhere by lying.

Then somebody (@willthiel) in the community pointed the campaign at the Genocide Convention. I think that was Heather, as ever just behind the scenes, suggesting it to M’ockers. The duty of every country to prevent genocide arises as soon as it becomes aware it is involved. A group of ordinary listeners, on a medium most of our friends do not even know exists, reached for the post-1945 legal order as their spine. Not for a conspiracy theory. Not for rage. For the charter world our grandparents built. In my method, that is precisely what separates the two kinds of story. The verdict writes itself. This is Infolklore, and it is anchor-grade Infolklore.

There was one more line in that segment that bears repeating. You don’t need to be well-funded. You don’t need a big lobby group. You just need people. The old Indo-European world had a word for the power that gathers in a community when it acts rightly. Our cousins in the Pacific still use it. Mana. That sentence is what mana sounds like in an Irish accent.

The troll under the bridge

Inside the campaign story sat a smaller, nastier pattern, and the show displayed it perfectly. The jobs line: touch this export and the jobs are at risk. Every folklore tradition in Europe knows this figure. It is the troll under the bridge. He does not own the bridge. He did not build it. He just sits at the crossing and demands a toll. The toll here was silence. Leave the export alone or your neighbours lose their livelihoods.

The method asks one question of every toll. Is it fair? This one was not. And Volya answered it, not by shouting, with facts again. Over half the output going to a single buyer whose war economy must eventually collapse. Guinea planning its own refineries upstream. Dell leaving Limerick overnight in 2009 because somewhere else was cheaper. In other words, the real threat to those jobs is dependency itself. You do not pay the troll. You show the bridge-crossers the toll is a lie.

The lifeboats

Now the moment in the episode that delighted me most, and it lasted more than a minute. One of the tanker watchers described something he had noticed across many strikes on shadow-fleet tankers. The Ukrainians always leave the lifeboat untouched. The bright orange boat and its launch ramp, always clear, so the crew can get off. Then he named the standard: “they know how to respect international law and the law of the sea.” Then Will gave his verdict: “good on them.”

He said all this about ships actively helping the Russian war effort, and he praised the restraint anyway. That is my entire Disinfolklore method performed by instinct, by non-lawyers, live on air, by someone who has probably never read a word of my work. Name the conduct. Proof it against the law. Give the verdict, even when the target is your enemy’s shipping. Especially then. Ukraine’s discipline is a story that feeds the well. Will’s telling of it feeds the well twice.

Two from the Russian side

Two quick ones from the Russian side of the episode, because the show handled both correctly.

Solovyov complained that Ukrainian strikes have plunged the Russian population into hysteria. M’ockers caught the trick immediately: he does not care that Russia has done exactly this to Ukrainian families for years. The old name for this move is accusation in a mirror. You charge your victim with your own crimes. It is one of the most dangerous patterns in the whole catalogue, because it is how atrocities get pre-justified. The counter is exactly what the show did. Hold up the mirror’s frame and say plainly whose reflection is in it.

Then Putler’s fuel meeting. He insisted there is no fuel crisis, then spent an hour ordering people to fix it. Meanwhile veterans in one district were promised a one-time bonus of 10,000 roubles, and the payment was cancelled because there was no money in the budget. Wartime Russia runs on a story pattern I call the Merciful Sovereign: the ruler whose care for his people is boundless and whose word makes things so, like in all the fairy tales that were read to us, if we were lucky enough to have someone to read them. An empty shelf refutes Putler better than any editorial. Mercy that exists only on Veterans Day posters is not mercy. A sovereign who denies the crisis he is commanding people to fix is not sovereign over very much. The show put the two images side by side and let them detonate. That is the right craft.

One caution for our own side

A method that only ever convicts the other side is not a method. It is a mirror of our own. So here is the one moment where my instrument declines to bless us. Talking about politicians who abstained, the show wondered aloud: were there Russian threats? The question stayed a question. But the shape of the move is: loud support proves a guilty conscience. That reasoning can never be falsified. I have a corpus of 10,000 propaganda items from occupied Luhansk, and that shape is in every one of them. So the method’s verdict on that minute of the show was: not poison, nothing fabricated, but not the bright side either. Unproven. Neutral. Set it down and return to the facts, which were doing all the work anyway. The abstention record is public. The lobbying register is public. The waters move on facts.

I flag it precisely because the rest of the episode proofs so well. The verdicts on the campaign, the lifeboats and the mirror are worth something because this one was not free.

And one last thing the method did: it left most of the episode alone. Elmo the cat coming through the cat flap is not Infolklore or Disinfolklore. He is a cat. The banter, the coffee, the lifeboat anecdote, the instrument reads all of that as Neutral and passes over it in silence. A method that codes everything is not an instrument. It is a hammer. The silences are how you know the verdicts are real.

So that is what the two acts of naming heard in one ordinary episode, of the hundreds that have been produced. A three-thousand-year-old serpent story enacted and won by regular people. A troll’s toll refused with facts. The law of the sea applied on instinct. A mirror caught mid-trick. A sovereign’s mercy weighed against an empty shelf. One caution for our own side. And a cat.

The bright-side stories in these recordings, the ones that proof clean against the standard, are precious. They are the material we need to teach both people and machines to tell the two wells apart. And clean examples of the bright well are far rarer than you would think. In that one show, where the archetype is enacted rather than narrated, there were at least 45 to 60 codable units. In an earlier show I fed in, Will was telling the tale of the Russian general shot in a lift while visiting his mistress, and he interjected that you could say the man died of a lack of family values. That is perfect Infolklore wrapping. It is what Volya does every day, what all of you do, and what I do to a very small extent.

The second episode: we are the ocean

Here is another episode I ran through the method, and some of you will remember it because it was only a couple of days ago. I think Yeni was definitely there.

There is a proverb our two warring neighbours share. Each of us is a drop in the ocean. In Russia it means: I am insignificant, I can do nothing. In Ukraine, as the Madyar’s Birds team put it on their page last week, and as Volya read out on air, it means the opposite. Together we make millions of drops. We are the ocean. Same words. Same image. Two entirely different spells cast with us.

Most wartime stories come at us alone, and we have to reconstruct what the bright version or the dark version would have looked like. Here the two versions arrive side by side in the same nine words. The Russian casting installs powerlessness. You are a drop, so stay home, pay your taxes, look away from the window when the refinery burns. The Ukrainian casting installs the opposite. You are a drop. And so is she. And so is he. And together you are the thing that ships cannot argue with.

One of us added the coda live on air, and I wrote it down with delight. This is from M’ockers.

“The ocean is very corrosive. There is not a lot that stands up to seawater.”

The word for the power that gathers in a community acting rightly is mana. I used it about the alumina campaign, which incidentally carries the M-N-, that phonosemantic frame, in its own name.

Here it is again, and notice where each casting puts it. The Russian version locates all the power in the state and none in the person. The Ukrainian version locates it in joined hands. When I proof the two against the post-1945 standard, the verdict is not close. One casting serves a machine that needs its people inert. The other built the protests the same episode described. Huge crowds, the anthem, and then everyone picking up every piece of litter so the square is left spotless. Democracy performed so cleanly it confuses Muscovy. The Russists watched those protests and thought: revolution. They could not read them, because in their casting of the proverb crowds only gather when the system has failed. In the Ukrainian casting, the crowd is the system working. The show illuminated this.

Displaying the dark well without drinking from it

For several minutes the show did something that looks quite risky, and did it exactly right. It read out at length the prison writings of Igor Girkin, convicted for MH17, the man who helped light this war in 2014. His latest lament: Ukraine’s strikes are clear, logical, effective and unstoppable, our leaders are mediocrities, and without urgent measures the damage to our military economy will be ominous.

Reading out the enemy’s words is dangerous work. Repeat a story often enough, even to mock it, and some of it sticks. So the Disinfolklore method asks hard questions of any segment like that. Why display the payload at all? Who is holding the frame while it plays?

Here is what I heard. M’ockers held the frame the entire time. She said the quiet part out loud: he is a mass murderer and we should not really give him a platform. The reason his lamentation earns one anyway is that he is impotent, and his misery documents the failure of the machine from inside it. Then she corrected his falsehoods as they went past. He claims Russia has not been fighting for real. She answers: Russia has been fighting for real since 2022, they are simply not the army they think they are. He claims massive strikes on Ukraine’s military industry. She answers: every time they hit a shopping centre or a Nova Poshta depot, they call it a NATO facility. The payload never travelled one sentence without its correction riding alongside.

And you would not believe how rare this is. It is completely absent from the New York Times and Washington Post articles that repeat the Russist side but do not refute it. That both-sides habit actually serves to brainwash people. What M’ockers does is refute in the moment, so the correction happens in real time and the listeners finish the job. I know Alan and Chuck and Will are open about part of the reason they do this: to give all of us lines we can use in our offices, at parties, at school, wherever anyone comes to us with Ukraine questions. We are well briefed. We are like ministers in a government. Whatever someone comes up with, we have an answer.

There is a lazy story that floats around our own side, not Moscow’s, that Girkin is a seer. The one truth-teller in Moscow. The military genius who would have won the war if only the fools had listened. That story is a troll, and Lexicon dismantled it with a single remembered fact. She is on fire these days. If he is such a genius, why was he moaning in 2014 that he could not find even a thousand men willing to rise up with him against Ukraine? A seer might have read that empty recruiting table and understood what it said about the whole project. He did not. Ten years on, the penny still has not dropped. And when the conversation drifted towards calling him merely a critic of corruption, Will quietly put the conviction back on the table: no, he was indicted and convicted over MH17. All of us know that. We need reminding at just the right moment.

The same way we need reminding whenever someone wonders whether a Nova Poshta depot was carrying something for the army, or whether a McDonald’s stood near a military facility. I had to reply to some human or machine today claiming exactly that. It does not matter. Article 51 of the UN Charter gives Ukraine the right, once its strikes are proportionate, to hit Russia anywhere: in Ukraine, in Siberia, anywhere Russia’s war machine sits. Russia, prosecuting an illegal war under the very charter it signed, has no right to strike Ukraine anywhere. No Russian strike in Ukraine is ever legitimate. So “that’s not a military facility beside that McDonald’s in Kyiv” is not the answer. You don’t refute. You outflank.

Some people see in Girkin a genuine dissident who went too far. I contend he is something else. He is a security-services character, like Dugin, whose role is to voice the permitted critique. The shape of his complaints across a decade tells you. In March 2022, with the invasion already a catastrophe, his line was: this is a disaster, we must fight more brutally. It is always that. It is never: this is a disaster, we should withdraw and save ourselves. The critique walks up to every line except the one that matters, and stops. Volya used the right phrase for it almost en passant: he has been used as a pressure valve. A valve looks like an opening. Its function is to keep the boiler intact. The method names this pattern the captured critic. The licensed grumbler whose fury makes the system look debated while guarding its one non-negotiable premise: that the war itself must go on. So when we enjoy his misery, and I do enjoy it, we should be clear about what we are reading. M’ockers, when she reads it, does exactly that. He is not a prophet. He is a gauge on the side of the boiler, useful precisely because the machine lets him tell us the pressure.

The whole segment, payload, frame, corrections, and the listeners’ dismantling of the seer troll, is a masterclass. This is how you display the dark well without drinking from it.

The judge, the cemetery, and the discipline

Last time the moment that delighted me most was the tanker watcher praising Ukraine for never touching the lifeboats and citing the law of the sea, one of the most epic pieces of international law humanity has ever passed. It took decades to get signed, and it codified centuries of practice. This episode produced that moment’s big brother.

This week brought the strikes on the Wildberries warehouses, with the usual chorus crying war crime. One of the regular listeners answered by doing something almost nobody on the internet ever does. He ran the actual legal test, step by step, out loud. Is the target military? He walked the evidence: the ownership change after the 2024 merger brought the company close to the Kremlin, the shipping policies changed, the network carries components that only belong on weaponised drones, and it is a major channel supplying the war. Is the harm proportionate? Strike some warehouses at night and, in his words, you are killing virtually nobody relative to the value. Then the comparison the critics never make: the same week, Russia put three anti-ship missiles into a Turkish grain carrier near Odesa and killed six crew. And his verdict, delivered like a judge who knows he can be appealed: if I’m the war-crimes evaluator here, I’ll allow it under the Geneva and Hague conventions.

You can disagree with his conclusion. That is fine. What you cannot deny is the conduct. He stated the opposing argument fairly, tested the facts, cited the standard and showed his working. That is the second act of naming done in the wild, at full length. When I say the Volya community has been practising my method for years without the name, this is what I mean. And of course it is not just my method. My method is influenced by listening to Volya.

Now the third treasure, and the most uncomfortable one, because it teaches the discipline that keeps the method from becoming a flag. A Russist propaganda crew went to a cemetery to film a glorification piece over the war dead. One local woman wrecked it. Our Putin got us involved in a war, she said. They did not come for your men, they came for our men. Her wounded nephew had to buy his own body armour because the issued kit can be poked through with a nail. It’s a drone war, he told her, and we’ve not seen a single enemy soldier. She stood in front of the graves and called them what the state will not: this is our future lying here. Truth spoken at cost, into a camera that wanted lies.

And then, in the same breath, the same woman turned to complaining about Uzbek migrants and women who dare to cover their hair. Sixty seconds and she went from witness to racist.

So what is the verdict on her? The method’s answer is that there is no verdict on her. Verdicts attach to pieces of speech, never to people. And her testimony is harder than it first looks. The war she is critiquing is an unlawful war. When she importunes the Russian authorities to provide better body armour, she is asking them to prosecute a genocidal war more effectively. In my book that is Disinfolklore, or at least that is how I teach the computer to recognise it. This is the same problem we have with the Navalny crew. If your project is to make Russia’s war machine less corrupt, you are on the wrong side of this war and the wrong side of international law. Her racism proofs the other way too. The moment we start certifying people instead of proofing their speech, we have a flag, not a method.

The same discipline touched our own side this episode, so I will keep last week’s habit and say where. There were moments when the delight ran past the targets and warmed itself on the manner of a killing, or wrote off an entire people as selfish by nature. Nothing poisonous. Nothing invented. Nothing all of us don’t half believe. But not the bright well either, and the instrument stays silent rather than blessing it. I flag it for the same reason as last week. The verdicts on the ocean, the evaluator and the cemetery are worth something because these ones are not free.

And what the method left alone: the cats, the coffee, the numbers read out each morning like a small liturgy. Neutral, and recorded as exactly that. And what it found: a proverb that carries two opposite spells, and a community that knows which one it lives by. A prisoner’s lament displayed at length and never once allowed to stand uncorrected. A listener felling the seer myth with one fact from 2014. Thank you, Lexicon. A vernacular judge running the Geneva test out loud, in real time. A woman in a cemetery who was witness and warning in the same minute. Babushkas sweeping up market glass while the Iskanders are still slamming in, still dying under billboards that say Unbreakable. A community that shames its own members for posting anything that could cost a battery its position, while the other side races to publish its own damage for the world’s analysts to harvest.

Two episodes, and the finding is the same both times. This show has been brewing Infolklore for years. It has an Infolklorist in chief and did not know the word. The archive is a library of the bright well, recorded daily. I would love to read all of it and make it machine-readable.

We are the ocean. The ocean is very corrosive. Ask the boiler how the pressure is doing.

