Decoding Trolls

Two years ago this month a man came from nowhere to win the first round of a presidential election in a NATO state. I worked out how it was done before the intelligence services published the proof, thanks to Ioana. On Sunday night a man in Brazil won a fourth term by doing the same thing the other way round. Tonight is about the method, the Disinfolklore analytical method, which is the one I set out in Munich in February 2025. It is about who is running it against us, as they did in Romania, and who has now run it back in Brazil. And it is about what the machine has found this month inside Volya Radio. A community of volunteers there has run the method for the war every night for two years. They have no name for what they do.

One sentence first, so nobody mistakes the subject. Lula’s view of russia’s war on Ukraine is not mine, and it is not ours. Many of us have said so since 2023. Tonight is about method. The method works whoever holds it. That is the point.

Munich, February 2025

Here is what I said in Munich, to a Pirate Party audience at the Security Conference. The speech has since been viewed over a hundred thousand times. I repeat my own words because the case tonight rests on the dates.

I declared that we live in a Disinfolklore Universe. Disinfolklore is my word, coined on 13 February 2023, for disinformation that works the way folklore works. It carries archetypes, the old characters and story shapes we all learned before we could read. It uses them to move our moods, our motivations, our attitudes and our intentions. The energy a meme carries from those archetypes into your mind is what I call Mana. Look for the Mana in the meme. That was the mantra.

I said this was not a metaphor. The war for our attention is not like a war. It is the main battlespace of a war, and the kinetic battles in Kursk and Kherson feed it.

I said that the power to archetype belongs to all of us, and then I gave the catch. If you own the means of cultural production, the platforms through which memes are made, exchanged and distributed, then you can archetype at scale. You can re-encode minds at scale.

I said that community identity is wholly formed through story-telling. Herder asked the German tribes in 1777 to unite behind their folksongs. The Grimms, Wagner and Goethe answered. Ninety years later there was the first unified German state. russia knows this. MAGA knows this. They build community out of grievance, fear and memes.

And I said what was to be done. First, know that this is what is going on. Second, create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours, in your own mind and in your own sphere of influence, however small, modest or humble. Engage in conscious memetic warfare according to rules of engagement, which I called the Code of Positive Trolls. Six tests. Generosity, Right, Patience, Mana, Focus, Insight. If your memes conform to those six tests, that is positive trolling. It is Infolklore. And then make a call. Don’t just stand there assaying, like everyone on Volya does a thousand times a day. We make a call. We adjudicate. We listen, we read the meme, we decide, and we respond accordingly.

That was the theory. Now the two elections.

One guy worked out the box: Romania, November 2024

On 24 November 2024 Romania voted in the first round of its presidential election. A man called Călin Georgescu came first with nearly 23 per cent. Three weeks earlier the polls had him under one per cent. He had no party, no structures in the country, and had declared zero campaign spending. He had been expelled from the far-right AUR in 2022 for calling the Iron Guard’s founder and the author of Romania’s Holocaust heroes. His content was a lost true Romania, before NATO and before the European Union. His biggest theme in the last two months was peace. Peace meant that Romania should stop supporting Ukraine so as not to be dragged into a war. Beside it ran the line that ninety per cent of Romania’s food is imported, which, he said, is a crime against the Romanian people.

On 26 November, two days after the vote and eight days before any document was declassified, I published how it was done. My sources were two Romanian newsrooms, a think tank, and the commentator Ioana, of this parish. Here is the mechanism, and I want you to hold it in your mind beside what happened in Brazil.

Georgescu did not rise through his own videos. He rose through other people’s. G4Media and Info Sud-Est found that his name had been planted, as a tag, in the comments under everything to do with the election. “Călin Georgescu.” “Călin Georgescu president.” “I vote for Călin Georgescu.” Under the posts of his rivals Elena Lasconi and Mircea Geoană. Sorry, Ioana, for murdering those names. Under the television stations’ posts about the polls. Under a PRO TV post about the candidates’ wealth. The same accounts turned up under all of them. And then the platform did the rest. On a Lasconi debate video with over 900,000 views, TikTok’s algorithm began offering the name “Călin Georgescu” in the search bar of the comment section. The video was not about him. On Lasconi’s own page, seventy comments carried his name and the search bar offered it again. On a video supporting her with two million views, TikTok’s “search related content” recommended him. The reporters explained why. TikTok’s algorithm associates a phrase with the search bar when it notices the phrase appearing a great many times in comments.

So anyone who opened TikTok’s search box in Romania that month found Georgescu, whoever they had gone looking for. Expert Forum counted the result. In September he had 31,000 followers. In November he had 154,000. The hashtag #calingeorgescu had generated 150 million views. Almost all of it ran through that one tag, which is not how real popularity behaves. Real traffic scatters across many tags, as George Simion’s did. His was obsessively generated around one. In the ten days before the vote he gained more visibility than Geoană had gained in eleven months. And Expert Forum drew the conclusion before the state did. “The winners of exploiting the viralisation algorithm,” they wrote, “are clearly the far-right candidates.”

On 4 December the president declassified the five documents the intelligence services had put before the defence council, and they confirmed it in detail. A network of 25,000 TikTok accounts went to full activity two weeks before the vote. Seven hundred and ninety-seven of them had been created in 2016. They sat at one per cent activity until 11 November 2024, when the whole network was switched on, like a light bulb. Every account had its own address, so that nobody could measure the network by the shared infrastructure that gives bot farms away. The coordination ran outside TikTok, on a Telegram channel created in June 2024. Its subscribers were given the predefined tags to post, #CG, #diaspora, #calingeorgescu. They were given strings of emoji to put beside the candidate’s name, chosen to exploit TikTok’s algorithm. They were told to screen-record videos and alter them so that the platform would read copies as original content. TikTok itself found 1,183 accounts using one tag in every clip. It found 83 accounts following the emoji-and-name pattern, which left 2,912 comments. Twenty-three per cent of those came from Georgescu’s own official account.

That was the first layer. The second layer was the one with a budget. More than a hundred influencers with eight million followers between them were paid to describe an ideal president without naming him. Then the comments under each of those videos did the naming. The influencers were fitted to the candidate afterwards, by the tag box. And TikTok, asked by the electoral authority to remove the unmarked material, blocked it in Romania for a day and then left it visible. It classified Georgescu’s political posts as entertainment and showed them without restriction. The other candidates’ content was filtered.

Two days before the second round, D…

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My new Historical versus Real russia lens has been tested before.

In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.

“…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…”

The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.”

That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real russia of the future.

If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical russia discourse, we can help correct it.

The question to put to every voice in Future russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final?

For their own good, and within the law

If russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come.

So unless Future russia learns what the Real russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical russian troll.

What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law.

Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022.

Why we need to start now

The reason to learn the difference now, before Future russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes.

The archetype of russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical russia.

The Historical russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable russia. They still are.

The limb is gone. The Historical russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece.

The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture.

The History Provocation

Historical russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing.

I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter.

What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy.

It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical russia’s surrogates, a part to play.

In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”.

The record of the last History Provocation

The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021.

On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them.

Of course, the Historical russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli.

Some in the West read the warning

Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June.

One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.”

In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”.

He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition.

That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical russia and Real russia.

Two ways to meet a History Provocation

There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it.

Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the a…

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This is about Future russia. Now is the time to think about Future russia.

Current russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time.

“We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists.

So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana, to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.”

Ukraine’s war aims

Ukraine’s plan does not depend on russia choosing well from its perspective.

In February 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, then head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, set out Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war. Ukraine should destroy russia’s rear: its oil and fuel bases, the plants producing its weapons and ammunition, and its other strategic targets. Ukraine should take back all its territory before peace talks begin. In his words, Ukraine “will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminals are prosecuted, [Russia’s] nuclear weapons are destroyed, and [Russia’s] nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.”

I called those Ukraine’s war aims: destroy russia’s capacity to wage war, permanently.

I wrote then that Budanov gets it. I wrote that this is a once-in-a-millennium chance for Ukraine, and for all of us. That includes russians who understand what the Real russia is, and how their future can be built only on the Real russia, not the Historical russia. Any chatter, I wrote then, about “peace” should be filtered through this prism.

General Budanov had already said in October 2022: “As soon as the Russian regime collapses, it will all fall apart.”

Future russia

This is what I expect. Current russia goes on losing until it has lost almost everything. Future russia is the state of Moscow and St Petersburg.

The rest of today’s Ruschist Federation becomes a whole plethora of sovereign states. Their independence is watched over for a time by Europe, the United States, China, the powers of Asia. Each of these future states must adhere to a Real policy, not an Historical policy. That is a condition of receiving the aid they will need to sustain themselves as sovereign independent states.

The map already holds the outline. Within its internationally recognised borders, the Ruschist Federation counts 83 federal subjects. These are the regions, republics and cities that make it up. Twenty-one of them are republics. Most are named for people who are not russian.

As I wrote in 2022, “Russia’s self-image as an eternal monolith masks its continuing colonial legacy.”

Muscovy was a village when Kyiv was already a city. Muscovy has never had a decolonisation moment. There was no Frantz Fanon in Moscow, and no Sartre. Future russia is what the decolonisation looks like when it finally comes.

Two russias inside Future russia

The current Ruschist state dissolves and splinters. It leaves a remnant based around St Petersburg and Moscow. Even then, however, the russia problem will not have been solved. A state of Moscow and St Petersburg can still be the old empire in a smaller coat.

Inside Future russia, two russias will argue over the country. The rest of us need to know, from the first day, which one is speaking.

One is Historical russia. The other is Real russia.

The purpose of this is to explain to you the difference. Understanding this difference can help us cut through debates today, rhetoric today, and what I call, in other projects, Disinfolklore today.

One is Historical russia. The other is Real russia. They cannot share one country. For 30 years, plenty of russians, plenty of Western experts thought the russia of the doctrine of Russkiy Mir and the russia of the map could get along. Indeed, they thought they could even help each other.

They cannot. Sooner or later, one devours the other. The Real russia devours the Historical russia. Or, as is occurring today, the Historical russia is devouring itself.

The hardest place to separate the Real russia from the Historical russia is not on any map. It is inside the head of every russian. And, indeed, it is inside the heads of those of us who have spent our working lives watching russia. I’ve noticed in my own time that russia experts themselves are just as susceptible to falling for Historical russia trolls as complete neophytes.

The archetype, in the Kremlin’s own phrase

What I want to focus our minds on is the meaning of the Real russia. Historical russia, Russkiy Mir, whatever we want to call it, I’m calling it Historical russia. That is the archetype. The archetype, Historical russia, is russia as its doctrine remembers it.

The phrase is the Kremlin’s own. So I afford it the privilege of calling it what they themselves call it. On 30 September 2025, it was three years since russia had claimed four Ukrainian regions as part of its own constitution. That day, Putler described his programme for these regions, as Reuters reported at the time: “essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands”.

The doctrine’s theorist

The doctrine has a theorist. Vladislav Surkov was for years the Kremlin’s chief technologist. He was the one who staged russia’s politics. He was once Deputy Prime Minister of russia. He was later the curator of its policy on Ukraine.

