Podcast | The Economist Gets Trolled

As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu.

Midnight Tea at the Kremlin

So the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care.

Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of russia. He thanked the russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour.

The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top russian oligarch breaks the silence.

Why 1843 Matters in My Oeuvre

Some of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today.

Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my post, and Max Boot did an editorial based on it, basically saying the russian army hasn’t changed at all since the first Crimean War.

So, to see this puff piece for a Ruschist. So: a man takes tea with the Tsar at midnight. He recants his Western life to the Tsar’s face. He is shown the folder that owns him. Ten months later, he breaks the silence in the West’s most trusted liberal weekly, while living in Moscow, unarrested, his factories defended by the russian army. The silence was not broken. It was commissioned.

One Package, Two Vessels

The Economist didn’t publish one piece that week. It published two. The profile — 37 minutes of reading, built on 60 hours of granted conversation — tells us who the man is. And beside it, under the paper’s By Invitation rubric, the man’s own manifesto: why a broken russia is bad for the world. The paper’s standfirst, the line under the headline that tells you what to think before you read, asserts his conclusion as if it were the weather: when the war in Ukraine ends, Moscow will need to be part of the new security architecture.

The two vessels carry one payload. The profile manufactures the character — the physicist, the outsider, the chaos theorist, the man who avoids ideological and moral judgments. The manifesto then delivers the policy: stop pressuring russia, accept its sovereignty over everyone, and let its elites design what comes next. Character first, payload second. This is how you serve a troll to readers who think themselves too clever to be trolled.

I spent years inside russia-occupied Ukraine from February 2015, watching how this machinery works on ordinary minds. I called what I found Disinfolklore: the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds, working on their intentions, their attitudes and their moods, without their even knowing. The Melnichenko package is Disinfolklore of the highest grade. It is also 200 years old. That’s the point of this mission: the same families of Chekists and KGB men have been in charge of russia for 200 years. Same genes, same memes — communism, empire, Russkiy Mir. Old wine, new bottles.

The Manifesto: A War With No Actors

The payload sits in the manifesto, so the manifesto comes first. It runs to some two and a half thousand words about the war in Ukraine. The word invasion appears nowhere in it. The name Putler appears nowhere in it. Bucha, nowhere. Mariupol, nowhere. The tens of thousands of Ukrainian children russia has abducted appear nowhere. A russian industrialist writes two and a half thousand words about this war for a Western audience, and the man who ordered it, and the people it is murdering, never come up.

Instead, the war has weather for causes. Great wars do not begin when the first shots are fired, the essay opens portentously. The front line is merely the point where accumulated pressure breaks through to the surface. Pressure accumulates. Bonds break. Politics does not direct events; it is led by them. Nobody decided anything. Nobody loaded the missile that hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv. Physics did it.

When the essay finally gives the war a verb, the verb has been chosen with jeweller’s care. In 2014, after what it calls the political upheaval in Ukraine — meaning the revolution in which Ukrainians died for the European future their president had stolen from them — russia concluded that democracy had run its course, and then acted: first in Crimea, then, eight years later, across four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. Acted. The largest invasion of a European country since 1945, the flattened cities, the eviscerated humans, the torture basements of Kherson and Izium, the filtration camps. Acted.

Then the single most revealing word in the whole document. The West’s support for Ukraine, the essay complains, is really a war on russia in which, geographically, the fighting stays on Ukrainian soil. Formally, Ukrainians do the fighting. Formally? Twelve letters that erase a nation. Ukrainians are not, in this man’s account, defending their children from a neighbour who has come to murder them. They are a formality through which the West conducts its pressure. And when the essay concedes in one sentence that Ukrainian sovereignty is real, the next sentence takes it back: Ukraine’s security, built on the permanent negation of russia’s sovereign agency, is equally unstable. In this grammar, Ukraine defending itself is an act of aggression against Ukraine.

The Menu of Four Futures

The essay’s core is a menu for genocide. It’s a menu of four futures for russia, and the menu is the message. Future one: a russia brought in from the cold but treated as a defeated power. That, we are told, breeds aggressive revanchism. And here comes the century-old chestnut, produced on schedule: Versailles was not the creation of order, but the accumulation of deferred energy. Mana, you might say. Punish us and you manufacture the next Hitler. Future two: russia as China’s vassal. Future three: russia fragments, and a fragmented country with a nuclear arsenal is America’s worst nightmare. Future four: russia as a fortress — North Korea.

The Economist’s profile adds a detail the manifesto omits: this fourth scenario is promoted by the security services and subject to serious discussion in the Kremlin. That admission tells us the author knows the security services’ internal menu. The paper does not ask how he knows it.

Then the punchline. The forms are different; the systemic result is th…

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