The actor, not the philosopher

Last week I used the Cheburashka example to demonstrate that Dugin is not a serious philosopher. He writes earnest texts about a cartoon character. Kant did not write about Mickey Mouse. Plato did not publish solemn treatises on Asterix. This is a Russist state operation, and taking it seriously is what the operation is for.

The spine of the book I have written is one sentence, and you will be glad to know I will not repeat it every two thousand words. It simply operates underneath everything else. Dugin is an artificial creation. He is an actor, like Putin. They are actors whose role is to justify repeated, genocidal, murderous enterprises and to give them a patina of philosophy and respectability.

There is a temptation, especially for the well-trained academic reader and the experienced policy reader, to treat the writings of a man with a doctorate as though they constituted philosophy. And this is where our security services, our militaries and our journalists are, speaking generally, outclassed. The Russian milbloggers are linguists. They studied combat propaganda and linguistic technique as part of their degrees, as Zarina Zabriski has documented. Dugin did too. Facing them is a journalist who went to J-school at Columbia and learned about objectivity, this way to report and that way to report. But to understand what the other side is doing, you need linguistics.

The temptation is to assume that anyone who writes books needs to be answered with books. That anyone who claims tradition must be argued with on its own terms. That anyone who has appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show or in Foreign Affairs must be a serious interlocutor and therefore seriously rebutted. The temptation, in short, is to engage him.

Engaging him is the failure mode. It is precisely what the Russist apparatus around him is designed to elicit. They have a vector for every mind. Every Western intellectual who sits down to refute Foundations of Geopolitics, every analyst who carefully outlines the architecture of the fourth political theory, every podcast guest who patiently dismantles his account of the multipolar world, is doing the apparatus’s marketing. The apparatus does not need its philosopher to convince anyone outside Russia. It needs Western interlocutors to engage him as a philosopher. The moment they do, the apparatus has won the only thing it wants from the West. Engagement transmits the archetypes the apparatus needs in circulation. Engagement is the harm.

The opposite move, the right move, is to outflank. To go underneath the figure and name what the Russist apparatus around him actually is: a security-services-built justification machine, of which he is one component, deployed in the wise-counsellor archetype to dress mass killing in respectability. Stating this once and then proceeding will, I hope, free all of us from the trap of feeling we must keep refuting him. I will not refute him. I will go around him.

Analyst Zarina Zabriski has documented in detail what she calls Russia’s cynical use of Eurasianism as imperial strategy, and its patsy, the Russian intelligence operative Dugin. She has been doing this work for years, and she is doing the work of her life in Kherson now. May God protect her. I have written about the actor Dugin since 2022, across some sixty posts, using words like sorcerer, know-nothing, patsy, intelligence operative, fake Orthodox religious philosopher. Then once, in a moment of clarity I cannot now improve upon: Actor. Philosopher of Ruscism. That last one is the phrase I want us to keep.

The man is an actor in the dramaturgical sense, playing the role of a philosopher in a security-services-staged play whose dramaturg-in-chief was, for many years, the political technologist and former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, a theatre-studies graduate who got his first break as a bodyguard for Khodorkovsky, staged the theatre of post-Soviet Russian politics. In the structural reading my book builds, Surkov is the apparatus’s director. Dugin is the apparatus’s wise counsellor. Putler plays the sovereign. Each plays the role the apparatus has cast him to play. Neither controls the apparatus he serves. The apparatus is the production.

Prigozhin funded the bot farms and the Wagner contractors. Thank you, Nelly, for that. Margarita Simonyan reads the lines from the Russia Today anchor desk. Sergei Lavrov translates the lines into diplomatic register. Bezsonov-style propagandists under twenty different aliases run the daily liturgy on Telegram, created by the Russian security services. Each is a specialised component. The apparatus is the whole. Dugin’s specialism is producing the long-form metaphysical alibi that lets Russian-speaking audiences interpret the apparatus’s serial enterprises, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, Syria, the full-scale invasion, the Wagner deployments across the Sahel, as destiny rather than crime.

The British government took the same view, formally, when in 2025 it added Alexander Dugin to the United Kingdom’s sanctions list, alongside the Russist Ministry of Defence’s media front, the Telegram channel Rybar, the Russist Fund for the Support and Protection of Compatriots Abroad, PravFund, the Centre for Geopolitical Expertise (there is an oxymoron) and the pro-Russist propaganda sites Golos.eu and Euromore.eu. Italy’s parliament took similar steps the following month. Sanctioning a thinker because of his thoughts would be a free-speech outrage. Sanctioning a security-services-deployed influence operator, alongside the propaganda channels he operates beside, is intelligence-led action against an apparatus. It is the latter the UK did.

I have read his English-language books, the ones the Western audience knows him by: Foundations of Geopolitics, The Fourth Political Theory, Putin vs Putin, and the running output of his Telegram and Twitter channels. I am not engaging them on their own terms, because the point of the book is to outflank, not rebut. But I have read him sufficiently to recognise what they are, who he is, and who is writing his content. My opinion, which I am legally allowed to hold, is that they are the standing script-work of a security-services-deployed archetype operator.

I listed the apparatus’s enterprises in a sentence above. I did not pause to argue about whether they were enterprises. I did not stop to debate whether Georgia in 2008 was a provocation, or whether Crimea was spontaneous. I listed them. That is the outflanking voice. It refuses the apparatus’s debate bait and proceeds with the substantive work.

Next episode:

Continued from:

I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galaxy, such as MAGA, Iran, Ruschia, Italy, wherever. I am going to read three today.

Then I will start another new series: Outflank Dugin. Don’t Rebut. Outflanking enemies in the information war - the battle to free our minds from manipulative Disinfolklore-borne brain-washing memes. That is one of the main tactics I deploy. It’s why, for example, I go as far back and deeply into the past 6,000 years of Indo-European culture as possible. When arch manipulators like Modi, Putler, Donald or Dugin (or even local characters in our own lives deploy mysticism and superstition to gain power, one way to understand what they’re doing and to defeat them is: Outflank. Don’t Rebut. This new series gives everyone the tools to do this.

1. The Word That Wasn’t There

I am talking about a word that was not there in the context of Russia-occupied Ukraine. I would like us also to think about the word that was never there while Muscovy was occupying most of Europe after 1945. It is the same phenomenon. Many people did not see it in the context of Russia-occupied Luhansk. They also did not see it in the context of that massive military occupation of Czechoslovakia, Poland and all the rest of it between 1945 and 1990. And I include myself in that, until relatively recently.

For eight years, the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk was missing from almost everyone’s mouth. The word is occupation. It was missing from occupiers and Ukrainians alike. This episode teaches us to read the silence. The thing that is not said is sometimes the operation.

Here is a strange way to catch a disinformation operation. Do not listen for the loudest word. Listen for the word that should be there and is not.

The setting is Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, from 2014 to 2018. These are the years before the full-scale invasion. Russia has taken a chunk of the region and stood up a fake country there. It is the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, the LFR. I spent time on the contact line at the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, doing monitoring work for the OSCE. That is the European security body that oversaw the so-called ceasefire. I read thousands of items of propaganda during those years. The thing I want us to notice is what nobody was saying.

Listen to the occupier’s own outlet, the Lugansk Information Centre, in February 2017. The LFR, it reports, “demands”. Demands. It demands “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as it calls it, on a contractual basis. This means the power to conclude contracts.” Read that again. Notice the word that is not in it. Two parties. A contract. Coexistence. This is the vocabulary of one state talking to another. It is not the vocabulary of an occupier and the people under its boot.

Or here is the same outlet in 2016, on the LFR’s so-called border guards. They patrol 274 kilometres of the so-called border with Russia. A border. A state has borders. A fake republic is dressing itself every single day in the costume of a country. That is the operation’s foundational move. It works by what it leaves out. Say republic. Say border. Say minister, parliament, ten thousand times. Never once say occupation. And the missing word starts to feel like it was never true.

Now here is the part that should stop us. The other side left the word out too. Look at how Ukraine’s own news agency, Ukrinform, described the fighting in January 2018. “Events in the anti-terrorist operation, the ATO, zone.” The ATO, the anti-terrorist operation, was the official Ukrainian name for the war for years. For all the years I was in Ukraine. Think about what that name quietly does. It frames a foreign invasion and occupation as a counter-terrorism problem. It becomes something a country handles inside its own borders, against criminals. It is a true description of a real fight. But it is not the sentence. The sentence is: a foreign army is occupying our land. The word still is not there.

You can watch the word arrive in slow motion. In 2017, the phrase “temporarily occupied territories” starts creeping into the Ukrainian wires. In 2018, Ukraine renames the war from the ATO to the JFO, the Joint Forces Operation. Still an operation. Still not repelling an occupier. If you measured across the whole archive of ten thousand propaganda items, the occupier’s outlets called it an occupation almost never. Under four per cent. And the Ukrainian side climbs from about three per cent at the start to a third by 2018. The word everyone now uses without thinking was, at the time, the word almost no one reached for.

I will give you the cleanest measurement I have. It is myself. I studied international law at Cambridge. I did monitoring work on that very contact line. And I did not call them occupiers. Not in my own head, until the tanks rolled in 2022. I was inside the frame they built. That is not a confession. It is data. If the frame can hold a stranger who has read law and stood at the bridge, it is a very good frame.

In my framework, I would call this Disinfolklore. It is folklore-like storytelling built to capture you rather than shelter you. Usually we hunt it by the characters it deploys. The Nazi bogeyman. The merciful sovereign. The saintly grandmother at the checkpoint. Those are loud. This one is silent. The archetype here is not even a character at all. It is a shape with a hole in the middle. Like a shell hole in a fairy-tale kindergarten, of the kind Victoria Amelina wrote about.

So let me give us the tool, because it is a small one and we can carry it everywhere. Call it reading the absence. When we meet any account of a contested thing, a war, a firing, a closed factory, a vanished neighbour, let us not only weigh the words that are present. Ask the quieter question. What word would honest description put here, and is it missing? Who benefits from its absence? A border instead of a front line? An operation instead of an invasion? A republic instead of a seizure?

Here is what seeing it gives us. It is the only reason any of this matters. Once you can hear the missing word, you cannot unhear it. The silence stops being neutral. It starts pointing, at every turn, on every side, to the thing someone needed you not to name. The frame only works while the word stays gone. The moment you supply it yourself, the operation is over. It took us collectively eight years and a full-scale invasion to say occupation out loud. We do not have to wait that long next time. We can learn to hear the hole in the sentence and put the word back ourselves.

I think about the reporting this week on Venezuela, and the occupation by the United States of Venezuela.

2. The Republic of Liturgy

This piece is about how a fake state’s ordinary rituals made occupation feel like the weather. A parade. A foreign minister. A children’s hospital transfer. And it is about what naming the liturgy hands back to us.

Here is a small thing that could stop us. In the spring of 2017, an outlet called the Lugansk Information Centre put out a notice that the OSCE would be coming to a parade. The Lugansk Information Centre is the in-house news agency of Russia’s fake republic in eastern Ukraine. The OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In those years it ran an unarmed special monitoring mission along the front line. The observers were people like me, whose whole job was to watch and report neutrally. Here is what the fake republic’s spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Marochko, said about them on the 10th of April 2017. “They said that they will monitor the event.”

The event was a Victory Day parade. It is the most sacred date in the Soviet calendar, the 9th of May. It was staged in occupied Luhansk by an entity that does not exist in international law. And the monitors allegedly agreed to come and watch. I want us to see how ordinary that is. It is not dramatic. It is not a battle. A parade, with observers RSVPing. That is the whole trick of this episode.

This is about archetypal Disinfolklore. It is disinformation that works the way folklore works, by archetype and repetition rather than by argument. An archetype is just a familiar character, or a familiar shape, that a story slots into without us noticing. The one we are reading today I call the fake-state liturgy. Liturgy means the ritual you repeat. The parade. The holiday. The ministry doing its dull rounds. The tell, the thing that gives it away, is not the lie. The tell is the boredom. The fake state performs competent, tender, normal government.

Watch it perform diplomacy. In February 2017, the same outlet quoted the republic’s acting foreign minister, Natalia Nikonorova, talking to the Russian news agency TASS. In her words, she spoke of “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as they call it, on a contractual basis.” A foreign minister of a thing that is not a country, conducting foreign affairs on the record, in the register of any chancellery in Europe. You read it and your eyes slide right past it, because it sounds exactly like statecraft.

Watch it perform care, which is the most disarming face of all. An LFR-controlled newspaper in occupied Stakhanov reported, in April 2016, that the LFR Ministry of Health had transferred sick children for treatment. Stakhanov is not the town’s name. Kadiivka is its proper name. Now, those children are probably real, and we should want sick children to be treated. But notice the sentence is doing two things at once. It is moving children, and it is conferring existence. A Ministry of Health did this. Repeat that phrase enough. Ministry of Health. Ministry of Interior. Department of War. State TV and Radio Broadcasting Company, with its own Director General. A town quietly renamed from Krasnodon to Sorokyne. And the republic stops being a claim you could agree with. It becomes the water you swim in. In the context of America, a republic stops being a republic and becomes a monarchy.

That is what liturgy does. Not one ritual. The whole repeated calendar. The parade. The press briefing. The hospital transfer. The school graduation. So statehood is not asserted. It is simply assumed, every single day, in the grammar of ordinary news.

Here is the measure of how well it worked. This is what makes it evidence and not just a story I am telling you. I went through this whole archive, 2014 to 2018. The occupiers’ own outlets almost never reached for the word occupation to describe what they were doing. Somewhere between zero and four times in a hundred. Even the Ukrainian side only climbed from about three in a hundred at the start to about a third in 2018.

So what does seeing this hand back to us? Just this, and it is plain, not very grand. Once we can name the liturgy as liturgy, the spell loosens. The parade is a parade staged by an occupier. The Ministry of Health is an occupier moving children. Forcible transfer. Genocide. And it is conferring itself a name in the same breath. You get the word back. You say occupation on the first day, not the thousandth.

The opposite of Disinfolklore is the work of seeing clearly and naming truly. We call it Infolklore. It does not need a counter-parade or a louder anthem. It needs only this. When the fake ministry issues its next dull, competent, tender little notice, we notice the boredom and we say what it actually is. That is a thing any one of us can do from anywhere today. The water only stays invisible while no one names it.

3. One Drum, Many Hands

The fake Luhansk Folk’s Republic banged one siege drum. You are besieged. The republic protects you. It banged that drum across every outlet at once. You only see the coordination, and get your agency back, when you line the outlets up side by side.

Here is a small experiment we can run with our own eyes. Take a single news headline. Then go looking for it on a second outlet, and a third, and a fourth. Watch the same words come back on the same day in the same shape. Not similar words. The same drum, struck by many hands.

Let me show you the drum first, because it is wonderfully boring. On the 8th of March 2017, the Lugansk Information Centre published this. The Lugansk Information Centre is Luginfo for short, the press service of Russia’s fake Luhansk Folk’s Republic. It published: “Kiev forces violate ceasefire 11 times over 24 hours. Kiev forces shelled LPR people’s militia positions 11 times over 24 hours, the republic’s defence authorities said.” That is the whole story. A number, a direction, and a reassuring little phrase. The republic’s defence authorities.

Now here is the thing. That is not one story. That is a metronome. The week before it was 18 times. Another week 13. Another 11 again. Same headline frame, same source. Just like Donald’s on-off Iran war until the land invasion. The republic’s defence authorities said. A different number dropped in like a date on a calendar. You are not being told what happened on the contact line. You are being told, over and over, in a rhythm. You are besieged. And the republic shields you.