He got his first start from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is a man who always advocates for the Historical russia. He does so despite his opposition credentials. He does so despite his undoubted sacrifice in spending a number of years in the gulag before being released.

Surkov was initially Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Then he managed to get himself into the role of PR, as an ideologue. In my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, I maintain that Surkov is actually an actor. He is acting the role of controller of the Ruschist Federation.

Surkov is actually from Ichkeria. His real name is not Surkov. On 11 February 2019, as part of his role and on the instructions of the security service curators he serves, he published an essay he called “Vladimir Putler’s Long State”.

Surkov counted three historical russias. Each of the historical russias he counted was tied to a ruler who was great, in his mind: Ivan III, Peter the Great and Lenin. Surkov announced a fourth, the long state of Putler. I answered it the day that piece appeared.

The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska

I had spent three years leading international monitoring patrols at one of Surkov’s finest creations. It was a scene he had drawn: the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. On one side of the river, we had Ukrainian defenders. On the other side, russian occupiers, masked as the so-called fake Luhansk People’s Republic. Between them, up to 10,000, mostly elderly females, played bit parts in this entire drama, set up by Surkov.

This was the only official crossing point on the line of contact in the Luhansk region. russia occupied part of that region from April 2014.

The bridge I worked on was real. The state, the fake Luhansk People’s Republic, was created by Surkov and his curators. That state, which staged the scene around the bridge, was a performance. And so, I maintain, is the state that performed that performance, the Ruschist Federation. That is the Historical russia, not the Real russia.

A russia with no border

Historical russia cannot recognise a border, its own or anyone else’s, because its borders run wherever history reaches.

Borders like that are always being crossed. So there is always someone to fight. There is always a neighbour to be taken back into the house as “one people”, whether the neighbour wishes it or not.

Surkov’s scene at the b…

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Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos.

Enheduanna

Enheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now.

The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method.

Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”.

She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god.

There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does.

What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it. She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him.

The averaging engine

We are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours.

The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”.

There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power.

That landed with me.

Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in.

Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.”

Every word of that is right.

It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer.

It is older than writing.

What a writer is for

Something subtle is buried in the word writer.

A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right.

The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. R-t-.

These are not plays on words. They are clues. They are clues to the early Indo-European mind, and to the minds that fed into it, out of which our whole culture comes.

That same sound surfaces in the Vedic ṛta and the old Iranian arta. Both are Indo-European languages, attested very early in writing. Both mean truth, the true order of things. And the sound is in truth itself. Look at it closely. Strip its vowels and the skeleton sits there. T-R-T. The second letter and the second to last. The same two consonants, R and T, hiding inside an English word, one language family away and two thousand six hundred years from the rock inscriptions at Behistun in Iran, where arta stands carved in the living rock from around 500 BCE.

And the sound is in writing nine centuries before Behistun. Around 1400 BCE the monarchs of Mitanni, on Mesopotamia’s northern rim, bore Indo-Aryan names built on arta-. Artatama: his abode is truth. Artashumara: he remembers it.

That little R-t- skeleton has travelled again and again through the languages from Ireland to India. It is ṛta in the Ganges valley. Arta in Persia. Rectus in Rome. Recht and right and truth in the Germanic languages, like English and, well, German. It never quite keeps the same letters around it. It never once lets go of the same meaning. Rightness.

The words a writer works with are made at their root, another R-t- word, of the truth sound. To write is, etymologically, to true the world. To make the crooked line straight. Enheduanna did it with a hymn. I try to do it in podcasts, tweets, essays, posts and pieces like this one. The instruments a writer uses change. The office does not. I hold the same office as Enheduanna, grand as that may sound, and it is the truth.

The sound a writer cannot un-hear

This is the discovery I have spent six years chasing. It started, as things usually start for writers and for artists, with getting snagged on the material. There is an R-t- in started, and in writer, and in artist.

Years ago the sound of a word stopped me the way a knot in the grain stops a hand. The word was Manu, the first human and first monarch of the oldest Indian tradition. A crowd of other words came with it, uninvited, all carrying the same two consonants in the same order. M, then N.

Say them slowly. Moon. Month. Mind. Meaning. Memory. Human. Money. Mana. Karman.

The thing in the night sky. The span of time it measures. The organ that measures the world within us. The meaning that organ makes. The memory it keeps. The human who does all of this. The woman who makes that human, and you might look on PowerofMana.net for “The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal”. And the sacred power once thought to run through all of it. Mana.

One small sound, M-N-, sitting beneath the deepest things a person can name.

A writer’s first duty here, as ever and everywhere, is suspicion. So I followed the sound. Through thousands of scholarly papers. Across tens of thousands of kilometres between Ireland and India, again and again, in travels I recount in Finding Manuland.

What I found is this. The oldest recoverable word for the moon in the ancestral tongue behind English, and behind all living Indo-European languages including Persian and Vedic and Sanskrit and Hindi, does not mean “the bright one”. It is not Luna, and it is not the sound inside lunacy. It is méh₁nōt, and it means the measurer.

So many of these sounds sound alike that I would ask you to read along as you listen, if you can. Not if you are driving. Not if you are on your b…

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When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living.

The russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the Tr-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy.

Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was.

So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal.

Continued from Part One:

In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood.

Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington.

The nursery

Gold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon.

The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he says he told his wife. Pure Disinfolklore. Does he ever talk to her? The latest drawings, Hitchens reports, add decorative lion heads, more gold and an ornamental staircase. “Where the heck are these lions coming from?” a former commissioner asked her. I can tell them. I spend a good part of my life touring the Neo-Hittite and Syro-Hittite monuments of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, and you see a great many lions there, from millennia ago. “You could imagine a symbol of American democracy, like a bald eagle or a bison or something. The lion is associated with the British monarchy.”

The garden. The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over for striped umbrellas and lawn chairs, so that it now resembles the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He wants Lafayette Park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself. Dozens of trees, including historic cherry-blossom trees, were ordered out of East Potomac Park to make way for his golf course.

The pool. He had the Reflecting Pool, the mirror of the Republic, drained and repainted in what he called American-flag blue.

The house. The South Lawn became a helipad, rebuilt flatter so that guests can, in his words, go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom. A court asked the Administration’s lawyer whether, if the government decided very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, nothing could be done. “I think that’s right, yes,” the lawyer said. One enabler among thousands. They are cursed for what they are doing to our republic. Preservationists, he insists, are treasonists with bad taste. The usurper accuses those defending what is truly right under the law of treason. The chutzpah of it. And his own legal brief, which he edited personally, as if he had nothing more important to do, says the ballroom is a gift to our country from President Donald, and asks who could ever object to that.

The arch. It began in April 2025 as an architecture critic’s proposal for a temporary 60-foot arch for the country’s 250th birthday. The President more than quadrupled the height, made it permanent, and put the gold Liberty on top. He considered topping it with a giant fist, Hitchens reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, in homage to his own raised fist after the attempt on his life. His architect said the arch would frame the view of Arlington as Raphael framed the heavens. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Excavation has been announced without the planning commission’s approval. Small, medium and large, he told the donors, holding the three models. I happen to think the large looks by far the best.

What a child reads

A child reads that list differently. Gold. A ballroom. Lions on the palace. A rose garden destroyed. Trees cut down. A mirror-pool. The king’s own name on everything. An arch for a conqueror to ride through, who has conquered nothing but the inner minds of too many people. Every one of these is a story that every child in our civil…

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One morning in April 2026 a US fighter pilot was supposedly pulled out from behind enemy lines in Iran. At night. That is the story we were told. We do not really know what happened. The likelier reading is that the United States military made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear material from Iran, then concocted a story about a fallen aircraft, the loss of many jets, and a heroic escape for a pilot nobody has yet seen. Some of us remember the cacophony of that week, which was then succeeded by all sorts of other stuff. On that very day Donald was circling the ceremonial axis of the Republic outside Arlington National Cemetery. He had his motorcade drive slowly round a traffic circle. He was focusing on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, while the supposed airman, who may or may never have existed, struggled under unspecified injuries, rescued, it was reported, by hundreds of other heroic US military.

Part 2 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

He wants to put an arch on that grass. A triumphal arch, like the one in Paris, 250 feet high, concrete wrapped in granite, with a 60-foot gold Liberty on top, wings on her back and golden eagles either side. Six months before, in the Oval Office, a reporter had pointed at the model and asked him who it was for. The russian mafia Don answered: me.

Continued:

This week’s podcast is about an arch act of trolling: installing the monarch archetype at the ceremonial axis of the Republic, perhaps the greatest republic humanity has ever experienced, and probably now in its closing stages.

A duty to retain the Republic

All of us have a duty, and especially the Americans amongst us, to fight to retain the Republic in the jurisdiction of the United States. France has had five or six republics. There is no reason why there cannot be a second American republic, one that takes account of all the errors the Don and his enablers, the eparchy, have brought to the fore of so many minds.

It must be said what it is like, at this point, to read the august commentators upon whom I and many others used to rely, in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the other great institutions of the Republic. They take the ballroom at face value. They write serious pieces about the arch. They write sniffy, snobby pieces about gold in the White House. They share the memes the White House releases, to express their disapproval, and in sharing them they keep them alive. That is one of the sadder aspects of all this.

Last week a senior US Army officer in Canada pooh-poohed a very competent Canadian journalist who asked him the straight question. What would you do if the commander-in-chief ordered you to invade Canada? I do not impugn the integrity of ordinary soldiers. I do impugn the integrity of commanders who would rather keep their jobs than state clearly to Canada, a NATO ally and one of the United States’ strongest supporters, that under no circumstances would they obey an unlawful order to invade it. That lack of integrity, that lack of professionalism, is exactly what has led to the catastrophic war in Iran, in which America has expended most of its available munitions and all of its political capital in the Middle East, and has made a superpower of the mullah-led, undemocratic regime in Tehran. The US Army is engaged in the most heinous war crimes in an unlawful war. The Navy feeds its sailors starvation rations on ships without proper sanitation. Meanwhile the bombing goes on. Full kudos to the brave officers who resigned, or were fired by the russian mafia-led administration, rather than follow unlawful orders. We can say that this is just Don and his russian mafia enablers. It is on all of us that it is happening.

My speciality is to look for the folkloric archetypes in the everyday stories that some people call news and I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore. So while all that was going on in Iran, or not going on, and we may never know, Donald, the Don, the russian mafia Don, was looking at a patch of grass.

The straight line

The spot where he stopped his motorcade is the western end of a straight line. Pierre L’Enfant, the French engineer George Washington hired to lay out the capital, drew it across a marsh in 1791. The McMillan Commission carried it west over reclaimed river flats in 1902. It runs from the Capitol down the Mall, past the Washington Monument, along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, which I crossed many times as a postgrad at Georgetown, and up the hill to the old house at Arlington. Americans call it the ceremonial axis. It is the straightest line the Republic draws. Focus on that word. Straight. And everything the Republic does on that line is a turning. A power is handed on at one end of it. A parade wheels at the Capitol and comes back. A cortege turns off the bridge into the cemetery.

