Podcast | Why No Ceasefire's Great - for Ukraine

In this week’s podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts), let’s look at Eight aspects of this week’s White House visit which other experts have not focussed on.

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An extract from this week's Decoding Disinfolklore show on Volya Radio, edited from the remastered recording for reading.

I'm Decoding Trolls. I write at Disinfolklore.eu, on X as Disinfolklore and DecodingTrolls, and at Disinfolklore.net, DecodingTrolls.net and PowerofMana.net.

Eight aspects of the White House visit

Welcome, welcome, Wendy. So our topic is Disinfolklore and everything we've been seeing in our information space this week about Disinfolklore. Much of it has been focused on this White House meeting and the Alaska meeting. We talked about it a bit last week, and Ioana talked about it last week. A great take on it.

But also, Disinfolklore is an analytical method to parse russian, MAGA and other forms of disinformation. So it's a set of lenses through which to perceive, appreciate, analyse and parse Disinfolklore.

So I wanted to quickly look at eight different aspects of the White House. Let's aggregate the entire system, the entire complex of stories. Much of it is Disinfolklore related to this week's antics at the White House visit.

A turning point

First, I think many of us understand this. Perhaps people who haven't been focused on the war on a daily basis since February 2022 won't really understand this. These are the people Randy would refer to as low-information people.

But this meeting was a turning point, looking at it from the long durée, as many of us have been doing. And as I have, certainly since working in eastern Ukraine around the time of the first impeachment. And all the events running up to the first impeachment, including the perfect phone call.

If we remember the perfect phone call that led to Donald's first impeachment, the quid was this. President Zelenskyy announces an investigation into Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden has never even been to Ukraine. The quo was twofold. One was that Donald would stop holding up - I think it was about $270 million - in Javelin missile systems. And also, he would grant President Zelenskyy a White House visit. So that is what the entire impeachment was about. It was about the deal to secure that White House visit.

We all remember - well, some of us might remember - the December 2019 meeting in Paris. Basically, Macron and Merkel and Putin put the squeeze on President Zelenskyy in the Élysée Palace. And Putin had been trolled into visiting Paris. He believed that he would walk away from that meeting with the right to hold elections in russia-occupied areas of Ukraine. Specifically Luhansk and Donetsk.

There were documents circulated about three weeks, four or five weeks before that meeting. They had been signed by Andrii Yermak. This gives us some idea of the depth of their experience in dealing with all of these issues. Those documents did suggest that some compromise was going to be made.

And then there was the No to Capitulation movement in Ukraine. I attended many of the meetings in my capacity as a diplomat monitoring the situation. I was very quickly convinced these were organic, Maidan-like protests. They made it very clear to me that President Zelenskyy, whatever they were planning, did not have the power to give russia any capitulation. That was before the full-scale invasion.

So just the idea that now Ukraine would capitulate - it's just for the birds. But of course, low-information people don't understand that. Or people who think they can use Disinfolklore to change reality don't understand that.

So then we flash forward to the February 2025 visit. Most of us will remember the trauma, and probably remember where we were. I was in an airport when I saw that. My heart sank when I just saw the photographs coming out of that meeting.

And here we are this week with President Zelenskyy at the White House, carrying himself with customary equipoise and grace.

He is arriving with some of the most powerful leaders on earth, basically, as his wing people. So what we're seeing here is what many of us have been working hard towards in our own small ways. That is Ukraine being re-archetyped, not just as an afterthought. Or not even an afterthought, as it was in December 2019. Macron and Merkel, backed up by Obama and David Cameron in Britain, thought they could just force Ukraine to capitulate. Because they swallowed all of this russian propaganda.

Now we flash forward and we see today Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as the essential security guarantor in the world. Many of us understood that early on. But now this idea is reaching the mainstream. That, for me, seeing all those leaders there, is a clear statement by them that Ukraine is the security guarantor for the Western world. That is why they all dropped everything and got on their airplanes.

Re-archetyping security guarantees

The second point I wanted to make about it. Re-archetyping and archetyping, as many of you know, is central to my project now and to my work.

The re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees has been very clearly helping us see this. Ukraine's best case scenario from the very beginning of the Donald presidency was obtaining and maintaining the right to buy US arms.

That's essentially what they've been playing for. There's a narrow path to doing that. And then all the rest, everything around this, about potentially giving up territory, about this or that. I suspect Will Thiel is 100% correct. I always did think he was right about this from a strategic point of view. But I suspect this is what Ukraine knows, because we see the FT, Financial Times, reporting yesterday. I think it was a Reuters story. They were reporting on the security guarantees. One of the four key elements in the security guarantees is that Ukraine will commit to buying $100 billion in US arms.

And this is such a clever re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees. Obviously, my heart sank as most of our hearts sank. We were seeing a lot of Disinfolklore, even today, about security guarantees and Lavrov and all this. You know, it is just nonsense. It's in the category of nonsense.

But what Ukraine is doing - and it seems backed up by the European leaders - is taking the concept of security guarantees. And putting into them a new content. And this particular component, this particular module, that Ukraine will commit to buying $100 billion in US arms. It is a fantastic rhetorical way of persuading America that it's getting a great deal. By letting Ukraine buy these Patriot missile systems which no one else can make, and whatever else they can get out of America.

So I just think that's a very clever way of re-archetyping the meaning of security guarantees. Then we see this is being done also by the leaders, it seems, in sync with Ukraine. They're talking about the best security guarantee being, you know, a million-soldier army for Ukraine, basically.

As we all know, and as these European leaders know, Ukraine is our security guarantee. America is not, sadly, anymore our security guarantee.

Trolling Putin on territory

The third point I wanted to make is this. President Zelenskyy says he's willing to talk about giving up territory along the lines where the battle lines are today. But only speaking directly to Putin. He is 99.9% sure he's trolling Putin on this. Because A, he doesn't have a mandate to give up any territory. And B, he's provoking in Putin and all the people around Putin this disastrous meeting from their perspective in December 2019.

There were reports that Yermak and Surkov... Surkov was russia's curator for Ukraine, and the former deputy prime minister of russia. He was with Putin from the ver…

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