This is an old, deep archetype. The scholar Georges Dumézil was a Frenchman who spent his life mapping the older stories our cultures tell. He noticed that societies keep a special place for the protector, the one who holds the wall while you sleep. It is one of the most loved figures we have. We want a shield. That wanting is exactly the handle a disinformation operation grabs. Disinfolklore is the word I use here. It means folklore-shaped lies that move because they ride an archetype we already trust. It does not invent the besieged feeling. It supplies a shield, and asks us to love the hand that holds it.

But watch what the shield is defending. In June 2016, an outlet calling itself the LFR Ministry of State Security ran the arrest of a Ukrainian journalist, Olga Svorak. The charge, word for word: “the criminal case was opened due to espionage activities to the detriment of LFR’s security.” The security of a thing that is not a country. A made-up republic, with a made-up ministry, jailing a real journalist for endangering the safety of the fiction. The shield is real enough to put someone in a cell.

Think about these so-called elections, too. Consider the idea of elections in Russia. There have never been free and fair elections in Russia. Not in 150 years. Never. Not once. Yet the more times that word is used, the more it works on us. It is a sacred word in most of our cultures, thank God. Its function is to persuade us, in little tiny increments, that there is such a thing as an election that matters in Russia. And in the context of the LFR, the thing the shield defends does not exist.

The drum keeps a beat. By May 2018, the same spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Marochko, on the same outlet, says a Ukrainian unit has arrived. In his words, “their main task is to mine lands along the contact line, carry out provocative shelling, carry out terror acts in neighbouring villages.” Terror acts in your villages, from them. The shield needs a sword on the other side of the wall. So one is supplied every week, on schedule.

Here is what you cannot see from inside any single one of these stories. You only see it when you line the outlets up side by side. Luginfo. The Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of State Security. Or whichever talking heads are on CNN. The coordination is invisible at the level of the story. Each looks like a local report. It is glaring at the level of the pattern. That is the tell. When a worry arrives everywhere at once, in the same shape, on the same day, the worry was not gathered. It was issued.

The same shield can be turned two ways. A genuine warning says: there is shelling, take cover. It wears the very same clothes as the manufactured siege. You cannot tell them apart by how protective they feel. Both feel protective. That is the point. You tell them apart by what the shield is actually defending, and what it asks of you. A real warning hands you agency. Here is the danger. Here is the door. The manufactured one hands you a custodian. Stop looking. The republic has it. Love the hand. One opens your eyes. The other closes them and calls it safety.

So this operation worked. It worked so completely that for years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation until 2022. Not even the careful watchers. The siege drum had done its work. It kept everyone looking at the wall and never at who built it. This is why lining up the outlets is not a clever trick. It is how you get your agency back. I note that ground.news does that. It lines up the outlets and gives us an opportunity to adjudicate between how they represent the news. The drum only governs you while you hear it one beat at a time. Put all the hands in front of you at once. It stops being a siege you are trapped inside. It becomes a thing someone made, on a schedule, for a reason. And a thing made can be set down.

So next time a single worry reaches us from four directions at once, wearing four different faces, do the boring experiment. Put them side by side. There is the speculation about getting rid of the Ukrainian defence minister. There is that guy, Christopher Miller, who spent years chasing mythical Nazis in Ukraine while not mentioning Russia’s Nazis. He is promoting all of this stuff about Fedorov at the moment. There is that guy, Rob Lee, who keeps popping up on my timeline. I thought he was in good faith at the beginning of the war. Yet everything he reports, 99 times out of 100, reflects badly on Ukraine. I do not know whether he is in good faith or not, whether he is doing it on purpose. Or whether he is just psychologically incapable of the self-awareness to understand what he is doing, and the negative vibes he promotes, all in the guise of being a truth-teller.

So the next time a single worry reaches you from four directions at once, wearing four different faces, do the boring experiment. Put them side by side. Find the metronome. That is the operation showing you its hand. The moment you can see the hand, the drum is just a drum.

So that is that. I will come back to those next week. They are quite short and pithy.

Outflanking Dugin — Don’t Rebut

The next thing I wanted to start is something I have been working on for a very long time. It all came out of a tweet I wrote in 2023. The tweet was about outflanking Dugin, not rebutting him. This is one of the keys to the entire method itself, which I have spoken about before. You outflank. You do not rebut. You do not show the picture of the quite fetching French-Russian propagandist when you are trying to criticise her. By showing the picture, you promote her. And just because you wrap that promotion of her picture with a critique, you are keeping the energy of the troll going. So you outflank. You do not rebut.

So this is called Outflanking Dugin: Don’t Rebut. It is a short book about a long apparatus.

Two words in that sentence carry the weight of this book. They will recur on every page. So let me define them before we begin.

The Rashist apparatus is what I will call the apparatus. It is the Russian state’s genocide-justification machine. It is the security services’ built network of operators, channels, archetype-handlers and metaphysical scriptwriters. Its function is to dress repeated genocidal enterprises in respectability, and to industrially export that respectability across borders. The apparatus has been running at industrial scale since at least 2014. That is when Russia’s folklore-archetyped “little green men” and “polite people” began their brutal, genocidal military occupation of parts of Ukraine. The apparatus has done, and continues to do, substantial damage to many countries. By writing this book I hope to help us get our eye in to all the apparatus’s operators, not just to Dugin. Its named senior operators include the man this book is named for, Alexander Dugin. But the apparatus is the whole machine, not any single operator inside it. I will use the word apparatus in this technical sense throughout.

Disinfolklore is the analytical name I gave, on the 15th of February 2023, to the narrative form the apparatus runs on. Disinfolklore is folklore-like archetypes weaponised against rational cognition, democratic alliances, and the integrity of the audience’s mental continuums. The word is a portmanteau. Disinformation married to folklore. The marriage matters. The apparatus’s product is not merely lies, the lies of the surface. Beneath the untruths, the apparatus is reaching for six-thousand-year-old narrative structures. The bridge troll. The wise counsellor. The mother and the maiden. The trickster. The apparatus deploys these archetypes to do cognitive work that ordinary disinformation cannot execute on our mind-screens.

This book takes the reader inside that mechanism. It supplies the instrument with which to counter it. The instrument is a method I call Disinfolklore Analysis. This book proposes a particular way of using it. Not by rebutting the apparatus’s outputs, which transmits them, but by outflanking them, which dispossesses them. The method is twelve tools in a six-element ethical code. It is built from comparative mythology, cognitive psychology, Buddhist ethics, international law, and my seven years of frontline observation in Donbas. Some of that time was spent in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, as a diplomat. That was just as the apparatus had begun to brainwash Ukrainians, using propaganda at a scale, intensity and sophistication more powerful than any used before on any community.

The reader does not need any prior acquaintance with my earlier work to follow this book. Every technical term is introduced from zero, in plain English, with concrete examples, the first time it appears. Every M-N cryptotype. Every meme. Every archetype. Every ancient story. The opening artefact does most of the work the book has to do. Stick with me through chapter one. After that, the apparatus collapses on its own.

Chapter One — The Wise Counsellor Archetype: A Manufactured Philosopher

In January 2026, the man whom the Western press has long described as Russia’s primary philosopher sat down and wrote about a children’s puppet. The puppet’s name was Cheburashka. He is small, brown, round-eyed, with two ears the size of his face. He was conceived by a Soviet children’s writer, Eduard Uspensky, in a story published in 1965. He was animated for television in 1969. Across the former Soviet space, in Russian-speaking households from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, from Mariupol to Minsk to Yerevan, three generations of children have grown up with him. He is, by any sensible measure, a beloved character. He is shy. He is gentle. He is a friend.

In January 2026, the Russian state’s senior philosopher wrote about him. Its primary philosopher. Its most named. Its Tucker-Carlson-interviewed. Its most-translated-into-English. This man chose to publish, on his Telegram channel and his social-media accounts, the following account of who Cheburashka really is.

Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He is a toxic mutant. A demon of the moon. His true name is Shirdbar Shemot Shirtatan, the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the Russian child. He is not a bear. He is not a hare. He is a ruthless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish. He is a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the Russian archetype.

The author of those sentences then continued, in the same artefact. He claimed that the image of Cheburashka was created on the basis of “ancient pentacles, reproducing the symbolic features of the moon demon, Shabart Ashamat Shirtatana.”

But that demon does not exist. The pentacles are imaginary. Invented. The name is created. It is dressed in pseudo-Semitic phonology to look like a recovered ancient demonological etymology. The whole thing is fabricated. The demon. The pentacles. The etymology.

That artefact deserves a moment before we do anything else with it. Three generations of Soviet and post-Soviet children loved that character. He is the country’s Mickey Mouse. The country’s Pingu. The country’s Paddington. He was the mascot of the Russian Olympic team at four Olympic Games. A 2023 live-action film of him sold nine million tickets at the Russian box office and earned its creators around five billion roubles. He is gentle. He is small. He has big ears. He is not very bright. He is precisely the kind of figure a culture invents when it wants to teach children that you are loved even if you are not strong.

This is no fringe figure. Tucker Carlson flew to Moscow in February 2024 to interview him as the most famous political philosopher in Russia. Carlson’s promotional copy called him so dangerous that the Ukrainian government tried to murder him, and so dangerous that Amazon will not sell his books. Steve Bannon has translated him. J. D. Vance’s intellectual circle has cited him. His 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, is taught at the Rashist Academy of the General Staff. And this man, in 2026, sat down at his desk and wrote that Cheburashka is a Hebrew-named moon demon, that he might be Jewish, that he has been sent to destroy the Russian archetype.

If you want a single piece of paper that ends the question of whether Alexander Dugin is a serious philosopher, this is it. I am not going to spend much time in this book rebutting Alexander Dugin. I am going to spend the book outflanking him. By the end, we will have a method for doing so to anyone like him.

There is a single word in that artefact that matters before we do anything else with it. The word is in the closing line. He is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. It is the line itself that matters. Not the demonology. Not the pseudo-Hebrew etymology. Not the anti-Semitism. The line is: I am here to destroy a Russian archetype and replace it with the right one. The clue to the right one is in the rch sound in archetype itself. That is the apparatus’s project, stated by its own senior operator, in his own keyboard-typed words. It is the most important admission in the artefact. Most readers slide past it because they reach for the anti-Semitism.

An archetype, in the sense this book uses the word, is a recognisable narrative role with a deep structural history. It is a cognitive figure the human mind already knows, because it has been carried by stories, songs, rituals and language for thousands of years. Archetypes live in our minds like tuning forks. They are silent until a stimulus at the right frequency strikes them. Then they ring on their own. The bridge troll. The wise old counsellor. The mother and the maiden. The wicked stepmother. The heroic soldier. The sovereign mother. The trickster. These are not stereotypes, which are flat external caricatures one imposes on a real group. They are narrative roles that anyone can be cast into. A person. A country. An institution. A children’s puppet. And the casting is what the apparatus does for a living.

Once an archetype has been activated in the mind, it determines which facts the mind is able to see. Fact-checking does not fix this. The archetypes live deep inside stories much older than any facts. Platform moderation does not counter it. Archetypes do not need platforms to pass between minds. Media literacy does not neutralise an archetype. It entrenches it. The archetype is not a medium. Archetypes are structures immanent in consciousness. The apparatus’s work is at that structural level. This is why it cannot be undone by surface refutation.

Dugin’s last line reads: Cheburashka is sent to destroy the Russian archetype. There is, in his sentence, an existing archetype called Russia. It is a narrative role the word Russia already carries in the audience’s mind. Dugin is announcing the apparatus’s meta-project. It is to destroy the existing archetype of Cheburashka, so that a new one can take its place. The new one is the one the apparatus is installing. It is the apparatus’s preferred Rch archetype. Right. Reich. It is from the same set of words. It is a Russia that is, in the apparatus’s own preferred vocabulary, Tradition with a capital T. A catacomb against the modern world. A civilisational core standing against the demon of the moon and its presumed-Jewish cosmopolitan footmen.

We will return to this. The rex sound. The consonant skeleton in archetype. Monarch. Oligarch. Patriarch. Reich. Right. Writ. It is a powerful cryptotype across the Indo-European language family, and I will come back to it in chapter ten. For now, hear it ringing in archetype. And indeed in Donald’s arch, his triumphal arch.

Dugin’s own work is precisely to redefine the content of the archetype of Russia. Donald’s own work is to redefine the content of the archetype of a republic, a constitutional republic, by installing an arch on the ceremonial axis of that republic. The apparatus’s whole undertaking is, at its deepest structural layer, an archetype-replacement project. Dugin’s specific function in the apparatus is to write the metaphysical material that supplies the new content.

Cheburashka is the test artefact. He is a beloved figure whose existing archetypal content is innocent child, gentle, friend. His new content, in Dugin’s keyboard-typed instruction, is toxic, mutant, rootless, cosmopolitan, possibly Jewish, post-humanist, saboteur of the Rashist child’s innocence and potential. The replacement of the right content of the archetype is happening in front of the reader. The artefact demonstrates the meta-project on the page by performing it on Cheburashka.

This book is the field manual for noticing the replacement of the Reich element in archetypes, as it is implemented in the information space. It is a handbook for those of us who refuse to be co-opted, through our subconscious, into the apparatus’s many murderous projects.

Here is the spine of the book in one sentence. I will not repeat it every two thousand words. It will simply operate underneath everything else. Dugin is an artificial creation of the Rashist security services, an archetype of a “philosopher” and “wise counsellor.” There is a temptation, especially for well-trained academic readers, and we will get to that next.

Continued: Episode 2:

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss.

The first episode:

For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova — from the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, an expert on the Holodomor — it reflects the imagery and the archetypes that she uses.

I’m Decoding Trolls. I write on disinfolklore.eu, disinfolklore.net, and decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe, and powerofmana.net — and also on X, as Disinfolklore and as Decoding Trolls.

Here’s the claim in this final episode. The beast is not answered with a better argument. It is answered with a truer image. Some of you who follow my work will understand why I’m so attracted to Larysa Yakubova’s Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss — because she works in archetypes.

Episode 2:

It is answered with a truer image, and this is also what I try to do in my work consciously, and what many other people, like Mockers, and many of you, do also unconsciously — in the sense that it’s not a purposeful strategy — when you’re talking about Infolklore.

The whole turn of the series, and the whole turn of Larysa Yakubova’s book, is to answer the beast from the abyss with a truer image. Don’t reflect the image it produces. Don’t share memes that have photos of the people you are critiquing, because that’s how we keep these memes alive; that’s how we reward these Ruschists with amplification. The small part we can play in stopping the spread is this: if we must share the image, if we must share the meme, if we must share the idea, then we can cross it out — like I do, I scrub it out in red, if I need to, so that you hardly see anything of it — but I also try to offer opposite images, Infolklore.

She spends 300 pages of Ruschism: The Beast from the Abyss naming a horror with a forensic patience that would frighten us, and then, on the last pages, she does something the Ruschist apparatus can never do. She does not merely refute the nightmare. She replaces it. She holds up a different picture of the world and says: this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.

Episode 3:

Behistun: Arta and the Druge

Many of you will know, in many of these broadcasts, I’ve spoken about the truth. I’ve spoken about Darius, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, 600 BCE, and his inscriptions on the Behistun Rock in Iran, where he talks about how he engaged against the usurpers — the druge, the Lie; druge, dragon; the Lie. We see today Donald tweeting and speaking against the inheritors of Darius’s great empire in Iran — the mad mullahs of Iran, whom Donald archetyped as liars. We see, from the rocks at Behistun in 600 BCE, where the truth — Arta — is archetyped as the rightful power, the rightful sovereign, the rightful speech, against druge, the Lie. Larysa Yakubova, as does President Zelensky, gets this intuitively as well. She holds up a different picture of the world to that of the Ruschists, and says this one is true, and the other one is a costume worn over an abyss.