We have written evidence of this institution from India and from Ireland, the two ends of the Indo-European world, going back thousands of years. When the same institution turns up at the extreme ends of a language family, scholars like me take it to come from a common source. The institution is the inauguration of the king. The monarch rides along a straight line, on a horse that is later sacrificed, or in a chariot driven by a charioteer who represents the military function. The straight line wheels around what would become, in Buddhism, the stupa.

So back to Washington, DC, an Indo-European community. The arch is to stand in a turn at the end of a straight line. The whole of what follows is in those two shapes. Turning, Tr-. Straight, R-t-. The R-t- of right, writ and truth is in straight. In the Indo-European languages, the family English belongs to, the human who draws the straight line is the monarch. The one who turns you is the troll.

Hitchens’s evidence

Antonia Hitchens in The New Yorker has written the fullest account anyone has of what has been done to that line, and to the house at the other end of it. Her piece, “Donald Trump’s Capital Makeover” (4 September 2026), is excellent. It is patient. It is fair to everyone in it. It is just. It assembles more of the facts than anything else in print. The ballroom. The arch. The paved-over Rose Garden. Has anyone here read Oscar Wilde’s tales about what happens when you cut the rose? The gold. The East Wing, knocked down in three days, for anyone looking for a symbol of what has happened to the First Republic. The drained pool, the donors, the money, the fired commissioners. Everything I read here as evidence is in it. If you have not read it, perhaps this piece will send you to it.

What follows is my reading of that evidence. From 2015 to 2018, just as MAGA was unfurling its war magic on the American people, I was in the tiger’s den, in russia-occupied Luhansk, as a diplomat. I read russian Combat Propaganda every day. I watched what it did to the minds around me. And I was, unwillingly but unavoidably, a participant in the stories I would learn to call Disinfolklore, archetypal stories that infect our minds with a meanness we could not have imagined a few moments earlier. Washington in 2026, I am afraid, reads the same way. It is ten years on, and the lessons of russia-occupied Ukraine, even before the full-scale invasion, were learned by only a handful of Westerners who lived there and lived to tell the tale. I was one of them. Had we been more vocal…

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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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This week, the bridge troll went to Africa. I want to talk about Ceuta, and I want to use what happened there to show how a migration crisis hacks our minds. Everything I learned on a wooden bridge in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 played out this week on a breakwater at the edge of Africa, on a scale I’ve not seen in all my years watching such crossings.

50,000 at the Fence

Ceuta is a Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal.

On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain.

Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open.

The Goats Are the Original Migrants

Longtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them.

The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it.

In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it.

So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue?

The Receipts from the Gate

Start with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. JUCIL called it an orchestrated invasion. Crossers told reporters they had been encouraged to go. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain says the whole thing unfolded against Morocco’s wishes — Morocco, which I remind you is an ally of russia. And Madrid publicly praises Rabat’s loyal cooperation, while quietly returning people across the border at a reported 150 people a minute. By Friday evening, more than 48,000 of the 50,000 were back in Morocco. So the official story on both shores is that nobody opened anything.

The Precedent: May 2021

Now the precedent. In May 2021, the same fence fell open the same way. Around 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours — over 1,000 of them children (the mother and the maiden archetype: children) — after Spain quietly gave hospital treatment to the leader of the Polisario Front, the movement that contests Morocco’s hold on Western Sahara. The Moroccan police — and I remind you, Morocco is an ally of russia — showed what Spanish officers then called unusual passivity. Morocco, an ally of russia, explained that its border guards were exhausted after Ramadan. Wow.

A month earlier, Morocco’s ambassador had said in public that there are acts that have consequences, and they have to be assumed. The European Parliament called that episode what it was: the use of migration, including children — the mother and the maiden archetype — as political pressure on a European state. Spain’s own defence minister used a plainer word: blackmail.

And here is why the precedent matters more than any denial: the lever worked. Within a year of those 8,000 crossings, Spain reversed half a century of policy on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s plan. Algeria broke off relations with Madrid over it. Every state on that shore learned the lesson the same week we did: the queue moves Spanish policy.

One more dated fact, and then you can weigh it for yourself. On the 20th of July this year, Sánchez went to Algiers to repair relations with Algeria, which is Morocco’s adversary. Ten days later, on Throne Day, Morocco’s national holiday, the fence fell open. The same ambassador who said acts have consequences in 2021 was the one issuing the denial this week. The Spanish foreign ministry formally rejects any talk of retaliation. The denials are on the record. So is the calendar.

The Angriest Man in the World Has a Friend at the Gate

Now widen the lens, because the question this week is not about Morocco alone. Two great powers stood to gain from a broken fence at Ceuta, and I want to walk you through what each of them actually did — dated and quoted — before I tell you what I contend.

Let’s start with Donald. His war on Spain has run for over a year, and it’s all on camera. June 2025, at the NATO summit, after Spain alone refused the new five-percent military spending target — a troll which Donald uses to try and coerce Europe into acceding to his blackmail on all policy issues: “Spain wants a little bit of a free ride. We’re going to make them pay twice as much, and I’m actually serious about it.” October 2025: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.”

Then came a second war…

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Four years ago I was scrolling a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Trukha. It is the biggest news channel in Ukraine. Over three million subscribers read it. It carries air-raid alerts, front-line clips, football, discount codes, the lot. And there, in among the news, I kept seeing a phrase: Kosovo i Metohija.

Kosovo i Metohija is not a neutral name. It is the Serbian state’s irredentist name for Kosova, the name that says the territory can never be anything but Serbian.

I know this because as a diplomat in the OSCE I often encountered the meme “Kosovo i Metohija” in the minutes of meetings. Often these minutes never revealed which country said what.

However, whenever I saw the phrase “Kosovo i Metohija” I knew the speaker was speaking on behalf of russia or Serbia - no other member state of the OSCE ever used that meme. Moscow loves that name. It is the frame Moscow borrows whenever it wants to say that borders are negotiable and that some nations do not really exist. And here it was, dressed as news, in the most-read channel of a country fighting for its own borders.

I am not Ukrainian. I read the channel through a translator app. Even so, the meme stood out like a wrong note. That was my first sighting of what I have come to call a Trukha problem. Not just a problem with one channel. A problem with a form.

This week the form became news itself.

What happened this week

Ukraine reshuffled its government, and its defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, left the post. Fedorov then said: that from the moment Trukha was bought by a new owner, the channel began working systematically against him, and he named the parliamentarian Danylo Hetmantsev as connected to the campaign (Detector Media, 16 July 2026: https://detector.media/infospace/article/251248/, and DSnews: https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/politics/fedorov-zvinuvativ-naybilshiy-telegram-kanal-ukrajini-u-zamovniy-kampaniji-proti-nogo-16072026-463553).

The activist Serhii Sternenko had already published an investigation pointing to a Kharkiv crypto entrepreneur as the likely buyer, possibly holding a russian passport. The channel’s previous owner was mobilised in June and blamed the minister personally.

Claims like these are easy to make and easy to dismiss. Everyone in a political fight says the media is against them. So I did what the Disinfolklore method always asks: I measured.

What the data shows

Trukha’s flagship channel publishes its full history on the open web. I collected 35,135 posts, everything the channel published from 24 March 2024 to 17 July 2026, and counted every mention of Fedorov by name. There are 126 of them across twenty-eight months.

For two years the channel liked him. As digital transformation minister he appears as a steady good-news figure: online marriages in the Diia app, cashback for buying Ukrainian, 5G tests. When he became defence minister in January 2026 the channel amplified his own framing, often verbatim: his plan for the war. His Ramstein results. Elon Musk replying that he was “glad to help” against russian drones on Starlink. On 22 January the channel even reported, straight, that Sternenko had become his adviser on front-line drones. In twenty-six months of coverage there is no sustained hostile frame anywhere.

Through May he is almost invisible, and when he appears, the channel praises him. On 18 May it credits him with Ukraine’s first domestically produced guided bomb (”per Fedorov, development took 17 months,” post 137723). On 28 May it reports neutrally on infantry pay talks. Two mentions in five weeks. Both friendly.

Then comes the evening of 5 June, at 20:01. The channel posts this, in its own editorial voice (post 138911, https://t.me/truexanewsua/138911):

“And tomorrow we will tell you about the corruption in drone procurement organised by pan Fedorov. Yes, that one. Don’t switch.”

News channels do not talk like this about their news. Campaigns talk like this. It is a trailer. Someone had decided, before the facts were shown to the audience, that the minister was now a target, and was building appetite for the reveal.

From that post forward, the channel mentions Fedorov twenty times in six weeks.

Eighteen of the twenty carry a hostile frame against him, or defend the channel against the people investigating it. The only two exceptions simply report President Zelensky’s own words after the dismissal.

On 13 June the channel platforms Hetmantsev, the very man Fedorov later named: “We thought Fedorov spent five months preparing a reform, but he spent five months preparing a website.” The full post list, with identifiers and timestamps, sits in my archive and any reader with a browser can verify every one against the channel’s public record.

The most important move in the data is subtler than volume, and this is where the Disinfolklore method shows its power.

The mechanism: real stories, redirected Mana

Ukraine has a real and painful public issue with its territorial recruitment centres, the TCC. Cases of brutality are documented by the country’s own human rights ombudsman. Trukha covered such stories before June, as most Ukrainian channels do.

What changed on 5 June is not the stories. It is the name pinned to them. A man dies in a Zakarpattia recruitment centre: the channel asks when Fedorov will do his job. A detainee in Mykolaiv is found with broken ribs: “When will Mykhailo Fedorov perform his duties?”. “Is this the plan of Fedorov’s ‘genius’ reform?” A TCC officer chokes a woman in Lviv: “this is our reform from Fedorov’s Ministry of Defence.” Yet Fedorov never had power over these issues. They’re the jurisdiction of the army not the civilian defence minister.

In my framework this is Tool 3, Mana in the Meme. Mana is the energy and intention a meme carries into your mind. An atrocity story arrives carrying genuine moral energy: grief, disgust, the demand that someone answer for cruelty. That energy is real and it is right. The manipulation is in the plumbing. The channel builds a channel-bed for that energy and points it at one man’s name, every time, so that three million readers’ legitimate anger at a systemic problem arrives, drop by drop, as a verdict on one minister.

The stories might be true. The redirection is the payload. This is why sophisticated readers get caught. Checking facts does not protect you here, because the facts check out. You have to check the Mana: where is this energy being sent, and who dug the trench?

And notice the trailer’s other tell. “Don’t switch.” Urgency is Tool 8’s red flag. A channel that has evidence of corruption publishes evidence of corruption. A channel that has a campaign publishes a countdown.

A channel that sounds like truth

There is one more layer, and it sits in the name itself.

To an English ear, Trukha sounds like truth. In Ukrainian the word труха means something close to the opposite. It is the dust of rotted hay. Chaff. What is left when the goodness has crumbled out of the stalk.

In my Disinfolklore framework, the final judgment on any meme, or any channel, is to proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. The verdict comes out Positive, Negative or Neutral. The central test is Tool 7, Right: is it TRUE?

And here is what this case teaches about that question. Sentence by sentence, Trukha passes. The guided bomb was real. The pay talks were real. The recruitment-centre cruelty was real and documented.

A fact-checker would clear post after post. Yet the channel fails the proofing, because truth is a property of the telling, not only of the sentences. A telling that selects true facts and lays every one of them toward the same target is not telling the truth. It is telling the target.

That is what the Code of Positive Trolls catches and a fact-check cannot. The proofing does not ask “are the sentences accurate?” It asks whether the Mana is right. Is the meaning generous? Is it patient, or is it a countdown? Does it deepen your understanding of a systemic problem, or flatten it …

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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. The first element is generosity.

When a generous person—or when Mockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to Mockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined.

The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore.

On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith?

The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably Infolklore, not Disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it Disinfolklore.

Archetyping Bad Faith

That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional Disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls.

I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this.

We know that everything he says basically is Disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call Disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way.

Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The Mockers Example

As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which Mockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into Infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in russia into sending him money, or like Girkin forever trying to persuade russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive Disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling.

We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into Infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate.

Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center

We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary.

I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is.

Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down.

The Reformation Parallel

I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs.

They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame.

I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in.

I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near.

6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth

Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indi…

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It pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things.

On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture.

Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension.

I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on.

What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prune every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing.

I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie.

In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here.

On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world.

I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson.

The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades.

Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two?

Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes.

Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of th…

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First thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter?

And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text.

I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing.

And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying.

So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for YouTube stuff. It’s particularly well optimized for that and it doesn’t keep any of the cookies and I generally don’t have to sign in. And so, for instance, I was watching the great Chuck Pfarrer and Alan Brewer today on YouTube through DuckDuckGo.

But now for Twitter, I am fighting my instinct, which is to always go for the app, but I now go for the, it’s on Firefox, and that cuts out the images. Unfortunately, it still has video, but it’s easy for me to scan through there. And I’ve been doing this now for about five days. So I just say that in the context of incoming troll radar, how do I control the information coming into my brain, coming into my mind, because we’re all dealing with so much of it. And the visual, the image element of it is something I can do without because I work in text mostly. I always add images to my writing and I consider myself mainly a writer, but I do use different forms of media. So I just suggest that if other people have found this lack of a setting, that’s my practical solution to it. And so far it’s working quite well.

China and russia: Territorial Ambitions

I noticed a tweet by Jay in Kyiv the other day where he, Jay was referring to this. We’re seeing this story appearing more and more about the China coming in to take a bite out of China, taking a bite out of russia. And I think it was actually mentioned on Times Radio today, which generally I don’t listen to, but I have started. They were interviewing William Taylor, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine in the late 90s and then the charge d’affaires after an acting ambassador after Donald and Lev Parnas and co got rid of Marie Yovanovitch who I met in Dnipro once and who was really amazing really engaged with the granular aspect of what was going on in Ukraine. And so I listened to that interview. And even on that, which is quite mainstream, they’re referring to this idea that China is now talking about taking parts of russia.

And I think maybe it was even Genesis Man raised it today on their show about how there’s a game, there’s actually a game now in China developed, which is, you know, which part of russia do you want? So I can really get behind that. But Jay in Kyiv made a point which I agreed with because when I first heard about this latest round of scary stories about China, not scary from our perspective, but scary for the russians taking parts of russia in this latest round. It was about two months ago by Konstantin inside russia. And as some of you will know, I have a slightly love-hate relationship with him because I am suspicious of him. Despite that I found I find him engaging some of the time and and and a good source of information and again going back to the incoming troll radar and one of the algorithm one of the parts of my algorithm which which I work on is 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.

And so I’m very careful about Konstantin in russia, inside russia. However, he, about two months ago, he featured as one of his news stories on his show about how the Chinese media was running these stories about China getting ready to take parts of russia. And I thought to myself, because I am slightly suspicious for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that again. Because of that, I was wondering, why is he telling us this? And what is the perspective? And my hypothesis was, this is a russian operation attempting to scare us with the idea that China’s going to come in and take a bite out of russia. So this is russia trying to put itself in the place of the West and basically say, you know, we’re protecting, we’re keeping parts of China inside the white supremacist European envelope.

And we’re doing you all a service. And if you don’t give us what we want, then China’s going to come and take in a bite of russia. Now, of course, and Jay in Kyiv, seem to come to this conclusion as well. Now, if it is true that there is this game which is approved in China, and any of us who know russia very well and russians very well understand they are, it is their primordial fear is of China, not of Europe. And so it’s completely plausible that China itself is generating some of these stories. But it’s equally plausible that russia, in their madness, think that they’re going to somehow scare us into sacrificing Ukraine because we don’t want China to take Yakutia. And so I just wanted to raise, yeah, so I suppose I start from the, I want to avoid being automatically manipulated, having my manner pulated, moved up and down in such a way that I can’t control it.

Mental Hygiene and Visual Images

Visual images have such a powerful impact on our consciousness that there’s many things you can’t unsee. And so if anyone writes trigger warning or they say, oh, this is awful, and then they kind of show it to you, like if I scan in the text and I see that I never click, you know, click on it. I remember, for instance, when the Christchurch shooting, that shooter in Christchurch, I remember I was working in Dnipro and going to a meeting in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with a colleague, a Turkish colleague, Turkish Canadian colleague, and all the way there, he was watching this first-person shooter video. And then I had another Kazakh colleague who, when we got back to the office, he said, oh, yeah, I was watching it as well. And then the next day, my Kazakh colleague said, I’m being ha…

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I was going to start with reasons to be grateful, because as you know, one of the four aspects of the model in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for noticing how information — what I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore — affects us and changes us is through our moods. Moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations: these are the aspects of our consciousness, our identities, our beingness, which are impacted. A good piece of Disinfolklore will affect all four. Attitudes and moods are more long-duration elements — of course moods can be immediate as well, but in terms of feeling happy or sad over a six-month period, Disinfolklore and indeed Infolklore can affect us greatly.

When I talk about Infolklore, I mean really what Mokrushyna, for instance, talks about. Mokrushyna and Genesis Man’s partnership, for me on a day like today, buoyed me up, transformed my mood, made me happy. I love the way Mokrushyna tells the stories. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Ruschists can be Infolklore when told with Mokrushyna’s mocking tone, drawing attention to elements we all recognise because we’ve been on this journey since February 24th, 2022, and some of us for longer.

Not all news is necessarily Infolklore or Disinfolklore. Part of my self-appointed job, my little contribution to helping us navigate the current age, is to characterise some of it as Disinfolklore, some as Infolklore, and to communicate how I do this in my head using evolving criteria. When news affects our mood and/or our attitude and/or our intentions and/or our motivations, then it’s definitely in the realm of folklore or Disinfolklore.

Reasons to be grateful today, given everything going on. Ukraine is, technically speaking, handing russia’s arse to them. If we imagine everything happening — Venezuela, Greenland, everything in America — and we think of having this ogre in the back of our minds with Wagner, this storied mythological force able to fly in anywhere and do anything, we think of russia having its four million tanks, the entire output of the Soviet Union. And then we see that Ukraine is handing russia’s arse to it. Whatever happens from this moment forth, so much of that mythos and materiel is gone that it’s laughable when russia is put in the same category as China, the United States, or the European Union militarily.

People’s algorithms, their data-resistant archetypes, their data-susceptible archetypes — if they are changing, they’re updating in real time according to these stories, which could be Disinfolklore or Infolklore. Whether it’s Kupiansk, where Putler announced it had been taken, and now it’s clear not only was it not taken but Ukraine retook it and cleared out most of the Ruschists. Pokrovsk, obviously under pressure, but from what we can see it seems to be holding, and we see videos of russia’s annihilation there. These elements of a story have a capacity, when amplified enough, to transform archetypal identities in people’s minds. Ukraine handing russia’s arse to it every day is a wonderful thing.

russian Arctic incompetence — absolutely wonderful. Mokrushyna was talking about it today. We hear this idea of a deal between the United States, russia and China to divide up the world, and russia’s propagandists are promoting it. But really, the guys around Donald — they’re not charity people. They’re hard-nosed. If they sense weakness, they pounce. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you can hold your own and pretend you’re rich enough in the country club, in Mar-a-Lago, you can be one of the gang. But if your Arctic seaports are falling apart and you don’t have any ships and your piers are crumbling — even Donald, whatever tie he has with the Ruschists, will look at that and think, “Well, I was going to divide the world up, but...” That pressure is going on. Good to see.

None of us — particularly those who made the decision to speak out after February 24th, 2022 — are scared of russia. There may come the knock on the door, but none of it is in any way as bad as what every single Ukrainian faces every night when they fall asleep, if they can fall asleep. We’re not scared of russia anymore. A whole decade’s worth of popular culture promoted this idea of russia as a giant, a massive bear that had to be feared and negotiated with in a quiet voice. But because of what we’ve seen since February 24th, 2022, we’re not scared anymore. When we hear Disinfolklore about Greenland, about NATO collapsing, we can be grateful this isn’t happening when we still feared russia as somehow equal to us. We have Ukraine and its strength and power.

We have the 800 billion euros, which went almost without a blink — agreed last weekend in Kyiv with the national security advisors. 800 billion euros up to 2030 is a lot of cash. Ireland back in the day was getting sort of 10–11 billion over the whole course of a budgetary cycle and built all its motorways for that. An amazing reason to be grateful.

russian air defence — it’s now mainstream that it’s absolutely rubbish, because of whatever went on in Venezuela and Caracas the other day.

We have the Epstein Act of Congress, which came out of nowhere. A miracle. We have a lot of work to do on that front, but it’s there. Every redaction, every lack of publication is now a breach of the law. It’s not enough, but it’s there. No one anticipated it. Chuck Schumer’s finest moment.

German, UK and French leadership, and many other leaders. We could have terrible leaders in those countries. We could still have Scholz, for instance. Imagine all the stuff we went through for the first two years of this nightmare with Scholz. Now we’ve got a proper German leader.

Ukraine will soon have its Gripen, its Griffins. Information wars are devastating russia — all that stuff about Putler’s palace has gone into the mainstream. Donald kind of making fun of them. Story after story going into the minds of people who are interested in geopolitics but don’t pay attention at our level. russia can’t take advantage of any of this.

We see this mental routine: “Putin must be really happy about this,” these Putin-understanders who articulate their mood through this rhetorical method. Perhaps he is — who knows, who cares. Think about how annoyed they must be that they don’t have any power left and everyone can see it, while Donald is doing all of this. That brings me enormous joy. If they had only waited for the full-scale invasion a year or two, had a bit of patience, they could have had everything. Now they’ve lost everything because they didn’t wait. When russia could be at the moment of its greatest strength, had they not had their arses handed to them by Ukraine — there’s no real substantive advantage I can see. The Arctic ports are a perfect example.

I wanted to start with that positive thing because I should be practising Infolklore as well, trying to positive-troll us using proper, truthful, genuine reasons, not deception, and being ethically disciplined. There are many reasons to be grateful.