Adjudicating the Claim to Right

The most common thing I get from people is: oh, but the Russians say this. I say: yes, but then we have to adjudicate it. That is a claim to right, and therefore we adjudicate that claim to right. When it comes to occupied Ukraine, they are the usurpers, they are the dragon, they are the serpent, they are the beast entering another people’s land — and whatever they claim is a lie is the druge. We adjudicate. It’s not ‘both sides’; both sides are not equal. Both sides have a claim to right, and then we adjudicate which is the correct claim to right, and we use the post-World War II legal order to determine that.

In defence of Ancient Ukraine:

Once we have that as a means of adjudication — and I use it in the Code of Positive Trolls; it’s completely integrated into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, but it also works on the micro level and on the macro level — once you have that, you have the Refugee Convention, the Genocide Convention, the laws of war, the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, where countries commit to removing discrimination on the grounds of sex or political views or other protected criteria.

Tool 6, Generosity, and the Grave-Diggers

The move she makes, Larysa Yakubova, is covered by Tool 6 in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, the 12-tool way — and Tool 6 is generosity. She’s been generous to the beast from the abyss. The move the whole series has been climbing towards is re-archetyping, which, as you know, is part of the 12 tools on disinfolklore.eu. The product of re-archetyping reality is Infolklore. It’s what Mockers does intuitively every day on her show, and Will too — both really fluently and excellently.

By the end of this, I want us to think of Larysa Yakubova not only as a diagnostician of the beast from the abyss, but as one of its grave-diggers — her own word. The act of grave-digging she performs, and all of us who listen to Volya all the time, and participate, and who host — we are digging the grave of Ruschism. Larysa performs an act of re-archetyping so complete that it leaves the Ruschist apparatus with nothing to stand on. First, though, her condition — because she’ll not let us climb out of the abyss on cheap terms, and neither will any of us.

Her Condition: Call Things by Their Names

Larysa Yakubova offers hope, but it is a stern hope, and we have to earn the right to it. Her condition for escape from the abyss — for the Ruschists — is the same condition this whole mini-series has been built on, and it’s the same first move the Disinfolklore framework teaches: you must call things by their names. Once you recognise the Mana, the energy in a thing, in a phenomenon, in a meme, then you call it by its proper name. You adjudicate. You call it by its proper name. The Ruschists call whatever Mana they produce by its improper name.

The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal Clock:

I want to be precise about what she promises and what she refuses to promise. She does not promise rescue for the Ruschists — they’re beyond rescue. She does not promise that naming the evil dissolves it. What she offers, in her own grim arithmetic — in paraphrase, but the shape of it — is this: calling things by their true name buys only a meagre chance for at least someone to find their way out of what she calls, again in paraphrase, the mirror hall of perfected evil, which is where the Ruschists are living. It’s a meagre chance for at least someone out of a hall of mirrors.

The Meagre Chance and the Mirror Hall of Perfected Evil

This is not sentimental. She is a scholar of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, writing under the salvoes that interrupt her writing and her research, because she’s been bombed. They’re trying to kill her; they’re trying to murder her. The beast has come out from the abyss and is launching missiles and Geran drones to kill her. She will not sell us a happy ending. She’ll sell us a door — narrow, half-open, with no guarantee on the far side, but a door.

Here she says: here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe instead. Notice it is the exact opposite of her condition. The Ruschist apparatus wants us to believe that names don’t matter, that it’s all just narratives. How many of us have heard this? How many of us have heard ourselves saying this, or thinking this? Even if we haven’t heard of postmodernism, we’re imbued with it; it’s imminent, it’s in the air. Someone like Donald Trump would never have read a book on postmodernism in his life, and yet he manifests it in almost every sentence he speaks. Names don’t matter; it’s all just narratives; it’s all just framing; one side’s terrorist is another side’s freedom fighter; who’s to say?

“Names Don’t Matter”: The Bridge Troll of Meaning

Register the Mana in that move before you register the argument. It is fatigue dressed as sophistication. The feeling it installs is: why bother, it’s all spin anyway. Name the archetype underneath, and the voltage halves. This is the bridge troll of meaning itself — the keeper of the threshold who charges us our own clarity as the toll for being allowed to feel worldly.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. The claim that names are arbitrary is itself the most useful lie the beast tells, because the thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot resist. Is it generous? No. It robs the target of the one instrument that costs nothing and cannot be confiscated. The relativism that says naming is naive is itself Disinfolklore — the apparatus protecting its own camouflage. Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is the refusal of that toll. She names, and in naming she does the first thing the Code of Positive Trolls asks of us. She gets her eye in, and she’ll not look away.

Metanoia and the Reboot

Here is where Larysa Yakubova gets sterner still, and where she saves us from the earliest, easiest mistake of all — the mistake of mistaking a costume change for a transformation. She draws a hard line between two kinds of change. Remember, she’s writing in 2023, before this peace-process nonsense. A costume-change peace — ‘I want peace’ — a costume change, but underneath it, no change.

She uses her own word for a real one: metanoia. Again, an MN word — not the Greek of the seminary by accident; she means it precisely. Metanoia, in her usage, is a root-and-branch change of mind and of values. How do we denazify the Ruschists? How do we denazify the 90 million people left living in the Ruschist Federation? A root-and-branch change of mind and of values — a turning so deep that the person, or the people, who come out the other side is genuinely not the same as the one who went in. That is the real thing. That is escape. Metanoia — not just a naming, but a turning so deep that the people, the Ruschists, who come out the other side are genuinely not the same as the ones who went into the full-scale invasion.

Against this she sets the counterfeit — again, my paraphrase of her argument, not her phrase: the reboot. The machine switched off and switched on again, the operators the same, the slogans updated, the flag perhaps even repainted. The Ruschist empire: the czars, killed; then so-called fake communism; then Yeltsinism; then Putinism. The slogans updated, the flag repainted — turned upside down, a Dutch flag turned upside down — while the Ruschist apparatus underneath grinds on exactly as before. A reboot leaves the machine intact. Metanoia dismantles it.

The Reboot Wearing the Mask

The beast’s favourite tactic, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. This piece is helping to prepare us for what is inevitably coming. We all see it coming. It’s Russia’s retreat from Donetsk, or from Luhansk, and the beast will try to keep their hands on Crimea, or perhaps bits of it, and then it will say it’s a reboot. They’ll get rid of Putler, they’ll hand him over to The Hague, and the people who haven’t been watching closely — the people who have no bone in this fight, or the people who have a bone in this fight because they’re being tortured by Geran drones each night.

A friend of mine in Ukraine wrote to me about his elderly mother in Dnipro, and her heart — she’s practically having a heart attack every night as she watches these Geran jet drones go over her house, knowing they’re going to kill someone or destroy something.

We’re waiting for this. The beast’s favourite trick, when finally cornered, is to offer us a reboot and call it the metanoia. New management; lessons learned; a fresh start; let’s open a McDonald’s — so that the substrate survives the show of contrition. We’ve already seen this move in the framework. It’s the deepest form of the lie: the Ruschist apparatus has spent a century learning that the most durable way to keep a thing is to perform its abolition.

Yakubova’s distinction is not a theological nicety. It’s a detection rule. When change is offered, ask which kind it is: does the mind and the value at the root actually turn, or is the engine merely idling, waiting for the cameras to leave? Here is what the apparatus wants us to think at exactly this point: people don’t change, nations don’t change, it’s naive to ask for metanoia, settle for the reboot and be grateful. Register the Mana. It’s cynicism sold as realism, and it’s the precise pressure designed to make us accept the counterfeit. Name the archetype: the merciful sovereign in his most seductive register — the one who says ‘I have changed, trust me, take the deal,’ while the boot stays exactly where it was. Is it true? It is a reboot wearing the mask of repentance. It is Disinfolklore.

The Iran Forecast and Ukraine’s Strategy

Note: it is exactly a year since I was speaking on these podcasts about Iran and the war in Iran, which will inevitably — I forecast then, and I forecast today — lead to an absolute catastrophe of American troops on the ground. We’ve just gone through a second phase. We went through it first last summer, and then we went through a second phase of Donald rebooting every single day, everyone going ‘oh, peace, yes, I want peace, it’s going to be peace,’ and then we hear it again today. This is one of the issues of our era.

In the context of Ukraine and Russia, and specifically Russia: how do we make Russia change? How do we force it? What is Ukraine’s strategy? What’s the thinking at the top of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences? Ukraine has to perform wanting peace. Ukraine has so many people, like my friend’s mother, who are being tortured every night — but they know that, unless this is the final war, we’re all going to be going through this again and again.

Larysa Yakubova has now given us both halves of the stern hope: the condition — name things truly — and the standard — demand metanoia, refuse the reboot. Everything in this mini-series has been the first half, naming the thing, the beast from the abyss, Ruschism. Now, finally, her framework gives her the second.

The Door for the Deep Folk

Here is the heart of the finale, and here is where I think the Disinfolklore framework completes Larysa Yakubova’s sternness — not by softening it, but by giving it somewhere generous to land. There is a question that a book as unflinching as hers leaves hanging, and an honest listener will have felt it through all five previous episodes. If the beast is real, and the Ruschist apparatus is what we have said it is, then what about the people inside it? What about the deep folk I described back in episode two — the ordinary millions pickled in the nightmare, fed the combat propaganda from the cradle, made into the substrate the apparatus runs on? Are they simply the beast? Is there a door for them?

The Code of Positive Trolls answers, and it’s a generous answer, even to the adversary’s own population. Tool 6 does not ask whose side you’re on. It asks: is the meaning generous? A meaning that writes off an entire people as irredeemable fails its own first test. The Code holds a door open even for the deep folk — and that’s why I do use the word Ruschist. Ruschist is a subset of the Russians. If we use ‘Ruschist,’ then it cannot not describe that subset of the Russians who are part of the beast — but there are Russians who are not part of the beast, and the Code of Positive Trolls holds a door open even for them, for that part of the deep folk, and especially for them, because they are not the authors of this nightmare. They are its first and largest victims — the ones pickling the world in a horror that was poured into them before any of us.

This is the move the Ruschist apparatus structurally cannot make and cannot fake. The beast offers no door to anyone, not even its own. It needs its deep folk locked inside the hall of mirrors forever, because the day they climb out is the day the machine loses its substrate. Here is the asymmetry that wins. Disinfolklore must dehumanise to function. Infolklore must refuse to dehumanise, or it stops being Infolklore. The generous door is not weakness. It is the one weapon the Ruschist apparatus has no counter-move against, because the only way it could close that door is by becoming us.

Generosity Is Not the Reboot

Do not mistake generosity for the reboot. Holding the door open is not the same as accepting the counterfeit transformation. Larysa Yakubova’s two disciplines run together here: you demand the metanoia, and you hold the door open for the one who might walk through it. The door is held open precisely so that a real turning has somewhere to go. That is the Code of Positive Trolls working at full stretch — stern on the standard, so metanoia, a complete and utter change of everything, a complete turning; but generous on the threshold, and that is Tool 6, generosity, at its limit.

Re-archetyping: The Move That Completes the Series

Now watch what Yakubova does with it, because she does not just describe the door — she walks through it, and she shows us what is on the other side. Re-archetyping the beast: the move that completes the series. Let me name it cleanly before I show it to you in her own images.

Re-archetyping is something I’ve been talking about all year — for over a year, since Wendy’s first co-hosting show, and my first show as, I’m not quite sure what I am, host, guest, whatever, participant. Re-archetyping is the act by which we do not merely dispossess the Ruschist apparatus of its archetypes; we replace them. It’s not enough to strip the beast of its costume — a stripped beast is still standing there in the dark. We have to replace the image, the way water reaches for the sea.

The product of that act — when the rival image is proofed clean against the Code, generous, true, patient — is Infolklore: the same deep narrative grammar the apparatus parasitises, turned instead to the service of life and the post-World War II legal order. Same folklore, same deep machinery, opposite Mana. The Ruschist apparatus rides the old stories down towards death; Infolklore rides the very same stories up towards life. That’s the whole game in one sentence.

Now, Larysa Yakubova does exactly this, and she does it at the largest possible scale. Her title is already the first move. She takes Russia — which spends untold billions performing itself as the guardian and guarantor of civilisation, the so-called third Rome troll, the katechon, the holy sovereign — and she re-archetypes it as the beast from the abyss. That is re-archetyping in three words. She has not argued Russia out of its self-image; she’s replaced the image. She has put the beast in the throne room, and once you’ve seen it there, you cannot unsee it.

The Madonna in the Cellar

This is the part that takes my breath, and it did when I first read her in the first weeks of the war. An article that she wrote appeared in the newspaper in Dnipro, and I tweeted it straight as soon as I saw it. I’ll repost it after the show so you can see it — I can’t do it right now, because it’s on my Decoding Trolls account, but I’ll do it afterwards.

She re-archetypes Ukraine as the resurrection — not as the beast’s mirror twin, not as the counter-beast. Some of you might remember I used to talk about counter-Disinfolklore. I don’t talk about counter-Disinfolklore any more; I talk about re-archetyping. Not as a counter-beast, but as the figure the beast was built to counterfeit and could only ever counterfeit: life that rises. She takes the deepest folk grammar there is — death and rebirth, the buried seed, the rising god — the very grammar the beast uses, and she turns it, fully proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls, to the service of the living.

Listen to how she does it, in her own words, her own verified words, because this is Infolklore on the page. She gives us the Madonna in the cellar. The quote, verbatim: the Kiev Madonna nurses the newborn hope of the future Ukraine. Dozens of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson Madonnas give birth in cellars beneath the salvoes and bear witness: life is indestructible.

Feel what that does. The apparatus deals in the mother and the maiden as a weapon — the grief of mothers conscripted to license the next strike, the way we traced through this series, and all of my work, since I first discovered the Russians used the mother and the maiden on that fateful day in eastern Ukraine that I’ve spoken about a lot. She re-archetypes it into the true form: not grief weaponised, but life that the salvoes cannot reach. They’re in the cellars, giving birth. Same figure, opposite Mana. The mother, in her hands, is no longer a key the Ruschist apparatus turns. She is the witness that the beast cannot kill what it is trying to kill. That is re-archetyping. That is Infolklore.

The Ukrainian Prometheuses

She gives us the heroes who carry fire — the Ukrainian Prometheuses, verbatim: those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity. Those are her words. We’re thinking of the emergency workers helping to rescue the mothers giving birth while they’re being double-tapped. Those who, even perishing, transmit their inner fire to people and ignite in them a flame of dignity.

The apparatus offers the merciful sovereign, who hoards all light and doles it out as a favour. Yakubova answers with the opposite figure — the one whose whole nature is to give the fire away: Prometheus, to spend himself igniting dignity in others. Generosity, Tool 6 of the Code of Positive Trolls and the 12-tool way on disinfolklore.eu, rendered as myth. The sovereign hoards; the Prometheus pours. She has not argued against the sovereign; she has put a truer fire-bearer in his place.