In 2018, when russia seized two Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of occupied Crimea, it caused a big crisis in the Sea of Azov. I was sent down to establish the OSCE’s monitoring model based in Berdiansk. Most Ukrainians of a certain age will remember this moment — another horrific humiliation. Whatever’s going on in the Atlantic right now — again, reasons to be cheerful. Medvedev, on the day of the raid, actually wrote that he wants the Americans to kidnap President Zelenskyy on russia’s behalf. As Will characterises it, this is peak Absurdistan: the russians justify their entire war based on a mythological coup which, if there was any coup, was executed by Paul Manafort, who’s still Donald’s adviser. And now Medvedev is admitting the russians are so useless they can’t mount a raid and actually wants the Americans to do what they can’t. Peak Absurdistan. Let’s count our blessings.

What I noticed in eastern Ukraine was that the russians used stories to c…

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The document dump. It reminds me of another aspect of my past, where I worked for this New York law firm called Fishbein Badillo Wagner Harding, which was closely associated with Giuliani and Herman Badillo, who was one of the first Hispanic council members in New York City. We also worked for Donald Trump. The case I was involved in — before I went to Cambridge to study law, so I was a paralegal — was a Bear Stearns matter, where Epstein worked as well. This was obviously long before Bear Stearns exploded, but when Bear Stearns exploded, I was not surprised.

It occurred to me today as I was listening about the document dump: the chaos of these files is a catastrophe for Donald and everyone. There are tens of millions of documents. We have enough documents now to know there are tens of millions more to come. But from the perspective of a lawyer, you have — I’ll say infinity as a metaphor — infinity of different ways to charge particular criminals. Well, you don’t — there’s a set of different ways for any particular set of facts. You develop a theory, take a view on the most solid charges, and if the person is guilty of huge numbers of crimes, you try to take the most solid one.

Any of us who followed the Stormy Daniels case from the first time Michael Cohen was charged and jailed — it was done on illegal funding of the election, because the payment to Stormy Daniels should have been registered. That was the most solid case they could make. Donald was unindicted co-conspirator number one. But then it was dismissed, and when it came back, it turned into a business records fraud case.

By analogy, you can see the clearest case against Putler. He’s entitled to sovereign immunity because these are acts done as head of state. But because international law — this principle which sadly the current US regime and Putler and all the paleo-masculinist conservatives want to get rid of — holds that international law has primacy over domestic or municipal law, certain crimes cut through that immunity. The stealing of children under the Geneva Conventions is a really clear-cut crime. And the idiot has admitted to it. He is just as idiotic as Donald in the sense that if you were their lawyer, you’d constantly have your head in your hands, because they keep admitting to crimes from which they’re not immune. He has admitted on television to stealing these children, as has Lvova-Belova. The Council of Europe has established the tribunal to try russia for the crime of aggression, and Putler and all the leadership will be responsible for that. They’ve committed so many crimes — the genocide case is going through, tortuous and complicated, and will go on for years. And the Compensation Commission was signed last week in The Hague.

This is where Ukrainians will be able to claim compensation. And again, this goes back to Putler understanding what awaits him and russia, and why they will never relent. There’s no chance, as far as I can see, unless the European Union gets catapulted into a Disinfolklore universe — which I don’t see happening at the moment, thankfully. When I made my Munich speech, I wasn’t sure. It was the same day President Zelenskyy was speaking in Munich, and J.D. Vance spoke the next day or perhaps that day as well. It wasn’t clear to me how things would go after the White House visit. The typical pattern would have been everyone trying to assuage the Americans and selling out Ukraine — that’s what had happened since 2014. But that didn’t happen.

You see this huge pincer movement, like a lobster claw, against russia — notwithstanding Ukraine’s execution of justice by blowing up long-term assets. Yes, it would be great to see him charged for absolutely everything, but this crime is serious enough that the key would be thrown away, and it’s the easiest to prove — he’s admitted it. They could convince even extremely conservative judges.

Why hasn’t it happened? Unfortunately — I won’t go into too much detail for personal reasons — but I think five judges at the ICC are now sanctioned by the United States, including the chief prosecutor. I’m hoping that now Europe has to say to America: sorry, we’ve helped you for decades, but now it’s over. The chief prosecutor is accused of something which I suspect he didn’t do. We see this coalition between the United States, Israel and russia trying to destroy the International Criminal Court — the apex of the system established after World War II. It was almost unimaginable that the ICC would be established before the Rome Statute was founded, around the turn of the century. Now Israel, the United States and russia together are trying to destroy it through all sorts of disgusting means. I suspect the court is under great pressure, but the warrants for Putler’s arrest, and indeed Netanyahu’s, are still alive. The case against russia is much stronger. I’d say it’s the best, the easiest chance of a conviction — getting a warrant against a sitting president is really, really almost impossible, but we’re seeing justice being rigged every day. That’s my explanation from a lawyerly perspective. I recognise the frustration that we don’t see a massive charge sheet and constant pressure.

I’ll also mention the European Court of Human Rights case, which is the definitive history for as long as our civilisation lasts. That 600-page judgment will stand as the definitive history of russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine, starting in February 2014. It settles as a matter of law and fact basically everything about the war in Ukraine, and it should be the last word. I wish we lived in a world where that judgment — those 600 pages and all the decisions about when the occupation started, the destruction of all freedom of religion in Ukraine by the russians, the murder of people, the Disinfolklore crimes in russia-occupied Ukraine, the killing of journalists and people like Victoria Amelina and Victoria Roshchyna — formed the framework, the mental frame for humanity. But alas.

One of the ideas I’m pretty clear on this week is what I call the zero-sum war. Putler and President Zelenskyy understand this is a zero-sum war. Whichever side loses will, as the Manchu Qing dynasty or the Hittites did, completely disappear from history. The Hittite is the first attested Indo-European language. The Hittite empire lasted from about 1500 BCE to 1100 BCE. They signed the first treaty we have in international law. I’m about to visit Mitanni, where the Mitanni empire was, which I’m really excited about. The Treaty of Mitanni between the Hittites and the Mitanni — the Mitanni themselves were Semitic-language-speaking people, but they worshipped Indo-European gods. We know this because in the Treaty of Mitanni the guarantor is Teshub the storm god — I’ve just named my new kitten Teshub — but also Indo-European gods like Indra, in charge of the sovereignty element, and various others.

Today we see the same dynamic. Most of us are pretty convinced the Ukrainians aren’t going to accept another Budapest Memorandum-type arrangement. But everyone’s talking about who will guarantee, who will protect the treaty. In the Treaty of Mitanni, 1500 BCE, you have the god Mitrashil — who is Mitra, the god of juridical law — and the god Indra, who embodies both the legal and magical aspects of sovereignty. And then the gods Nasatya, the horse-born divine twins. We’re scratching around looking for guarantors of peace, and this is where it began in 1500 BCE.

By the zero-sum war I mean this idea — which we see in the *Financial Times*, which just continues to get rolled and trolled — that Putler is unknowing and misled by all around him. This is such a childish fantasy that I’ll never listen to any serious commentator who argues it as the sole explanation. We have to bank on Putler having a clear-eyed idea of what is going on. He knows, as far as I can see, because he understands all of russia’s crimes. He pretends not to, and russians pretend not to in their Disinfolklore, but th…

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In the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy.

At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield.

So of all the gateway concepts to Master/Magister, I chose “trolls and trolling.”

Then, when I formed the hypothesis in the note below about Trolls, Trolling and energy exchange, I became @DecodingTrolls to test the hypothesis and to troll others into perceiving how we become part of the problem when, unthinkingly / unknowingly, we perpetuate others’ trolls, like, for example the idea that Europe and Ukraine are “weak,” in whichever guise such trolls are conveyed.

As emptywheel notes below, trolling and Don’s motivated trolls are CENTRAL to his mana/power. And the key/core/dominant determining troll that yields/yielded Don’s power was about pedophilia (cf. PizzaGate troll that recruited many MAGA adherents to their Magus Donald due to the disgust it engendered, unjustifiably, about his main rival Hillary in the minds of those who fell for the PizzaGate troll).

This is why the public cover up through ‘redaction’ of the Epstein files goes to the core of Don’s Mana/power.

“The very trolls that Donald Trump has relied on since 2016, people like Jack Bysiobieck, people like Benny Johnson, people like Charlie Kirk while he was still alive….

There’s this whole group of trolls and they have been instrumental to Donald Trump’s ability to grab attention and refocus it somewhere else…

In other words, these people, so long as social media, so long as Twitter is viable, they have been able to swamp the public’s fear with Trump’s b******t and in the process drown out other things.

‘A new report by Reuters uncovered that in the first half of this year alone, President Trump’s family has raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets. This on top of potentially billions more in unrealized on paper gains.’

Now, much of this cash has been coming in from foreign sources, which doesn’t come as a surprise when we factor in.

So they are an instrumental tool to Donald Trump, to his ability to be able to be always the center of tension, but ensure that it’s the kind of, you know, ensure that he can direct the attention where he wants it to be.

‘Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?’

Donald: ‘I think you are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’

Those trolls, that troll in the effort, is fundamentally tied to conspiracy theories about pedophilia.

Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way[…]…

He relies on these trolls. These trolls rely on conspiracy theories about pedophilia. He installs these trolls as the FBI director and deputy director, and he’s stuffed.

And then when he tries to make it go away in July, he can’t, those trolls at first, even the Psobe act…

What happened is that he threatened those same trolls, the same trolls his power utterly lies on, and they stopped chasing Epstein.

But by that point, it has this weight and salience throughout the MAGAbase…

[Don’s chief of staff Wiles is] the same woman who’s telling us there’s no ‘there there’s inside the Epstein files, is also telling us it’s not central to Donald Trump’s power, which not only was it up to the moment in July when he tries to shut it all down, but if you look at what has happened since July, if you look at the way effectively Democrats plus Tom Massey plus Marjorie Taylor Greene have been able to take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson over and over and over again, it is fundamental to his power right now. “ [From Ball of Thread: Young Playboys Gone Wiles, 19 Dec 2025

This material may be protected by copyright.]

⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.

Then, we become the troll.

The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.

Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.

We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.

That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.

We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.

One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.

⚡️Biden Resolved Perennial Plight of the Sorcerer - Can Starmer?

Two aging Sorcerers: Deva Biden vs. Asura / Danava Dæmon Donald.

Fighting for power (Mana) / Sovereignty over our world.

Both Sorcerers know their mantic powers (Mana) fade further and further with every dawn.

Both have apprentices.

How can they know the right moment to empower their apprentice?

How can they be certain that, once empowered with all their Magus Master Monarch’s Magic, the Apprentice won’t destroy their Master/Magister?

How can the Magister/Master immunise themself against treachery by their Minister/Apprentice, should they stand down?

The Plight of the Sorcerer from the first moment Indo-European patriarchal Monarchy began in eastern Ukraine.

The complication is always some variation of:

What if I convey my Mana to my Apprentice Magus, and then they use my own Mana against me?

How do I immunise myself from my ambitious minister/apprentice?

Sorcerer Donald tried to solve his plight, by hanging his Apprentice Magus Pence (out to dry) on Jan 6.

“Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location & thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.”

Then Sorcerer Donald was convinced by Sorcerer Thiel and Musk to take on their Apprentice Magus Vance, in return for immunity, and $1b+ - a true Devils’ bargain:

Yet, of course, Donald doesn’t trust Vance.

A dæmon recognises other dæmons and their apprentices from 1,000 paces.

Donald, once again, like a folktale ingenue has made the same mistake: his apprentice, he’s sure, will betray him.

By contrast, Sorcerer Biden chose his apprentice from good stock.

Apprentice Magus Harris was as loyal as Magus Pence had been to Sorcerer Donald. Wise Sorcerer Biden, unlike Sorcerer Donald, knew the right time to pass on the Right to her.

And it is done.

Contrast too how Sorcerer Putler dealt with his Apprentice Magus the Chef of Disinfolklore Prigozhin himself:

England’s anti-mask pro-Covid Sovereign gave his mother Long Covid:

She dies. He gets Sovereignty over all the English as a result.

Shakespeare loved a good succession battle.

Brown agreed a devil’s bargain with Blair, lost his soul over Iraq, then lost Mana (power) almost as soon as he managed to get rid of Blair. Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande, similarly, destroyed each other. Starmer, current UK PM’s popularity’s in minus figures (manifestly unfairly in my humble opinion). Yet, Ed Miliband his predecessor’s popularity among party members is above 40%. Can Starmer effect a transfer of the crown, before his unpopularity leaves the way open for pro-russia “Reform” party? This remains to be seen. Ireland’s former prime minister Leo Varadkar, similarly, was unpopular. He surrendered power / mana to one of his deputies, who then did well in the subsequent general election.

On and on, back as far as Indo-European culture’s first empire the Hittites, we have seen issues with Magisters unwilling to surrender power/mana. After 500 years, around 1,200 BCE Hittite destroyed itself over how to pass on power (Mana).

Resolving the Plight of the Sorcerer is THE trickiest …

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Archetyping is a very important aspect of Disinfolklore as an analytical method. And archetypal Disinfolklore literacy is the first tool in the Disinfolklore Analytical Methods handbook. So you won’t be surprised to find that I’m starting today with MAGA archetyping Ukraine and Europe as weak.

The US is trying to archetype Europe as weak, yet it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping. We had this fantastic photo of Rubio looking over at Donald and seeing that he was basically asleep at this press conference. Weak. MAGA followers like Donald archetype Ukraine as weak and russia as strong. Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical russian drones and 600 strategic russian drones daily while attacking russia with similar quantities in ways which America, NATO collectively, nor any NATO country individually, between 1945 and today, could ever do. Now America is trying to archetype Europe as weak — in the same way that russia archetypes Ukraine and Europe as weak, in their view, as a woman.

We remember Putler referring to this hard rock song from the Soviet era, by a band called Red Mould, on February 20th, 2022: “Sleeping Beauty in a coffin — I went up and effed her.” As the New Lines Institute noted in its first genocide report, this was evidence of genocidal intent because it was archetyping — they didn’t use the word archetype — Ukraine as a woman, as a corpse, and as the victim of necrophiliac rape. What America is now doing to Europe is what russia has been doing to Europe and to Ukraine. They’re attempting this through the National Security Strategy, but also through figures like Jamie Dimon, a well-named chap, who referred to Europe as a weak continent. It’s this strongman-versus-weak dialectic, which Ruth Ben-Ghiat has been brilliant at helping us see through.

The implication of this archetyping is that 27 individual EU states acting unilaterally would somehow be strong. Of course they don’t think that, because we’ve heard today the long version of the National Security Strategy in which several countries — Hungary, Italy, and a couple of others, and I don’t think Italy will be happy to be part of this — will be privileged by American attention, while all the other European countries will be consigned to the gulag, basically.

The shame of allying with child-stealing russia, which can’t even protect itself, and China run by another weakling. The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak. How they’re archetyping Europe is that they don’t want individual European countries to talk to anyone else.

Today we see reported in the *Washington Post* by David Ignatius, who I’ve never paid any attention to. I instantly archetyped him in my mind from seeing him. I have a subscription to the *Washington Post*, so I see him there all the time: “I’ll answer all your questions on Ukraine.” I’ve never been tempted for a second to dive in. And boy, was my intuition confirmed today when I see his breathless reporting, clearly from inside Donald’s gangster russian-mafia circles, about their breathless chutzpah of a deal where they think for a second that Ukraine will surrender Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to the russians and let the Americans oversee it, as if that’s some sort of sweetener.

After the thousands of people who have been murdered, raped, kidnapped by russia using ZNPP and Enerhodar — and I was the environmental security focal point for the OSCE for Zaporizhzhia, I covered Enerhodar, I met Mayor Orlov — some of us might remember him pleading with the international community in early March as Enerhodar’s native russian-language-speaking Ukrainian residents tried to stop the might of the russian army by erecting roadblocks. I’ve felt the Enerhodar occupation quite personally — obviously not even a millionth as much as the people there, the Ukrainians. But just the idea that these criminals, these gangsters would come in and offer russia ZNPP — it’s absolutely preposterous. It would only happen in another universe. And obviously, given my framing of Disinfolklore, where I talk about in my Munich speech last February — which is the second part of today’s episode — how my fear was that the United States and Donald and russia would collude to project all of us into the kind of Disinfolklore universe that I saw russia projecting Ukrainians into in russia-occupied Luhansk, when I worked and lived and travelled there daily between 2015 and 2018. This is my overarching interpretation of what we see now going on with this ridiculous peace process.

The Ignatius article today — apart from the chutzpah of thinking Ukraine is going to give up the largest nuclear power plant in Europe — they think the European Union is going to admit Ukraine next year because America says it, or that the European Union is going to give up this money so that russia can reconstitute itself. A Marshall Plan for russia.

I first tweeted about this troll in November 2022, when so-called russian liberals — the so-called russian opposition — let it be known that they wanted a Marshall Plan for russia. That was on the 23rd of November 2022. I often talk in Disinfolklore, and in the analytical method, about characters. So we have this character of a Marshall Plan for russia. They obviously believe in this, and now Donald and his criminal gangster mafia cronies have taken this troll and are now trying to use it to troll Europe and Ukraine into paying russia for its destruction.

As I mentioned last week, the European Parliament’s recent very stiff resolution against Donald’s and russia’s 28-point plan rightly calls upon russia to repay all the material and immaterial harm and damage. These are legal terms: the material damage — the 500 billion in infrastructure damage and counting — but then the trillions, I calculate back of the envelope, in trauma and inconvenience and death. It’s called quantum in law. You look at when someone has suffered a tort, when an individual has suffered a wrong, and 42 million Ukrainians have suffered a tort, and each of them has an individual claim for compensation.

Quite apart from anything else, what they are trying to do with this breathless reporting by this clown Ignatius — who clearly has no genuine expertise, who holds himself up as an expert on Ukraine but is now so seduced by his access to Donald’s entourage that he can breathlessly report this stuff as if it’s normal — when we have these laws and very fixed ideas of wrong, when we have the European Court of Human Rights judgment establishing russia’s culpability, the Council of Europe chamber established to try russia for the crime of aggression. We have the legal basis for russia’s culpability and financial liability. And then we have Donald and his cronies trying to create this Disinfolklore universe where up is archetyped as down, where it’s a bit like the First World War — “right and wrong on both sides” — whereas of course this war is like the Second World War.

I always remember going to my old Cambridge college, going into the chapel. We were shown the book commemorating all of the college members who died during the First War, as they refer to it. And there are German names there — the German aristocracy would send their children to be educated at Cambridge, even back in those days. Then the person showing me around showed me the condolences book for the Second War and pointed out that there are no German names in it. Not that there weren’t German college members who died, but they fought on the other side. As they said, the Second War was a different kind of war. As indeed is this one.

What Donald and this entire saga we’ve been going through, quite apart from everything else, is an attempt to re-archetype this war as something akin to the First World War — right on both sides. And the chutzpah of them taking this call by the so-called russian opposition — we can trace this meme from the 23rd of November 2022 when I first picked it up. We can trace it from there throug…

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⚡️US declares war against European Values.

United States’s newly published National Security Strategy is a declaration of war against those of us fighting to retain the post-World War Two legal and social orders.

When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe.

We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled. Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.

The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into russia, the credibility of russia’s threats against us is high.

More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating.

That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election.

However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders.

The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.

Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless.

Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga.

English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.

In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing russia from its own funks.

Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed.

5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kyiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help russia when it occupied Ukraine.

For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.” Because of this weakness russia was able to regroup and continue to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainians. So the new National Security Strategy is in some ways a continuation of US foreign policy.

However today Ukraine and Europe has agency and capability. Both Europe and Ukraine must preserve our freedom so that when America wakes up from this MAGA nightmare, there is at least one island in our world free of the Hand Maid’s Tale world of perpetual war that Donald, China, Iran, russia and the other Axis of Misogyny powers are trying to enmesh us in.

⚡️“Russian mafia Russian and NYC chapters meet in Miami to cos-play Yalta.”

No country is safe - Israel, America, russia itself,… when ‘territorial integrity’ is no longer protected.

Ukraine must take back the Kuban and China Inner Mongolian, Czechia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland can share Konigsberg, and deport its russians to China.

⚡️The Styx and idea of rivers being associated with the after life in Indo-European cultures originated on the shores of the Dnipro. In Mykhailivka in Zaporizhzhia.

The essence in all Indo-European religions of the passage into the afterlife has been deduced by distilling all known early Indo-European religious texts.

Bruce Lincoln, an American specialist in Indo-European religion, achieved this remarkable feat and set it out:

“The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river’s water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.”

Given what we now know about how Indo-European language and religion originated in the area affected by the explosion of the dam by the russians, it’s now possible to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that an idea that later evolved into other Indo-European cultures’ descendant religions - Greek, Iran, India, for example - was first formulated by Serednii Stih-Yamna humans in this area of the Dnipro river.

⚡️russia-USA’s ridiculous offer to Ukraine

Putler: “If it costs me 2m Russian soldiers to occupy temporarily a few more villages in eastern Ukraine, I’ll do it.”

USA: “Ukraine: don’t make Putler expend 2m Ruschists. Capitulate!”

Ukraine: “Bring it on. 2m fewer Ruschists is a win.”

⚡️What Ukraine victory looks like?

Written extensively on this issue: How this war ends?

From the perspective of one of the few foreigners to live inside russia’s brutal, brain-hacking, murderous and mad occupation of Luhansk. I worked there as a diplomat 2015-2018. Even I did not anticipate Bucha.

Besides, wars are won on the battlefield. russia, having lost on the battlefield, as of early March 2022, has ONLY been playing since for people like @BorisJohnson and @nfergus to persuade Ukrainians to accept occupation in exchange for a mythical peace. 2014-2022 we had the Minsk Accords, which it was my job to monitor the implementation of: on the ground. Many nights I documented many thousands of murderous ceasefire violations by russia in Stanytsia Luhanska. No-one cared in the international community to support Ukraine properly.

So today Ukraine will end russian economy and provoke the continuation of the 1990 collapse of the russian empire. With strikes on oil refineries in remote republics Ukraine is initiating the carbon copy process that led to Belarus SSR, Ukraine SSR and russian SSR dissolve the USSR - so as sovereigns they could enter into gas and oil deals to keep their people alive.