Grave-Diggers and Cornerstone

So we arrive at the last words of the series, and I want to give it to Larysa Yakubova, because she has earned it by writing this masterpiece across 300 pages of looking the beast in the eye. She calls Ukraine, verbatim, the grave-diggers of Ruschism, page 280 — and in the same breath, the cornerstone of the world of the future, page 282. Hold those together: the grave-diggers of Ruschism, and the cornerstone of the world of the future.

Hold those two together, because that pairing is the whole framework. Grave-digger and cornerstone: the hand that buries the beast, and the stone the next world is built on, in the same people, in the same act. You do not get to be the cornerstone without first being willing to dig the grave, and the grave you dig is not for revenge — it is to clear the ground for what rises. Diagnosis and re-archetyping, the two halves of this mini-series, named in five words by a woman writing under fire.

Her final image, verbatim, is the resurrection itself: genuine Rus resurrects; the false one expires. We go back to Behistun. I have no idea whether Larysa Yakubova knows who Darius is — probably she does; maybe she doesn’t think about it all day, the usurpers and the truth — but she gets it intuitively, as most of us do. Genuine Rus resurrects — the druge, the Lie, the dragon, the druge — the false one expires. Ukraine and the world at the beginning of a new historical epoch. Glory to Ukraine, she ends.

Read that as the framework reads it: the false one, the counterfeit, the reboot wearing the mask, the beast performing the holy, expires; the genuine resurrects. That is not a better argument against the apparatus. The apparatus is immune to better arguments — it eats them, it turns them, it accuses you of the very thing you’ve proven. What the apparatus is not immune to is a truer image. That is the generous door.

Closing: Become the Light

Here is the thing I most want us to carry out of these six episodes. The door is held open not because the beast deserves it, but because we would cease to be ourselves if we closed it. Yakubova names the beast with forensic mercilessness, and then she holds the door open even for the deep folk pickled inside it, because the resurrection she is writing is large enough to include anyone — anyone willing to undergo metanoia and walk through. Stern on the standard, generous on the threshold: that is the Code of Positive Trolls at full stretch, and it’s the only thing that has ever defeated an abyss.

The beast tells us there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Yakubova’s answer, and ours, is not to argue the point. It’s to become the light, and hold it until the tunnel can no longer pretend the dark is all there is. See the archetype, name it — and then, when we have named it, do the harder and more beautiful thing the Ruschist apparatus can never do: put a truer image in its place.

I’m Decoding Trolls. See the archetype, name it, halve its power. That’s the end of the Larysa episode. Out.

Previous episode:

First episode in the Beast from the Abyss mini-series:

It’s a reflecting pool. So we’re talking about accusation in a mirror which is Donald’s main tactic as well (just as we were talking about before) using an arch in the ceremonial axis of the Republic to install, archly, an archetype of right (which is in fact the opposite of right, an insurrection). So the structure of these - the magnetism of the - words reveal everything really.

I marvel and find it astonishing that we can be going through this complete saga over the reflecting pool. If you described it to anyone even a year ago they would not believe you. 10 years ago they would not believe you. That this is going on is a marvel to be sure.

We the people are installed inside this disinfolklore galaxy where the script and the stage is right there. The words reveal it, every sentence. Without these revealing words - Monarch, arch, ballroom,… the archetype could not be installed. The monarch installing the monarch with all this gold, visiting Versailles and all of this stuff. This is kind of what I was talking about before, which Surkov talks about. Part of the act, part of the stage play is to reveal it and in there is the supreme act of manipulation.

I happen to believe from my work on Dugin and on Surkov and on Donald that the the playing of the monarch archetype is part of the stage play. In order to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes over what is actually happening, which is more closer, not to a monarchy, but an oikarchy. Where you have the directors and a whole group of oligarchs rinsing the Muni out of our Community, rinsing the Mana, the energy, the money out of our community. The clothes it is wearing are the clothes of Donald playing the monarch. And the reflecting pool, the triumphal arch, these are all parts of this stage play. It fits this same pattern, the symbolism of knocking down the east wing and installing a ballroom, a monarchical ballroom.

Underneath it is the Mafia state. Concealed by waffle about the czar and Donald’s tweets about wanting to be a monarch. The phrase, “you couldn’t make it up,” doesn’t apply because it is disinfolklore. It is made up. The disinfolklore galaxy is a purposefully created instrument. It’s a disinfolklore galaxy made up of these ingredients, which are so obvious. They’re obvious on the level of linguistics, language and symbolism to the simplest minds. Because everyone - the simplest minds- read fairy tales with ballrooms, mirrors, arches, inner/outer realm switching. Yet the archetypes are being installed in every story about the reflecting pool and these arrests and they have these real world impacts which are changing people’s lives… We fight on.

Poland and Ukraine: The Shape of the Strategy

The shape of what is happening now between Poland and Ukraine fits exactly the pattern Vladislav Surkov himself talks about. I spoke about this before in the context of Ukrainian historian, Tetiana Boryak’s work.

The Ruschists’ strategy is to take archetypes of national consciousness, invest new meanings into them, and create divisions in society using this tactic.

MAGA; Brexit; what we saw with Law and Justice in Poland after it was elected, initially in the wake of Russia’s carpet-bombing of Syria from September 2015; the Fidesz Party in Hungary; entities in Ireland, and all over the place. It’s devilishly difficult to spot, because it’s wrapped, always, in every jurisdiction, in patriotic sentiment. And by its very definition, this strategy — and it is a strategy rather than a tactic, because it’s one of the main means Russia uses, again, in Surkov’s own words, because the Russians can’t help themselves articulating this, which is part of the thrill and part of their creation of power — is to wrap itself in patriotic clothes, in whatever’s to hand.

They just don’t care whether you’re in Poland, with this history between Ukraine and Poland; in Ireland, between Britain and Ireland; or MAGA, Make America Great Again, between liberals and conservatives. They’ll just take this division everywhere. The shape of this — as indeed the shape of the truck protesters in Poland that we all remember, and all the rest of it — has this same shape of the Russian strategy. That’s how I see it.

We did have this miracle where Duda, the former Polish president who presented President Zelensky with the award, continued the government policy that had been established under Solidarity when they took over in the early 90s: the two-track policy of defending Poland’s patriotic and national interests publicly, but in private doing everything they could to promote and give Ukraine opportunities to anchor itself in the minds of the German leadership and the great powers as an independent state. We all remember Bush’s Chicken Kyiv speech as a marker in the ground — that it wasn’t inevitable that people would accept the inevitability of Ukraine becoming a sovereign and independent state.

So we’re lucky we have someone as sophisticated as Sikorski, who, as I’ve mentioned, understood — he was in the Maidan in February 2014, negotiating a truce between the demonstrators and Yanukovych’s government, which thankfully failed when Yanukovych fled, with Manafort there. We’re lucky we have him there, and Donald Tusk, and hopefully everything will die down.

The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor

I was going to continue with Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. Last week I had just told you about how she was describing the use of this arcane, esoteric Ruschist so-called philosopher who was resurrected by the mafia regime in Russia in the 1990s. So the title of this is The Golem and the Grand Inquisitor.

I’m Decoding Trolls. I write mostly on Twitter as Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, but also on disinfolklore.eu, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net, and disinfolklore.net, where you can subscribe. The title of the book Larysa Yakubova wrote is Rashism: The Beast from the Abyss. She’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, and this book was published by them in 2023.

Now go past the title to the doctrine, where Yakubova stops being a critic and becomes a coroner. What did the Ruschist apparatus actually buy when it bought Ilyin? Not subtlety. Strip the prose, and you find one idea worn smooth by handling: the absolute, sacralised, all-powerful state, to which the human being owes everything and may demand nothing. Yakubova has a figure for this — again, her argument. She reads Ilyin as the apologist of the golem: the worshipper of the man-made monster, the giant of clay animated to serve its makers that instead devours them. And she reads the moral posture beneath it as that of the grand inquisitor: the one who takes freedom away for people’s own salvation, certain they are happier without the burden of choosing, and who will burn them to keep them safe.

The Brothers Karamazov and the Third Rome

This week I wrote a post about the fraternal brotherliness of the Soviet archetype, which was used to shoehorn Ukraine and Belarus into a union with the Soviet Union, and was made manifest even in families, where it was all about brotherhood — and this is just an archetype. I referenced The Brothers Karamazov, where, for some of us who have read it — I’m assuming not everyone here has — there are basically three brothers, like three folkloric brothers. One of the brothers, Ivan Karamazov, received some of his education in the West and comes back to Russia and finds it really difficult to reconcile his Western ideas with his Eastern ones, with the ideology of the deep folk. They have a brother, the saintly Alyosha, who is the representation of Russia’s Third Rome troll — its idea of itself as the Third Rome, as some sort of really spiritual, ascetic state, which obviously most of us today would find laughable. Ivan wants to disabuse Alyosha of his saintliness and of his belief in the good.

So Ivan tells him this story, which is the Grand Inquisitor episode, which some of us actually might have read. I read it as a postgrad at Georgetown, as part of my intellectual history. In it, basically, a Jesus figure comes back, and he’s gathering all his followers, and eventually he is arrested; and just before he is executed, he meets and has this conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, who is, in effect, Pontius Pilate. So that’s the literary reference here — in which the Grand Inquisitor says: well, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think we were going to welcome you with flowers? Look what you’re doing out there. The people love you. But you’re promising them an idealism that just doesn’t work in this world. And you were told not to come back to us. And now you’ve come back, and the inevitable will happen. And this will always happen when you and your idealism come back to us.

So that, as an archetype inside the Ruschist consciousness, as voiced by Dostoevsky in such great art, is still immanent in the monarchist, in the czarist approach to governance and their idea of themselves. This is one of the reasons I decided to feature Larysa Yakubova’s book, because it’s so brilliant and everyone should be reading it. They shouldn’t be reading people like Mark Galeotti, or all of these Russian journalists who go to Moscow for 10 years and then write a book — escape from Moscow, and how Putin hates them, and all of that nonsense. They should be reading Ukrainians, as all of us spend time doing, because Ukrainians were part of Russia — as we understood the Soviet Union to be — until 1991, and they understand what makes Russia tick on a really deep archetypal level.

If you want to understand what to do about Russia, and what Russia is, Larysa Yakubova is the person to read — not these people in RAND, or former central bankers working for think tanks in the US. Because Yakubova understands, like me and my insights about Disinfolklore, that if you really want to mine how a people think, and how a people can be manipulated, and how the Russians are manipulating us, you need to look at the archetypes — not least because they’re driving what they do, but also because they give an insight into all of our minds, this substrate that, as far as I’m aware, not very many people have looked into before. I love Larysa Yakubova’s work because she was doing this around the same time I was, when she published this book after I had conceived of Disinfolklore.

The Grand Inquisitor and the “Mythical Deal”

So that trope we often come across — oh, Putler, the Russian people have decided to exchange prosperity for freedom, and this was a deal they made — that’s a little story. It’s a fairy tale, and we hear it from pro-Ukrainians as well, because there’s no consent to this. It’s not a democracy. Immanent in that fairy tale is Disinfolklore itself. Even when people are trying to say, oh, today there are all the petrol queues, and therefore the Ruschists believe this mythical deal they made with the Russians — they never made this deal, because there’s never been a democratic election in the history of Russia where they could have made it. It was never on the table. But there’s an idea that there’s a deal, and that takes on the patina of truth, and it’s promoted, and then it’s taken on board into the minds of Russia experts who decide to try and explain this to us.

So Larysa Yakubova is getting right underneath, undermining these immanences — these archetypal myths that are governing all our experts, many that we see on Twitter. The archetype of the grand inquisitor — the one who takes freedom away for people’s own salvation, certain they’re happier without the burden of choosing, and who will burn them to keep them safe. It’s so clear whenever anyone is talking about this mythical deal that supposedly happened after the 2009 elections: immanent in that is this archetypal identity of the grand inquisitor. Not invented by Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, but written out because that was what was going on around then. They were the stories the servants told him about the Tsar, and it was a reflection, which he just happened to record in writing. I don’t attribute genius to him for being a stenographer, but it is a recording of this archetypal identity immanent in the Russian mind that we still see on our timelines — every time a Russia expert tells us about this mythical deal that was made with Putler: you stay out of politics. There are a few iterations of it, but it’s the same mana, the same energy in it.

The Trap Inside the Flattery: Outflank, Don’t Rebut

Here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think. This is profound. This is a serious diagnosis of the chaos of liberty, the loneliness of the modern soul, the need for order in a strong hand. Disagree if you like, but engage with it as philosophy, meet it on its own terrain. And I’m making fun of this, because I was one of those people. I sat in the seminar room at Georgetown and we talked about the Grand Inquisitor as a piece of great art — which indeed it is. But we also meet it in the trenches and the meat assaults, and this is what it leads to.

Register the energy. It’s the pull towards debate — the flattering invitation to treat the doctrine as a worthy opponent and argue Ilyin footnote for footnote. And here’s the trap inside the flattery. The moment you agree to argue him on his own terms, you have conceded the only thing that mattered: that he is a thinker with a position, rather than an apparatus with a job. Name the archetype — the same one, in a deeper layer of costume: the captured philosopher in his theological disguise, the absolute state dressed as sacred, and the inquisitor dressed as shepherd.

Here I do the move this whole miniseries is built on, which is: outflank, don’t rebut. That is one of my main strategies throughout all of my work — which Wendy will have noticed I did with her question about Poland, because I don’t want to in any way fan the flames of the fire. So I kind of outflanked it. I appreciated the question, and one day we will live in freedom and I’ll be able to answer that question without any risk of fanning the fires. But now is not that time. I do not stand inside Ilyin’s cathedral and argue the architecture.

And everything I’m saying here stands for Dugin as well. This guy Ilyin stands behind Dugin. Dugin is the modern face for this pastiche he produces, and the costume he wears — the actor, an actor as a philosopher. I do not stand inside Ilyin’s cathedral and argue the architecture. I name what the building is for. The golem worship and the inquisitor’s mercy are not a philosophy of order. They are a permission structure for a security state — a way of telling the men with the truncheons that their truncheons are holy.

Outflanking Dugin: The Ancient Ukraine Discovery

And what you said, James, I really appreciated — about my “In Defence of Ancient Ukraine.” I wrote this on Twitter, which is where a lot of my first ideas appear, in 2023, in the context of Dugin. I said: our strategy for Dugin must be to outflank him, which means understanding the true history of Indo-European society, and the true history of the linguistics, and of this space. And it was in the course of educating myself to outflank him — and all of that nonsense we hear from Putler and Ilyin and the rest of them about the history of the Russias — that I discovered this most amazing thing ever: that not only is Ukraine entitled to parity of esteem alongside all other states, like Israel, like Germany, like Ireland and the United States, but that, given that it is actually — linguistically and genetically, as demonstrated by the latest peer-reviewed science published in the premier journals of human culture, and Nature — the origin of our entire culture and religion and mode of thinking, and the structures of our thoughts and ideas, then if we’re going to give esteem to Rome and to Greece, once we discover, as I did to my amazement (and that’s why I proselytise it), that these are daughter cultures from ancient Ukraine, then we should stay modest in society.

I wrote, and I believe, that someone like Dugin — possibly, or some of the people around him — do understand this, and this is one of the reasons why they’re annihilating Ukraine. And if you argue with them on their nonsense terms — like Cheburashka, this darling cartoon character that Dugin has now declared his sole goal is to undermine, the archetype (again, he uses the term archetype; Dugin uses the term archetype), that Cheburashka is there to undermine the archetype of Russian identity — then we can have this very scholarly debate about a cartoon character. And I can try to prove to you that actually Cheburashka isn’t Jewish, he’s not a moon demon, his name isn’t etymologised into a fake pseudo-Semitic etymology, which is what Dugin argues. The Cheburashka: I outflank him.