TimothyDSnyder SPlokhy and HrytsakYaroslav explain patiently to nfergus why Findlandisation/sacrifice of Ukrainian lands will not yield peace:

September 13, 2025, Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Yalta European Strategy (YES) held a discussion “What Will Historians Consider a Ukrainian Victory?”

https://www.youtu.be/5JxKRAl6kJw

⚡️ In the Fairy Tale, Trump and Ruschia always triumph.

Notice the similarity in structure?

That’s Disinfolklore. An ill…

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I’ve been occupied with the 28-point plan all week and this saga. A lot of what I’ve written is about that. Basically, the first intimation I had of the capitulation plan was on the 11th of November, when a journalist wrote in the Kyiv Post that the United States was attempting to remove the reference to territorial integrity from the annual UN resolution condemning russia’s occupation, invasion and aggression against Ukraine. That was an ominous sign. The moment I saw this capitulation plan, I thought of that report.

I first wrote about it on the 21st of November: “Russia’s Escalations in Europe — Scenarios and How Witkoff’s Capitulation Plan Will Backfire.” One: attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine. Two: desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament.

I was wondering, as many of us have been, what russia hopes to achieve by attacking NATO countries and sending drones in. I do have this sense that the unwillingness of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries to respond aggressively is partly a function of the lack of American support under both the former and current president for NATO. But I also have a strong intuition that they are allowing russia to exhaust itself, to create these kinetic attacks — and that the purpose of this lack of response, which frustrates all of us and especially Ukrainians, is to allow russia, in the way you might a toddler, to just play out its aggression. Meanwhile, the main game is arming Ukraine. I saw this week that Norway’s response to the 28-point capitulation plan was to front-load a billion euros in planned arms deliveries to Ukraine.

I’m leaning towards this idea that desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking russia back is what russia is up to. Like a dead cat on the table, russia wants to distract us — as it did after Crimea by occupying parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, trying to spur revolts around the rest of Ukraine, then escalating in Syria. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. When russia hit that LNG carrier on the Danube, that was a big sign — and nothing really seemed to happen in response.

I then wrote: “Donald’s Russian mafia controllers’ latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender, at a moment when there are 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk. Likely it will backfire. It will help bolster President Zelensky when he says no for the nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation. Meanwhile, the project to dissolve Russia into four to five sovereign states continues.”

I noticed, as some of us might have, this kind of briefing against Umerov, the former defence minister and head of the security council. This journalist who wasn’t on my radar — a lot of people seem to rate her — Kathleen Dombos, extraordinary name. She was briefing about Umerov and Yermak. It struck me that just because we support Ukraine doesn’t mean every journalist covering it understands what’s happening. If one thing we’ve seen this week, it’s that a lot of journalists I’ve never heard of are part of the White House press room and are probably very esteemed in their professions, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about Ukraine or have any understanding of what all of us have been monitoring so closely since the 24th of February 2022 — and which many of us have been monitoring since February 2014, when russia first invaded.

This kind of breathless reporting of things which you and I, having followed this very closely and having listened to Mokrushyna or Will or Wendy or others each day, understand is just a new cycle of the same old stuff — that’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It seemed to me that someone, probably a faction within the American administration, was trying to weaken Ukraine by getting rid of Umerov and Yermak. Yermak in particular has been on this rodeo since November 2019 and is the best person for the role. Because of Rubio’s status as national security advisor, Yermak can meet him directly as his interlocutor, which is very helpful.

I just noticed that undercurrent. I think all of us on Volya Radio do our best not to intervene in Ukrainian internal politics, because just because we support Ukraine 100% doesn’t mean we’ve earned the right to intervene in whatever’s happening internally. But I’ll be watching the campaign against Umerov and Yermak quite closely.

Donald is at his weakest. He can still choose to go all in on Ukraine. He lost the Epstein files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency. Then this month’s election defeats — the NYC mayor, Virginia, across the board wins for the Democrat Party, Pennsylvania school boards — mark the beginning of the end for a physically depleting Donald.

Since then, we’ve seen him announce he was going to introduce a bill to restore parts of Obamacare. But Congress members, as soon as they heard, threatened mass resignation. The bill was pulled. The reason they threatened mass resignation — something we haven’t seen over the cutting of USAID or ICE or anything else — was because they hadn’t been consulted and they’re sick of being treated like slaves. The White House handling of Congress has weakened Donald considerably. Because of this weakness, he’s allowed russia to come out with this ridiculousness of the 28-point plan.

Then there’s the fact that russia’s central bank printed 1.65% of russia’s GDP equivalent in new rubles last week — the Bank of russia is the source for that. To put it in context, the United States printed about 20% of GDP during COVID and an equivalent amount during the financial crisis. russia is at 1.65% of GDP — and of course that GDP denominator is probably a lie from 2023, so the real figure is likely higher. We’ve got a little way to go, but the trajectory is clear. I think that’s what explains this haste with the plan.

I was quite happy with this one: “Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey.” Americans are mad at Donald for two and a half thousand appearances in the Epstein files. Ukraine needs to give Donald a Thanksgiving turkey. Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people. Thankfully, nothing is going to happen over Thanksgiving. This is the same pattern we’ve seen again and again.

I thought Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation was a significant bellwether. Now these threats by Congress members en masse to resign their seats and give the Democrats a majority underpin my immediate reaction to her resignation: she is archetyping herself for a run for the presidency. She and Steve Bannon — who I believe is her controller, her puppeteer, the person who gives her her lines — he clearly sees her as a vehicle to propel him to the presidency. According to Michael Wolff, Epstein’s biographer, Steve Bannon sees himself as presidential material. Maybe he sees MTG as a better vehicle. But in any case, that was a harbinger for what we’ve subsequently seen with the other Congress members.

All of this feeds into interpreting what Donald is up to. His chances of success in forcing Ukraine into surrender or withholding intelligence support are in proportion to his power fading.

A lot of people are questioning what’s going on inside the administration. When I was studying intellectual history at Georgetown University as a postgraduate, I had this amazing teacher, Hisham Sharabi — one of the great Arab intellectuals, Palestinian intellectuals of the twentieth century. He ran the full gamut from helping the PLO in the armed struggle, to teaching Bill Clinton at Georgetown, to being celebrated at the time of the Oslo Accords and given credit for helping Clinton put that deal together. By the end of his life, Sharabi was against the Oslo Accords. He taught me intellectual history and was a great scholar and writer.

The gender aspe…

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Minsk is one of these characters I’ve been watching very closely. The Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to feel free. It prompts us to look for archetypal characters in the data — characters which aren’t typical. It’s not always Kellogg. Sometimes it’s Ukraine, the country itself. Ukraine archetypes as David or Goliath. russia archetypes itself, switching between David and Goliath — on the one hand, “everyone’s ganging up on us, let me into the G8”; on the other, “we’re the mighty second army.” The power of this as an analytical tool comes to the fore when we recognise, for instance, that Kellogg is going to Minsk.

I bet you Kellogg doesn’t know what I’m talking about here. He doesn’t understand why he is going to Minsk. The reason he’s going to Minsk, I believe, using the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to push this perennial troll about Minsk into the information space again.

For me, Minsk is a living character. A living being. I was in eastern Ukraine on the day Minsk II was signed in mid-February 2015, and my job immediately changed. Under Minsk II, russia and Ukraine agreed to withdraw their weapons systems a sufficient distance from the line of contact, which in the area I was in ran along the middle of the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk Oblast. Artillery had to move more than 30 kilometres away on each side. Myself and my colleagues from the OSCE — our job was to monitor the withdrawal and then, over the coming years, to ensure it was maintained.

For instance, russian occupiers on the Luhansk side, the russian-occupied side of the river, used to go home in their tanks for lunch. We went through this whole debate about whether this was a breach of Minsk. Then we found out they were just going home for their lunch in the tank. So it was less than 30 kilometres, but we let it go. When there were breaches of Minsk, I had to certify them in a legal sense. These were then reported. Sometimes I certified thousands of breaches of the ceasefire.

Minsk for me is a living character. It’s the difference between knowing a famous person because you’ve seen all their films or read the character in a book, and actually living in the same house as that famous character. That’s why I particularly tune in to the dynamic meaning of Minsk in russian Disinfolklore. That’s why I tuned in immediately when I saw Kellogg was going to Minsk.

My working assumption — and no data has displaced this yet — is that what russia really wants is Minsk III. I archetype Minsk III as actually the agreement which was then breached between Duncy Putler and the Chef of Disinfolklore himself, Prigozhin, brokered on the day of the coup — the agreement that Prigozhin gets to go to Belarus and disappear, and they’ll fake the aeroplane crash. So that’s Minsk III. I then wrote about Minsk IV. What I’m trying to do in my small way is re-archetype Minsk, because what russia really wants is the contact line to be frozen as is, faking in the tiny advances they’ve made since February 2022.

I heard today that Donald in Canada was again pushing for Crimea to be recognised as russian. This is what they’re fixed on. This is why I call Duncy Putler the village idiot, the village dunce. They fix on these things and they want their Minsk. We even saw the head of the OSCE in Moscow a few months ago — I wrote about it at the time. russia denied there would be OSCE monitors, which told me russia actually wants them. But of course, in the era of drone warfare, the job I did would be absolutely impossible today.

The 30-kilometre withdrawal zone either side of the contact line for artillery, tanks and different weapons systems according to their range — that’s a really quaint, old-fashioned way of maintaining a ceasefire or a peace. Now you have drones which no one can see, which radars can’t detect and can’t stop, as we see with the Shahed drones. Monitoring a ceasefire would be absolutely impossible. Someone flies a drone — that should be a breach of the ceasefire.

But that doesn’t mean russia isn’t still madly trying to push Minsk as a concept, as an idea. James, you mentioned someone in President Zelenskyy’s team said there will be no Minsk. I recall it from that meeting in Indonesia where Ukraine set out its 10-point peace plan. The first point is: there will be no Minsk III. Ukraine cannot say this enough. It has said it a thousand times. Thankfully, all of our leaders are now on board with this — apart from one, sadly, who is indulging the russians. And that is the purpose of Kellogg going to Minsk.

Publicly, russia says it can press on and keep going forever. But what it really wants is to stabilise the front lines and rerun this whole Minsk III troll — where you had five years after the Minsk agreements, in December 2019, President Zelenskyy in Paris at that very memorable, important meeting with Macron, Merkel and Putin. russia just wants to replay the same tune again and again.

I don’t think Kellogg would understand this. Paul Manafort might — he is probably the liaison between the oligarchs, Putin and Donald’s team. He may understand why they’re pushing Minsk. But as far as Kellogg goes — he’s the one who said “we need to hit the mule to teach the lesson.” He’s just like a mule, a dumb mule, who is probably doing this without understanding it. He still thinks people are listening to what he is doing in the peace process.