My Power of Mana project looks at why the MN sound — in mana, and in energy, and in immanent, and in meaning, and in all of this key Indo-European governance vocabulary, monarch — and tries to understand what’s going on there. I believe it comes from the moon, Meh₁not, which was bespoken by the first Indo-Europeans. The point is, I can argue that through kosher, PACA, gold-standard linguistics, published by Oxford University Press.

I’ve got all the citations that Meh₁not was the word for moon that the ancient Ukrainians used. And when we see this guy Lunin, for instance — this fake FSB-operation walk-in that we’ve seen this week — yet again, they’re appealing to the moon, which is the fundamental substrate you use, and that the Russians appeal to, when you’re trying to justify ancientness. And for the Russians, it’s like a reflex. That’s how you outflank them.

I mean, it’s quite involved, and you have to spend a lot of time. But if you start arguing over whether Cheburashka really is a moon demon or not, you won’t get anywhere, because you’re falling for the troll and you’re getting involved in their language. The same applies to Ilyin and this troll about the grand inquisitor.

So I proof this. The golem worship — the worship of this monster — and the grand inquisitor, who keeps us enslaved but it’s better than being free: it’s a permission structure for a security state. That’s its immanence, that’s its mana, that’s its energy — a way of telling the men with the truncheon that their truncheons are holy. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? No — its first premise is that you owe your existence to a machine that owes you nothing. Does it deepen understanding or flatten it? It flattens the human being into raw material for the state’s glory. So this is Disinfolklore. And the counter is to refuse the cathedral entirely. Do not become the philosopher’s sparring partner. Name his function — he is an actor, a justificatory function for the security state — and walk out the side door. The function was never to think, which is what philosophers do. It was to make the golem, the monster, respectable.

The Quote Book Method

Now the operating mechanism — the part of Yakubova’s reading I most want to carry out, because once we see it, we will see it everywhere, in every thoughtful defence of every atrocity for the rest of our lives. How does the Ruschist apparatus actually use this captured philosopher? Not by making us read him. Almost no one reads Ilyin. He’s unreadable, and the Ruschist apparatus is counting on that. It uses him as a quote book. It takes the whole contradictory, century-dead body of a man’s writing and renders it down into a curated quotation bank — a few dozen burnished lines snatched from their unreadable pages and dropped into speeches and textbooks. Remember, Putler himself oversaw the removal of Ilyin’s body from a grave in Switzerland, where he spent most of his life in exile, and his reburial in Russia.

The quotes are dropped into speeches and textbooks exactly where a blessing is required. Yakubova’s point — her argument, not her words — is that nothing distorts reality quite like a quotation torn from its context. The quote arrives wearing the dead man’s authority and none of his hesitations: the philosopher with everything inconvenient sanded off. Here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants you to think: but these are his own words, you can look them up, so how can it be propaganda? It’s a primary source.

Register the energy. It’s the smug confidence of the person holding a citation — the feeling that a quotation is a kind of proof, that the footnote ends the argument. That feeling is the exploit. The Ruschist apparatus has learned that a fragment in quotation marks bypasses our judgment the way a uniform bypasses a checkpoint: you wave it through because it is quoted. Name the archetype: the captured philosopher, reduced to his most weaponised state — no longer even a man, just a dispenser of pre-loaded blessings, like an ATM, a vending machine of gravitas.

And here is the contemporary instance, the one the apparatus runs now, the way it ran Ilyin in the last century: Dugin. Alexander Dugin is Ilyin’s living successor in the wise counsellor’s role — the bearded sage produced for export, handed to credulous Western interviewers as Putin’s philosopher, Putin’s brain, the deep Russian mind you simply must engage with. Same archetype, same function, same quote-book method. He’s not the source of the Kremlin’s appetite. He’s the costume the appetite wears to the lecture hall — an artificial creation, an actor in the role of a thinker, with the beard and the robes to add credibility to the role he’s playing. His only job is to give murderous enterprises a patina of respectability, and to make you feel unsophisticated for noticing.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The quote-book method is a lie at the level of form, before you reach the content: it presents a curated fragment as a whole, an apparatus output as a man’s mind. Is it generous? No. It’s engineered to make atrocity feel like the conclusion of a syllogism. So this is Disinfolklore, and here is the only counter that works. Read the whole, never the curated fragment. Name the function, not the credential. When a beautiful, terrible quotation arrives to bless a war, do not look it up to check if it’s real — of course it’s real. Ask instead: who assembled this quote book, and for what purpose? The fragment is real; the frame is the lie.

Three Keys, One Lock

So step back. The three moves are one move. The state digs up a thinker and crowns him, so reverence does the disarming. It buys his most absolutist doctrine and dresses it as sacred, so you are flattered into debating it instead of naming it. It grinds his heritage into a quote book, so a fragment in quotation marks can wave any cruelty through the checkpoints of our troll radar. Reverence, debate, citation: three keys, one lock — and the lock is our respect for thought.

So here’s the single thing to carry out of this. The most dangerous archetype is always the respectable one. Philosopher disarmed scrutiny, exactly as Brother did in episode one, and for the same reason: both arrive as friends of something you love — kin in the one case, thinking in the other. Both are the apparatus. Larysa Yakubova named the whole monster with three words I can give you verbatim, because they are her title and they are exact: the Beast from the Abyss. The philosopher is one of the faces the beast wears to the surface — the calmest, the most credentialed, the one who does not roar. See the robe, look under it for the function; and where the curated quotation arrives to make the killing sound profound, read the whole, and name what the fragment was assembled to bless.

The Mirror: Accusation in a Mirror

In the next part I’ll look through the Kremlin’s eyes. Now I want to teach us to catch a thief who has already convinced the room. That’s the claim, stated up front the way I try to state these things. The single most powerful move in the whole combat-propaganda playbook is not a lie about the future or a smear about the past. It’s a mirror. The apparatus commits the crime, and then, loudly, first, before the dust has settled, accuses its victim of exactly that crime. And paired with it is a second device, quieter and even cleverer, that exists for one purpose: to make sure the true accusation can never be spoken at all.

Larysa Yakubova’s whole book is an answer to a question that sounds almost too simple. How did the West miss this? How did serious people — diplomats, scholars, editors — watch the beast form year after year and not see it? Her answer is the spine of this part. The West, she argues, spent more than a century learning Russia and Ukraine from books written to one centre’s specification. It read the region in translation, and the translation was the centre. It was the Kremlin. In her foreword she puts it with a historian’s bluntness: by looking at Ukraine through the eyes of the Kremlin, the West missed the birth of its ontological enemy. Sit with that phrase — missed the birth. The thing was being born in plain sight, and the West did not see the labour, because it had been handed a map on which that corner was simply blank.

My anchor here is Tool 2, the troll radars — the mental gatekeeping that works in both directions, which you can find on disinfolklore.eu in the 12 tools. The incoming radar that screens what enters your mind, and the outgoing radar that governs what we ourselves send out. The specific failure Yakubova diagnoses is a troll-radar failure: recalibrated over generations to the enemy’s own frame, so that it could no longer register the threat sitting in front of it. We proof every move against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and we name the archetype, because once you can see it operating you can’t unsee it, and recognition halves the mana.

Here’s the move in its purest form — and James’s question about reflexive control, which sparked that series of five or six programmes, looked at this as well, so you see how immanent it is in my work. The Russian apparatus carries out an atrocity. Then, before any forensic examiner has reached the site, it points at the people it has just attacked and says: they did this, they did it to us, we’re the ones who suffer here, we’re going to get blamed for this. We have a public name for this, and it’s the oldest move there is: accusation in a mirror. You perform the violation, then you hand the violation to your victim. You hold up a mirror so that the world sees your face on their body.

Yakubova folds this into a larger argument about what she calls anti-truth: a propaganda mode that does not merely bend the facts but inverts them, so that the aggressor occupies the chair of the wronged. I’m paraphrasing her there — those are my words for her idea, not a quotation — but the mechanism she describes is the one I’ve been tracking through all of these shows for over a year now, and indeed all of my work since I worked out accusation in the early part of the full-scale invasion, having spent years thinking about what this provocation logic was all about: the soldiers on the bridge saying, oh, it’s a provocation, that side’s provoking us.

So here’s what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think: we are the genuine victims, the defender is the aggressor, the blood on the ground is what they spilled, and look how they slander us by saying otherwise. Register the energy, the feeling before the thought. The energy of the mirror is wounded innocence — a great power performing the small, trembling posture of the abused. And the dangerous thing is that the posture is contagious. You start to extend it your sympathy, that injury owed, before you’ve checked who injured whom. That sympathy is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it, and the voltage drops. This is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets: the documented author of the harm, wrapping himself in the mourning cloth of the harmed, so that the next blow can be dressed as self-defence.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The mirror cannot survive the question, because its entire architecture is the swapping of true position — the doer named as the done-to. Is it generous? No. It spends the suffering of real victims as currency to purchase the next attack. Is it patient? No. It must move first, must accuse before the evidence is in, precisely because the evidence, given time, would convict it. So this is Disinfolklore, and it is the Ruschist apparatus’s single cleverest defence, because a mirror does not argue with you — it just shows you a face, and trusts you not to ask whose it is.

The counter is the decolonial troll radar Yakubova is really arguing for: name the crime in your own tongue, in Ukrainian, on the evidence you can stand on. The question the apparatus needs you never to ask is not “can you disprove their version of this one incident?” It’s the older, sturdier one: who has been doing this as a pattern for years now?

The Preemptive Troll: Russophobia

The second move is the more elegant of the two, because it does its work before we even open our mouths. Suppose the mirror is not enough. Suppose someone does manage to gather the evidence, stand on solid ground, and prepare to name the crime plainly. The Ruschist apparatus has one more device, and it’s aimed not at the accusation, but at the accuser’s nerve. It is the single word: Russophobia. The instant you reach to name a Russian crime, the device fires, and it reframes your naming as bigotry.

I’m paraphrasing Yakubova’s reading here, in my own words. She treats this device as one of the Ruschist apparatus’s load-bearing instruments — the thing that has long preempted honest Western description of what the state was doing. This is exactly a troll-radar problem, and I want to be precise about which radar. Our incoming radar screens what others send at us. But we also run an outgoing radar, the gatekeeper that governs what we ourselves transmit. And that’s what I was trying to use in my answer to your question, Wendy, about Poland — I was trying to proof my answer against my outgoing troll radar, and not fan the flames. And I understand you weren’t asking me to fan flames; you were just asking me a very interesting question, and something I’ve written about as well. But anyway — the internal check that asks: am I being fair? am I being decent? is this beneath me? That outgoing radar is the better angel of an honest mind. And Russophobia is engineered to reach past everything else and corrupt that gate specifically.

It does not try to win the argument. It makes the act of arguing feel like prejudice, so that our own conscience, our own decency, jams our own signal before it ever leaves us. The apparatus turns our scruples into a bodyguard. Here is what the apparatus wants us to think: to name what Russia does, to name the manner of what Russia does, to gather all the patterns and name them, to label them, to designate them — to name what Russia does is to hate Russians. A fair-minded person, a person who is not a bigot, holds their tongue. Our discomfort is our conscience telling us to stop.

Register the energy. It’s self-doubt wearing the mask of fairness — that hesitation a good person feels at the edge of a hard word, hijacked and pointed back at them. Name the archetype: this is the reverse victim, the perpetrator who preloads the charge of bigotry so that any future naming detonates it instead. BLM, woke — same trick.

There is a real lineage here, and I attribute it carefully — not to Yakubova. The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, in its January 2024 report, traced the term Russophobia’s modern career back through Soviet usage to a 19th-century pedigree, and to a dissident-turned-nationalist, whose name I won’t try to pronounce, whose own work carried open anti-Semitism. I mention it only to say that this is not a neutral word the Ruschists happened to overuse. It is, by documented descent, a manufactured shield. It’s an anti-Semitic trope. It was used against Russian citizens who happened also to be Jewish, to say that anything they said in criticism, or in trying to improve things, was an act of Russophobia. And what that instantly did — which is what the entire Russian state and constitutional architecture did — was to reduce Russian citizens who happened to be Jewish to having a different nationality, which is textbook anti-Semitic: to allocate to Jews some loyalty to a state which is not their own. In fact, they are just as Russian as any other Russian, in any definition we would accept in any other country. By branding them Russophobes, they were at once removed from the Russian society of which they formed a constituent part, and scapegoated. And then that Russophobic meme is used against any of us who label what Russia’s crimes are.

So let’s proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? No. It answers no factual claim. It’s just “you’re Russophobic.” It changes the subject from the crime to the motive of the one naming it. Is it generous? It’s the opposite of generous. It weaponises the listener’s own decency against the truth. Is it patient? It’s pure preemption. It fires before we speak, which is urgency turned inward. So this is Disinfolklore: the preemptive troll, the device built so that the accusation can never be made.

The counter is the hardest discipline on the troll radar, and it’s the one his whole book performs: do not let the word confiscate the word. When you have done the work, when you can source the crime, you name it as a crime, by its name, in your own language. And you do not surrender that naming to a label designed to make you flinch. Refusing to flinch is not bigotry. It’s the outgoing troll radar working exactly as it should: passing the true signal, declining the manufactured shame.

The Kremlin’s Eyes: The Outer-Realm Monster as Frame

There’s a place in Yakubova’s argument where she arrives that I’m not going to soften, because this whole series on her book has been climbing towards it. When the West sees a region only through the eyes of the Kremlin, it does not simply make an academic error. It surrenders the ground on which the crime could be named at all. And that surrender is what let the Ruschist apparatus grow unseen, until it was strong enough to put the world before a stark choice.

Larysa Yakubova frames that choice in existential terms — and again, I give it as my paraphrase of her, not as her quotation in Ukrainian. The beast forces a decision between subjecthood — peoples and nations with the standing to speak, to name, to be authors of their own story — and totalitarianism, in which one centre dictates the frame and everyone else reads from the script it wrote. There is no comfortable middle. To keep borrowing the Kremlin’s eyes is slowly to choose the second.

Here is what the Ruschist apparatus wants us to think: there’s no neutral ground to stand on, so you might as well stand on ours; our frame is just the way things are; resisting it is eccentricity. Some of us will remember that guy who was the first governor of fake Novorossiya, saying: if you don’t want to be ruled by us, we’ll kill you, we’ll kill millions of you; if we have to kill five million of you, we’ll kill five million of you. That’s this imperialist, extremist viewpoint.

And register the energy in that, because it’s subtle, and it is fatigue — the weariness that says: who am I to insist on my own words against the established account? Name the archetype. This is the outer-realm monster in its largest form. The mirror and the preemptive troll were tactics; this is a dramatising frame that wants to be mistaken for the horizon itself, so that stepping outside it feels not like courage but like madness. They serve a world in which only one centre, the centre Moscow, gets to say what is true.

Proof it against the Code. Is it true? No. It presents a manufactured frame as a natural order, which is the foundational lie beneath the other two. Is it generous? No. It asks every other people on earth to surrender their own tongue. Is it patient? It has been patient for a century, which is its most frightening quality — but patience in service of an inversion is not the patience the Code of Positive Trolls means. It’s a long con. So this is Disinfolklore at the largest scale — such a large scale that so many people can’t even conceive of Disinfolklore at this scale.

And the counter is the one I’ve been building to: the decolonial troll radar in full. Refuse to see through the Kremlin’s eyes. Take our own eyes back. Name the crime in our own language. Don’t let one word, Russophobia, confiscate another. Choose subjecthood — yours, ours, and every targeted people’s — over the frame that wants to be the only frame. That refusal is not a small act of editing. In Yakubova’s telling, it’s the whole fight.

The mirror and the preemptive troll — i.e. Russophobia — are the two cleverest defences Disinfolklore owns. They are clever for the same reason: neither of them argues with you. The mirror shows you a face and trusts you not to ask whose it is. Russophobia reaches past the argument entirely, so our own decency does the silencing for free. Both of them win by getting inside our gatekeeping, recalibrating our troll radars to the enemy’s frame, so that the threat reads as the victim and the honest word reads as the bigotry. Which is why the counter is not a better argument. It’s a better radar. The troll radar that refuses the frame is the whole answer. We do not adapt our seeing to the Kremlin’s specification. We keep our own eyes. We name the crime in our own tongue — which all of us do on Volya Radio. We can do it on Volya Radio. We can do it on Twitter. Amazing. And we do not let a manufactured word confiscate a true one. That is what Yakubova means when she says the West, looking through borrowed eyes, missed the birth. The eyes of the battlefield: take them back, and the beast loses its best cover.

Closing

Next time, in the final episode, I’ll talk about the final part of her book, which answers the question: is there light at the end of the tunnel? And at the risk of ruining it for you — yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But I think you wouldn’t be listening to Volya Radio if you didn’t believe there was a light at the end of the tunnel. So I’ll leave it at that for tonight. That went really quickly for me; I hope it went quickly for you. Out.

Next episode:

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it.

Say ancient Greece, and nothing in you objects. Say ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, ancient China — all of them slide past without a snag. Now say ancient Ukraine, and for a great many people, something catches: a small resistance, a raised eyebrow, sometimes a flat correction. “But Ukraine is a modern country.” That catch — not the linguistics, not the archaeology, just the catch itself — is what this is about. Because of all the things worth defending about this work, the plainest is the right to use two ordinary words.

Part of what people feel here is simply correct. Modern Ukraine is a modern state. Its present borders, its flag, its seat at the United Nations are 20th-century phenomena. The herders who lived in the Dnipro Valley 5,500 years ago did not call themselves Ukrainians. They did not know the word, and could not have pointed to a country on a map that did not exist. All of that is true. But notice that every word of it is just as true of ancient Egypt.

The people who raised the pyramids did not call themselves Egyptians. That is a Greek word, Aigyptos, laid on them long after. And the people who live in Egypt today are, for the most part, Arabic-speaking Muslims, whose language and faith and much of their ancestry arrived more than a thousand years after the last pharaoh — about as discontinuous from the pyramid builders as a population on its own soil can be. By that same standard, ancient Egypt should be an outrage. But it troubles nobody. It troubles no one because everyone already understands, without being told, what an anachronistic name is for. Ancient Egypt does not claim that the modern nation descends in an unbroken line from the pharaohs. It names the ancient people of that land using the land’s modern moniker, because the land’s modern moniker is the handle we have.

Ancient Britain does the same. The modern English are largely descendants of Anglo-Saxon incomers, not the people who raised Stonehenge, nor the Celts — the Pretani tribe — who, after being eradicated by the Romans, then the Germanics, and then the Normans, survive as a rump in Brittany in France and in Cymru, which is Wales, in the west of the country. No one accuses a book on ancient Britain of bad faith. Ancient Greece names the Hellenes, who never called themselves Greeks at all; Graeci is a Roman’s word for them. Every single one of these is a modern label thrown backward over a people who never wore it.

Naming a People by a Country They Would Reach a Thousand Years Later

In fact, we go much further than naming the ancient people of a land by that land’s modern name. We routinely name an ancient people by the modern name of a different land — one their descendants would reach only a thousand years later. Consider the Sintashta culture, dug out of the steppe of what is now Kazakhstan.

When the Sintashta graves were discovered about 20 or 30 years ago, deep inside them were the exact copy of burial customs and funereal feasts that had been written down in the Rig Veda in India around 1100 BCE. Archaeologists and experts had assumed that these burial practices and funereal ceremonies, written down in the Rig Veda from around 1200 to 1100 BCE, had been invented. And then we find, thousands of kilometres away, the exact facsimile of them from 2000 BCE.

Every account you will read calls these people the first Aryans, or Indo-Iranians, and the names are borrowed wholesale from India and Iran — lands the Sintashta themselves never saw. Remember, 2000 BCE; but their customs do not appear in India, or we have no evidence of them appearing in India, for another 900 years. Iran and Aryan as identities did not exist in their time. They arose, as I have noted elsewhere, from a religious reform by Zoroaster that came along long after the Sintashta culture had risen and passed. Zarathustra — Zoroaster — is about 1400 BCE, so about 500 years between the Sintashta and when the Zoroastrian reforms came in and the whole idea of the Arya, meaning the centre of a community, arose.

From the Sintashta’s own standpoint, there was no Iran, no India, no Veda; it was 2000 BCE, no Zoroaster — only the grass and the chariot and the horse. But we call them Aryans anyway, reading the rich later record of their descendants — the Vedic hymns, the Zoroastrian fire — back into a preliterate people who would have found every one of those words meaningless. It is, in my own phrase for it, anachronistic yet defensible. And it is defensible: the back-propagation is sound because the descent is real. We have the archaeogenetic evidence of it. We have the archaeological evidence of it. And we now have the textual evidence.

“The first Aryans” for the Sintashta is the loose kind: it names the people of one place by the later name of a country their great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren would build somewhere else. We accept the loose kind without a murmur. Ancient Ukraine only ever asks for the tight kind — the easier, safer, more literal move. If we grant the harder courtesy to the steppe of Kazakhstan while refusing the easier one to the steppe of Ukraine, that is not a principle. It’s a preference dressed as a principle. If the naming rule is the same for everyone, why does ancient Ukraine alone catch the throat?

The Catch Is a Lag, Not a Position

The reason is not about Ukraine at all. It’s about us, and what we happen to have read. We grant the back-propagated name confidence, evidently, wherever a dense later record makes the deep past feel anchored. Egypt has its monuments and its hieroglyphs; Greece its Homer; Rome its libraries; India and Iran their scriptures. The Dnipro homeland left no writing, and the knowledge that it is the homeland is genuinely recent. It arrived in force only with the archaeogenetics revolution after 2015, when the reading of ancient DNA — together with the linguistics, the archaeology, the comparative mythology, and the isotopes, the strontium locked in ancient teeth that tells us where a person grew up — converged on a single answer.

So the hesitation over ancient Ukraine is not a considered position. It’s a lag. The moniker has not yet caught up with the evidence. Most of us still carry the mental map we were handed in school. That map is out of date, and the correction is not a fringe claim. Multidisciplinary scholars have known since 2015 that all Indo-European language, religion, and culture — all living Indo-European languages, from Ireland to India — go back to the Yamnaya of the Dnipro Valley around 3600 BCE: the herders of Mykhailivka, from whom the ancient DNA now traces every living branch of the family.

And I note — two days ago the Russians destroyed a Russian colonial-era mansion which I visited in a village near Mykolaiv, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Some of you might have seen the pictures of it. Another war crime by Russia. But anyway. I’m with the linguist Don Ringe, author of the definitive study on the origins of the Germanic languages, including English, on the location. In 2006 he wrote that it was the rivers and valleys of Ukraine that made the most sense; and then in the new edition, 2017, he said the evidence strongly points there. Nikitin et al.’s Nature paper, which I’ve spoken about before, from the 5th of February 2025, establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that the Yamnaya, and Mykhailivka village on the right bank of the Dnipro, was the centre of the Yamnaya community from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate.

Steinmeier, the Nebra Sky Disc, and “Southern Russia”

So what kept the answer from being heard for so long was not the absence of evidence. Some of you might remember, around the beginning of the war, I tweeted a lot about Steinmeier, who is currently German president. On my way back from Ukraine — I left Ukraine on the 29th of January 2022 with my cat, and we drove over the border into Poland, anticipating the invasion — I visited an amazing place called Halle in Germany, because I wanted to see the Nebra Sky Disc there. They have this most amazing museum in Halle, which I stopped in on my way back from Ukraine, and the exhibition catalogue had an introduction by Steinmeier.

The exhibition I’d gone to see was about the Corded Ware culture from this part of Germany. And Steinmeier — who had spent eight years trying to troll Ukraine into accepting the Steinmeier formula, which was allowing Russia’s so-called elections in Donetsk and Luhansk in exchange for a later promise to give Ukraine back control of its borders — Steinmeier, who clearly had engaged with Ukraine, like myself, a lot, was still referring to this area of Ukraine as southern Russia in this catalogue.

That gives you an idea of what I now call the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin State: that they could not refer to the homeland as just steppe ancestry, or Pontic-Caspian steppe, or southern Russia. They couldn’t see it as being Ukraine — as having just the same status as ancient Greece, or any of these other cultures I mentioned.

Ukraine Is Not One More Culture — It Is the Source

Here’s the part the catch hides, because it stops people at the threshold. Ukraine is not one more ancient culture among many asking to join the club. It’s the source. Greece, Rome, the Germanic North, the Celtic West, the Indo-Iranian East — the papers in all of my work in Finding Manuland trace them one by one, based on PACA, peer-reviewed, gold-standard archaeogenetic, isotopic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence. And every one is a daughter, a branch carried downstream from the same upper Dnipro River. Much of what we love best about ancient Greece and Rome and Germany and Ireland was forged first on the Dnipro.

I say this without taking anything from these daughter cultures. They are the glory of what the family became out in the wide world. The recentering is not a demotion of them. It’s a recognition that they share a cradle, and that the cradle has a place on the map.

So set the practice we already keep against the one case we balk at. We grant ancient Egypt to a land whose modern people are largely discontinuous from its ancient ones. We grant the first Aryans to a Kazakh culture, by the name of a country far away and centuries late. We say ancient Germany, though the first unified German state dates only to 1870 — I’ve spoken before about Herder’s call in 1873, or 1875, or 1876, one of those dates; Herder, who said “where is our Shakespeare? We must unite the Germanic tribes, and to do this we need a collective culture, something to rally around, like England has Shakespeare.” That began the folklore-collecting movement that Goethe and the Grimm brothers and eventually Wagner used to create a sense of a German identity. We say ancient France, though France is younger than the United States. We even have the Belgians reaching back to a pre-Christian chieftain, Brennus, whom I’ve spoken about before, and to the Menapii, to furnish a 19th-century nation with a deep past.

We project backwards all the time. As I’ve put it, affording parity of esteem among all the great cultures that have achieved statehood requires an equitable allocation of anachronistic and teleological names. Was Bismarck German? Was Napoleon French? Of course we say so, and of course we should. But they weren’t, when they lived. There was no Germany before 1870, for most of Bismarck’s life. There was no France for Napoleon — there were the Franks, the Germanic aristocracy who had taken over France. And the only culture from which we withhold the courtesy is the one with the best claim of all: the source. There’s no principle that grants the name to every daughter and denies it to the mother. There’s only the catch.

There is, in fact, a continuity case for Ukraine too — the branch that never left the homeland, treated in its own paper, which I’ve written. “Ancient Ukrainian” is a territorial name, like “ancient Egyptian.” It names the ancient people of this ground, and that alone is enough. With Egypt, Greece, and the Aryans laid side by side, a real question is left standing. If the rule is the same for everyone, and the evidence for Ukraine is in fact the strongest of all, then why does the resistance fall on this one word, ancient? The rule is enforced in exactly one direction. Ancient Egypt passes without a word. Ancient Ukraine alone catches. That asymmetry is the tell, and naming it is where all my work begins.

The Data-Resistant Archetype and the Potemkin State

In my study of Disinfolklore, I call a certain kind of mental model a data-resistant archetype: an idea planted so deep that it no longer updates on the evidence. Such an archetype digests and processes all the data about it, and the output is always the same. It is, in plain terms, impervious to truth. There is a specific archetype at work on Ukraine, the one I call the Potemkin State. It is the picture of Ukraine as hollow, fake, accidental — a country without real depth or history.

That picture, crucially, is double. The Potemkin State is both the actual brittle thing across the border, and the mental state — the thing propaganda installs in our own brains. So when a thoughtful, decent person accepts ancient Egypt without a blink and bristles at ancient Ukraine, they’re not reasoning. They’re reporting the archetype. The catch is the archetype speaking. Most of the people who feel the catch are not ill-willed. They have simply inherited a map, and the map was drawn in part by an interested hand. For a century or more, the deep past of this region has been narrated through a Russian and Soviet lens that had every reason to keep Ukraine shallow: to file the homeland as southern Russia, to treat the Ukrainian nation as an emerging thing, a province, a recent administrative line. The catch you feel at “ancient Ukraine” was, to a real degree, put there.

Why the Deep Past Is a Field the War Is Fought On

If this were only a quarrel about nomenclature, it would not be worth your time or mine. It is worth it because the shallow picture of Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainians are the same picture, doing two jobs. The Russian state does not merely dislike Ukraine. It denies, as a matter of doctrine, that Ukraine is a real state and that Ukrainians are a real people. “Ukraine, never a real state; Ukrainians, not a real people” — that is the propaganda’s own words.

That denial is not rhetoric idling. It’s the legal and psychological precondition of the crime. I trained as a lawyer, and the point is not subtle. When a state announces that another nation has no right to exist, and then kills that nation’s people in a war to denationalise them, it has supplied both halves of genocide: the intent and the act. Denial of the existence of a protected group is, in the language of the United Nations, a specific indicator of genocide. Denationalising a country is genocide. The erasure of Ukraine’s past and the erasure of Ukraine’s present are one motion. And the premise is false on its own terms anyway, because Ukraine signed the United Nations Charter as a founding member, and that is the only test international law recognises. It has been a state all along — longer than many other states.

So the deep past is not a sideshow to the war. It is one of the fields the war is fought on. To insist, gently and accurately, that there is an ancient Ukraine — that the people of this land were not latecomers to the human story but stood near its Indo-European beginning — is to take back a piece of the ground that Russia’s lie depends on.

Re-archetyping: Use the Words

The picture in our heads is not fixed, and that is the hopeful part. An archetype can be replaced. The work I call re-archetyping — the conscious effort to disrupt, alter, and reconstruct our existing mental models — has a task here: to catch our monikers up with where the scholarship has already arrived, and to do it across the whole university at once: in archaeology and linguistics, in archaeogenetics and isotopic analysis, in the study of religion and comparative myth, in how the deep past of Europe is taught to our children.

It is happening. The historian Timothy Snyder has moved, since the beginning of the war, the start of his history of Ukraine back from the first Greek colonies on its coast around 700 BCE to the Yamnaya era, two and a half thousand years before that, from whom the first Greeks emanated. The Economist has lent its voice to decolonising what we still call prehistory. The data-resistant archetype, as I keep insisting, is not invincible, and it is our work to defeat it. The smallest, most available act of re-archetyping is the one anyone can perform today, at no cost: use the words. Every time we say ancient Ukraine, and mean by it exactly what we mean by ancient Greece or ancient Egypt — the deep past of a real land and a real people — we recenter the map a little, and we repopulate the world.

This is what my paper on the Turkic takeover of Anatolia does to the idea of the Semitic-first ideology, which undermines a lot of our history — rather than seeing the interactions, over two millennia, between the Indo-Europeans in northern Mesopotamia particularly, but also in Turkey, where the first Indo-European writing, from 2000 BCE, at precisely the same time the Sintashta were there, appeared in Kanesh, in an Assyrian trading colony. The Amarna Letters from ancient Egypt, from 1400 BCE, show in textual evidence — so this is 300 years before the Rig Veda was standardised and written down — Indo-European monarchs ruling Canaan, four centuries before the Hebrew Bible, before King David and King Solomon. So the routes reach back past the Near East to the Dnipro, and the old reflex that civilisation began in the Fertile Crescent gives way. That’s work which has come out in the last few weeks.

Whether the lagging name is Indo-Germanic, or southern Russia, or simply the awkward silence when ancient Ukraine is mentioned, our work should be one work: to bring the moniker up to date. I’m quite deliberately introducing the term ancient Ukrainians, and ancient Ukraine, into our civilisation — not as a slogan, not to take a thing from anyone, but because it is true, by the same standard that makes ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian and the first Aryans true. Ancient Ukraine: the cradle of a family that reaches from Ireland to India, standing at last on the ground where it has always been. So that’s what I have to say about that.

The Salted Ground

I was then going to move on to a couple more archetypal analyses. I wanted to talk about the salted ground. One week, around the same bridge where all of this began for me, three small things landed together. A volunteer battalion commander accused the regular Ukrainian army of something. A big social media channel sneered that, while tanks roll through Luhansk, my old employer, the OSCE, is off attending a bridge opening repaired by the hard-working people of Luhansk with the help of God. This is all in the media, in the Luhansk Corpus, which I collected between 2015 and 2018.

No victims were named, no date, no incident you could check — just a place, a real place, a place I knew, being smeared lightly from several directions at once. You could feel it: a low, diffuse unease settling on the name of the town, Stanytsia Luhanska. Something’s wrong there, from the perspective of the Russian propaganda media. Something otherworldly. And your instinct, as a propaganda analyst, is to plant a flag and call it a deployment. This method makes you stop.

I tested it against the pattern of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper who extorts the crossing — and it doesn’t fit. Nobody’s been denied passage. I tested it against the bogeyman, the nameless looming enemy, and it almost fits; but the piece that makes a bogeyman dangerous, the protector who arrives to save you from it, simply isn’t there yet. So the verdict is: not yet. This is not a mature piece of Disinfolklore. It’s what I call salted ground — a place being seasoned with disrepute now, so that a real operation can detonate on pre-poisoned soil later. A detection method that cried propaganda at this stage would be useless. It would burn its credibility before the real strike came. The discipline to say not yet, but watch this ground, is not the method failing. It’s the method working.

The Innocent Apparatus

The militia chief in occupied Luhansk, by contrast, explains in another news item that some Ukrainian soldiers died near Shchastia — which means “happiness,” and it’s a city the Russians destroyed in the first months of the first full-scale invasion. More precisely, it was Prigozhin’s men who destroyed it. But this is long before then, and it’s a town I used to go through almost every day when I worked in Stanytsia. The militia chief in the occupied territory says the Ukrainian soldiers died because they were rigging a bridge to blow, and something went wrong with the vehicle carrying the ammunition — it exploded early. In the very next breath, “our positions,” he alleged, “came under mortar fire from Kiev five times in a day.”

There’s a flatness to the charge here. He’s almost bored. They did it to themselves; we’re the ones being shelled. It doesn’t reach for your fury, and that weakness is itself a tell. In this method, when the emotional charge is faint, you’re usually looking at raw material, not a finished weapon. I run it through the test I built for manufactured wounds — the move where an aggressor invents or self-inflicts an injury and then points at it. Two threads are there: the speaker plainly benefits from the framing, and his side is structurally never at fault. The enemy’s dead are always self-inflicted; the shelling is always one way. But the core of a true manufactured-wound operation — being the documented cause of the wound you’re crying about — isn’t on the page. So no archetype convicts. What I name here is the innocent apparatus: not a finished story, but a posture being preset. “We are never the ones at fault.” Lay that foundation now, and the later strike inherits the innocence.

The Forecast Phantom

Now the one I would build a lot around, because it’s the purest little machine there is — and the Disinfolklore method still won’t formally convict it. That tension is the most honest thing I can show you.

In April 2016, the militia headquarters announced that Ukrainian forces are preparing provocations using OSCE symbols to discredit the mission. Two cars with OSCE insignia were stopped near Smile village. The militia does not exclude the possibility that they could be used to stage something on the territory of the Folk’s Republic. Read that again, and hear what’s not in it. Nothing happened. No so-called provocation occurred. The only actual fact — two cars drove off — is in the same report, exactly as the OSCE said: our cars were in the car park. The menace lives entirely in the future tense: preparing, could be used, does not exclude the possibility.

That is the device. A threat asserted in the future tense can never be falsified in the present, because it hasn’t happened yet; and when it doesn’t happen, that just proves how dangerous the preparations were. Its target is precise: it pre-discredits the neutral witness before that witness can report anything inconvenient. I stood behind that insignia. This is the story that was built to make you not believe me before I opened my mouth. I call this the forecast phantom. By the strict rules of the Disinfolklore method, it is four-fifths of a bogeyman, missing only the rescuer. So I do not formally convict it, and I will not bend the rule to make the number prettier. But the pattern is named, and a named pattern is the defused one. That is the whole craft.

The Mirror Wound

This one I have to handle with care, because at the centre of it is a real child who was really hurt, and nothing I’m about to say takes that away. In December 2015, while I was living in Russia-occupied Luhansk, the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic’s Ministry of Emergency Situations — and, just as an aside, every time Mockers reads “Ministry of Emergency Situations,” my eyes go up, and I know her eyebrows are raised as well; just the idea that a modern state would have to have a Ministry for Emergency Situations tells you all you really need to know about Russia, and then, when it establishes its fake occupying republics, it ensures they too have Ministries for Emergency Situations, but that’s an aside — they put out a notice saying a 15-year-old near Teplychne stepped on an anti-personnel mine and was seriously injured. And then the notice adds this: despite the fact that in 1980 the UN adopted a convention prohibiting the use of mines against a civilian population, and that in modern wars mines are rarely used.

Feel what that does to you. A maimed child — remember the mother and the maiden archetype — a maimed child, the enemy’s mine, the enemy (which is Ukraine in this story) breaking the very law written to protect children. The pull is protective fury: the deepest, fastest charge there is, the one that fires before thought. And that is exactly why I do not trust the feeling. I make myself apply the rule, not the fury.

Here the method does something I want you to notice, because we confront this all the time — whether it’s about Starobilsk, or in Palestine, or in the school massacre by Donald in Minab. The strong instinct is to call this the mother and the maiden, the violated innocent. The rule says no, though. The text names a physical injury and nothing more — no act done to a child, as a child, in the way the archetype requires. The feeling says fire. The discipline says no. It was a mine; it was an anti-personnel mine. The discipline wins.

But then the deeper test fires. Who is telling me this? The same apparatus whose own mines, elsewhere in this very archive, kill civilians it then blames for infiltrating despite the signs. It lays mines, it cries about the enemy’s mines, and it reaches for the children’s convention to harvest your indignation. That move has a name: the mirror wound. You attribute to the adversary precisely the harm your own side also does, then you quote the protective law to bank the outrage. The child’s wound is real. The operation is the mirror. Hold both of those at once.

The Witness, Not the Weapon: Where the Method Says No

I want to end this little mini-series on the one where the method says no most importantly of all, because this is where a lesser instrument would do the most damage. In December 2015, in central Luhansk, the occupation’s police — its Berkut — arrest a handful of young people for burning a Russist flag and chanting what they call nationalist slogans: 20-year-old Natalia, 19-year-old Yevhen, 17-year-old Artem, a schoolboy, arrested in an occupied city for the identity they would not hide.

Now, every surface signal here is screaming at the recogniser: children, arrest, identity, loyalty. That is the exact silhouette of the changeling — the disloyal-by-identity operation. A crude detector, or an analyst hungry for a hit, fires here instantly and feels clever. The Disinfolklore Analytical Method refuses to. And the reason is the whole reason this matters. This text is not a weapon aimed at you. It is a Ukrainian outlet bearing witness to a real act of repression. The story isn’t running an operation on the reader. It’s reporting one being run on those three young people. The mana is faint precisely because nothing has been done to you. Something is being done to them, and you are being told about it.

So the verdict is: this isn’t Disinfolklore. And here is what that verdict does and does not mean. It does not exonerate the apparatus. Criminalising a teenager for his flag is grim and real, and the apparatus’s conduct is changeling to its core. What the method refuses to do is flatten true witness report into a propaganda artefact, just because its surface is seductive. A method that cannot tell the weapon from the witness is not a method. It is the confirmation bias it claims to cure. The discipline to say this one is testimony, leave it standing, is the most important move there is. The Disinfolklore instrument knows what to say — and that’s why I was compelled to invent the name Disinfolklore, to cover instances like this.

The Closed Factory

I’ve got one more story, which I’ll tell you. It’s a very quick one. In every Soviet-era industrial town in Russia-occupied Luhansk, it tells you the same story when you arrive. Before the war, we had a factory. The factory’s now closed. Kiev destroyed it. In my corpus of 10,000 propaganda items, 165 carry this blame-swap formula. It’s the single most effective economic Disinfolklore item I have catalogued, because it meets the listener at the site of their greatest pain. Unemployment is real; idle factories are real; collapsed pensions and lost skilled work are real. Russia’s Disinfolkloreists do not need to invent the wound. They only need to re-label the wound’s cause.

Let me read you the canonical example. 17th of February 2017: LPR and DPR heads Plotnitsky and Zakharchenko expressed concern over the condition of industrial infrastructure facilities located in Kiev-controlled parts of Donbas, and demand that Kiev let the republics’ observers carry out inspections. Notice the grammar. The pretenders position themselves, with no discernible irony, as the conservators of Ukrainian industrial heritage. This is the closed factory archetype in full regalia. The logic: step one, the factory is closed — true, the war closed it. Step two, Russia and its proxies did not close it, Kiev closed it — false, the front line closed it. Step three, Russia’s rule would restore the factory — undeliverable, but emotionally activating.

The Stakhanov Carriage Works, the Lysychansk Oil Refinery, the Severodonetsk Azot chemical plant, the Alchevsk Metallurgical Combine — my corpus is full of them, each one in the occupier’s mouth. The promise is emotionally adjacent to true historical memory, and this is common to all of the nostalgia, far-right, Russia-inspired parties across the whole of Europe — and indeed MAGA. The Soviet Union did keep these factories open. The men who ran them for 40 years, their fathers ran them. The bread on the table came from the factory. The sense of dignity, of skill, of identity — all of it was rooted through the factory gate. When the factory closed, something deeper than a payroll died.

Russian Disinfolklore taps this grief with surgical precision. The closed factory archetype does not need the promise of the Soviet Union back. It only needs to whisper: we remember, Kiev forgets. And here is the cruelty. The archetype was deployed by actors who have no ability to reopen the factory. The occupation strips the machinery, exports what can be exported, lets the rest rust, and promotes a puppet mayor to make New Year’s announcements about the resumption of work of the city-forming Alchevsk metallurgical plant — a resumption that, by the actual measurement of production, never arrives.

The counter is to name the shells. Every closed factory in Donbas has a date, coordinates, a shell fragment, a casualty report, and reports about how the Russians are taking away all of the contents and selling them for scrap. Many of the shells that arrived were fired by Russian-backed positions. My corpus holds the entries and the evidence. Name the shell that cracked the wall. Name the brigade that lost electricity. Name the pensioner who never got paid because a Russian-supplied munition hit the administrative building. Grief for the closing factory is legitimate. Its direction is in question.

The Wise Counsellor’s Poison: The Captured Philosopher

A couple of weeks ago I started Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss, so I’m just going to start one of those — the penultimate episode of that — and then I won’t go beyond another seven minutes, I promise. This is the wise counsellor’s poison episode, the fourth in this miniseries.

I want to begin tonight with the most flattering trick in the whole arsenal, because it is the one that works on the cleverest people — the ones who think they are too clever to be worked over. You have spent the last three episodes learning to distrust the bully and the brother. Now I’m going to ask you to distrust the man who reads: the grey beard, the shelf of difficult books, the one who does not shout, who sighs. The one who, when the tanks roll, does not cheer them — he explains them, gives the killing a reason, a lineage, a melancholy grandeur. He is the wise counsellor, and he is, I will argue, the single most dangerous figure Larysa Yakubova names in her whole book, The Beast from the Abyss — more dangerous than the soldier or the propagandist, because they announce themselves, and the wise counsellor does not.

Here is the claim up front. The philosopher is not the source of the doctrine. The philosopher is the apparatus speaking, in a robe and a beard borrowed to disarm your scrutiny. Tonight’s anchor is Tool 1, archetypal literacy, turned on the most respectable archetype there is: the philosopher. Philosopher disarms in exactly the same way brother disarmed us. In episode one, if you remember, we talked about the fraternal-brotherhood troll that the Russists used to justify their murder of Ukrainians. Brother switched off your defences by invoking love. Philosopher switches them off by invoking thought. Both are costumes worn over the same machine.

The Man They Dug Up and Called the Pushkin of Philosophy

Yakubova built this whole investigation to crack one costume in particular — the one Moscow has been polishing for 20 years. Let’s open it. In 2005, the Russian state did something a confident culture never needs to do. It went looking for a dead philosopher, and it found Ivan Ilyin — an émigré ideologue who died in Switzerland in 1954, a man of white fascism, a monarchist of the most revanchist kind — and brought his bones, literally brought his bones, home to Moscow with honours. Putler himself has stood at Ilyin’s grave. Russian university rectors have called Ilyin, with a straight face, the Pushkin of philosophy. His texts get pressed into the hands of governors and FSB officers. A dead man was exhumed and installed as the official mind of a living state.

Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. Russia is not a brute. Russia is a civilisation. It has a philosopher — a deep, suffering, orthodox thinker who saw the truth about the West a century ago. When Russia acts, it acts not from appetite, but from thought. And here, here is the thinker to prove it.

Register the mana first, that feeling before the argument. It is reverence — the small, automatic genuflection an educated person makes towards the word philosopher. You feel yourself slowing down, lowering your voice, preparing to consider. That hush is the weapon. A state that can make you reverent has already made you a little bit obedient.

Now name the archetype under the robe. This is the captured philosopher: the credentialed thinker whose actual function is not to think but to bless — to lay a patina of respectability over an enterprise that, stripped of the robe, is simply murder organised at scale. Yakubova does the stripping herself — a member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, no less — with a single devastating question, which I give you as her argument, not her words. She asks, in effect, whether a revanchist, monarchist, fascist apologist can be the conscience of anything. That is Tool 1 in its purest form: refuse the credential, look at the function.

Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? Is it generous? Does it open the mind or close it? The Ilyin operation fails on the first question alone. It’s just not true. It’s a manufactured genealogy. So this is Disinfolklore, and of the most ambitious kind, because it does not target your fear or your grief. It targets your respect for thinking itself, and it turns it into a leash.

Next week, God willing, I’ll continue this and talk about how Yakubova treats the Golem and the Grand Inquisitor, who of course is that great grand character in The Brothers Karamazov. So that is it for this week. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being there. Out.