I didn’t pick up any vibes from Merz or Meloni or any of them suggesting otherwise. If we look at the body language from Meloni — some epic photographs from Canada. There’s no one pushing for Minsk III now. I think all of our leaders have been convinced of what I knew immediately: that after the full-scale invasion, you would never have another Minsk. This war goes on to the end, until russia leaves the whole of Ukraine — if that’s in a hundred years or in a few weeks. All of us are working for it to be in a few weeks or a month or two. But there will be no Minsk III.

It’s not technically possible. Belarus entered the war. We remember this. It is a party to this war. Ukraine remembers this. Ukraine would be fully within its rights — and may well do this — to take out all of the russian matériel and troops supposedly assembling in Belarus. The idea of Lukashenko playing coy and innocent — he is very much party to this war and sanctioned as such. Ukraine is perfectly within its rights, as Will has pointed out, to strike sites in Belarus.

That’s why I believe Kellogg is going to Minsk. It’s an embassy on behalf of russia, and it’s mainly to feed the information space. We’re going to see Minsk for the next week or so. It’s supposed to provoke in people’s minds this halcyon moment where we had a ceasefire and people stopped dying — and russia was able to get on with brainwashing the people in the areas it occupied, disassembling all the factories, licking its wounds.

As an American, it astonishes me that the people around that great country — the greatest country there’s ever been — can be laid so low as to have Kellogg unknowingly going merely to serve as a prompt for a Disinfolklore character, “Minsk,” in our information space. That’s really what I want to talk about today.

⚡️russia’s Core Competency? Industrialisation of suicide-bomber creation.

Sculpting Suicide Bombers out of ordinary humans used to be an artisan trade. russia learned it from Assad’s father, who perfected the art.

Every day since March 2023 1000+ russian soldiers, knowing they will be killed, have executed assaults in Ukraine which are doomed to fail.

How does russia get ordinary humans to participate?

We have seen thousands of videos of such assaults, ghosts crossing no-man’s land turned to dust by Ukrainian drones.

We’ve read hundreds of first-hand accounts l…

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Jeffrey Sachs was in my mind because he was this kind of devil from the early 1990s, when he was responsible for shock therapy or whatever. But I hadn’t encountered him in reference to Ukraine until I was on holiday on the Turkish Riviera in the summer of 2024. A really close friend of mine — who, like many people, has no sympathy for Ukraine and loads of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians — and I said to him: “Look, you’re really lucky, because I’m one of the few people who has spoken to more local elected officials in Ukraine than almost any Westerner.” I spent four years of my life, every working day, going into the villages and the hromadas — the decentralised former Soviets — and speaking to people. That was my level as a very low-level diplomat and member of the international community. I discovered I could get meetings with these village heads who had been elected under this amazing decentralisation plan which Ukraine introduced on the 1st of April 2014. President Poroshenko did amazing work with it, and so did President Zelenskyy.

Power was decentralised to these villages, former Soviets which had never had any power. They used to have to go to the district councils to get money to change a light bulb. All the elections were fixed. All these communities were designed around the communal farm. Until relatively recently, many of the people there didn’t have a passport — they couldn’t even leave their villages without permission. Suddenly this new process comes in, and you have these amazing leaders, male and female, in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovohrad — that was my area of operation. In Dnipropetrovsk, half of the hromada leaders were women. I went to each of them and asked: what made you do this? It was a voluntary process. They would bring me around these amazing schools — European-standard schools funded by the European Union, the Ukrainian government and USAID.

It’s an amazing story of decentralisation of power, of governance reform, which is virtually impossible in most of our countries because there are so many vested interests. Ireland, for instance, still has the same governance structure it had when it was ruled by England. It’s just impossible to change. So it really impressed me that in Ukraine, in the midst of a war, over the course of five years, they rammed through this really democratic process. This is probably why the left — and there are many people in the English left who full-throatedly support Ukraine and have been over there a lot — anyone who looks into Ukrainian governance will be really impressed by what they do. They keep 50% of their taxes.

I’m saying to my friend: “This is my experience. I can tell you there are no Nazis in Ukraine. I can tell you they will fight to the last person. I can tell you these are the areas that are now occupied, and I met the leaders there. Some of them are dead now. Some of them are in jail. Others are just waiting, biding their time to come back. I think every day of the people I met in schools there, the older people who gave us gifts and bread, who are in these places the Russians have been brutally occupying.”

And then he quotes Jeffrey Sachs to me. I said: “Who is Jeffrey Sachs? I don’t even know if he’s been to Ukraine. And somehow you believe him over me — your friend whom you’ve known for decades.” That has always stuck in my mind. Whenever I hear Jeffrey Sachs, I think about it. I think about what kind of algorithm is serving this stuff up to my friend — that he’s watching Jeffrey Sachs talking about things — and why is he believing Jeffrey Sachs over me, someone who has actually been there and talked to the people?

I used to think, when I set out on this path in 2018 to try and understand Donald’s magic — how did he troll people so successfully? — that it was just a matter of getting the truth in there. I wrote my first things online in 2019. Up to that point, I was completely invisible. But now I realise it’s about amplification. It’s about bot networks. It’s about the financial motivations of these people. But in a way, it isn’t even about financial motivation — all of us spend most of every day on Ukraine, and none of us are earning any money from it. So it’s about amplification and bot networks. And someone like Sachs — he lost his soul a long time ago. Like Donald, he has no shame.

The shame of being called out won’t make him skulk away, because he’s not in good faith. He’s not right. He’s not looking at the Code of Positive Trolls. He knows what he’s saying is a lie. He knows how much money he’s got from China, from the UAE or wherever else to do this. It’s part of this whole system. I think I saw he’s got seven bookings in twelve days. Who’s doing that? No one’s doing that for you, Wendy, or for me. There’s a whole network — a paid, financial network behind it, of russians, of the oligarchs he helped enrich — whatever his motivation. I guess we’ll still see him popping up again and again. It’s always a bit annoying when people like Will Thiel and people like me, who know a lot more in a provincial, regional way about governance in Ukraine — why is no one platforming us? We just have to keep on trucking.

It was great to see him exposed in that way, and I’m glad to see it. But I guess he’ll keep selling his wares. We see these people — like Putin, like the war itself — as a complete disaster repeating again and again. He’ll probably continue doing that.

I’m always usually quite happy when I try — as gently, as astutely, as skilfully and as unemotionally as I can manage — to challenge people. I often think about this conversation I had in Turkey about Jeffrey Sachs. I’m glad I had it. I don’t know if I changed my friend’s mind, but I hope so. We need to challenge these things and find skilful ways — emotionally resonant ways, clever ways, different voices — not to go on about it, but to find skilful means to convince people. Definitely call out the lies. When we have knowledge that the person is lying, call it out. But the real lesson is that presenters aren’t doing it, and we see this in America a lot at the moment, which is terrible.

Volume and frequency — that’s one of the key patterns. Take the Jeffrey Sachs thing. He’s not on my mind at all. When I look at YouTube, I clean all my cookies so I just get the default feed. But clearly my friend has probably got six years of vatnik stuff brainwashing him in his algorithm. With Jeffrey Sachs, I remember scanning my timeline and you suddenly see this thing in a positive sense — and you know that’s going to be the issue of the day. So you try to come up with a response.

We see these repetitive patterns, which many of us are tuned into — particularly coming from russia, because they just come up with the same lines again. It’s on a calendar, like an Outlook calendar. “Six months now, we have to go for peace negotiations again.” “Let’s accuse Zelensky of buying a castle in God knows where — should we say Italy or America this time?” The repetition, volume, frequency — then you see the same energy outward. It’ll always be Zelenskyy buying something. The energy is “corruption.” But it won’t always be a castle in Italy. Sometimes it’s California. I think he was buying a ranch today. Of course, that repetition also works — it convinces people it’s true. But for us who are deliberately trying to look out for it and not fall for trolls, when I see something repeated like that, I’m suspicious. It gets me to look closer.

We no longer have to rely on some quaint Italian TV programme. We are making the news ourselves, trying to make it as engaging as possible by sharing interesting things, creating interesting things with different voices, different colours, humour. That’s a very positive thing which never existed before. We are fighting back. What Volya Radio does with Mokrushyna, with Will and all of you — Genesis Man, Midwest Fellow, yourself Wendy, Ioana of course, Yeni, and everyone — is countering this in our own way. We’re c…

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Yesterday was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a white supremacist. In the wake of that murder, the movement from the right and the far right was to archetype those like George Floyd, but mainly those supporting George Floyd in the demonstrations afterwards — those who awoke to injustice and are awake to injustice. The far right and the right ran a coordinated, globally important, significant and successful campaign to archetype those of us who are woke, and proudly woke to our rights, as “woke” and somehow weak. The weak woke.

I would never have predicted this archetyping campaign would succeed, because it seems so counter-intuitive that you could persuade clever, educated people — even on the right, all across the world, and through their media, through the oligarch-owned media — that this is an appropriate campaign, an in-group-creating concept: anti-wokeness. In my view, this all arose from George Floyd’s murder. I always think of him and his little daughter, who’s probably around eleven now, when I see “woke” and “anti-woke.” I see people whom I like, who are good friends of mine and share many of my values, themselves campaigning against woke.

As previously advertised here, the dividing line for me is: if you’re committed to the post-World War II legal and social order — the Refugee Convention, anti-discrimination rules, laws, human rights protected as a matter of law universally for every human regardless of which group they’re in — then that is the dividing line. The anti-woke campaign, led by the oligarchs and the far right after George Floyd’s ruthless murder by a white supremacist, was their response. Their response was to archetype people alive to their rights, alive to the post-World War II legal and social order, as “woke” and therefore deserving of being denigrated.

Now we see a much more sinister movement. And I use the word “sinister” as opposed to “right.” Sinistrous in Latin means left. This is the underlying linguistic and psycholinguistic meaning of the far right — and sadly now many leading politicians — archetyping opposition as “left.” They don’t even need to say you’re sinister. They just say you’re left, you’re leftist.

In this executive order setting out the priority policy for US government agencies and departments to agree with the designation of Antifa as terrorists and as an organisation — and in line with this memorandum on national security, which again repeats the designation of Antifa as terrorism and sets out some of the characteristics of those who will be designated as, I’m paraphrasing here, enemies of the state and therefore subject to the full power of the US government’s enforcement mechanisms, many of which were developed during the War on Terror — included are people who are organising to violently suppress others’ rights. The entire document is an accusation in a mirror, in my humble opinion.

It archetypes as Antifa anyone who’s anti-Christian, anyone who’s anti-family values. It sets out all of the grounds to destroy the entire post-World War II legal and social order. But it does say that anyone who wants to abolish rights, to get rid of people’s rights, can be designated as terrorists.

That’s how I see George Floyd — to commemorate George Floyd and to think about all of that time, which seems like a lifetime ago. It was just five years ago. But his legacy does live on. Now we are seeing the same tricks being used with the concept of anti-fascism. “Anti-fascist” — that’s the term used in this national security memorandum just signed by Donald.

An agency has been set up in Virginia, a building where American citizens are being put on lists — as we speak, every day — because of someone’s interpretation that they are anti-Christian, or anti-family values, or out to get the right. I noted that this particular document includes pure Disinfolklore: this idea that the bullet casings which killed Kirk contained Antifa rhetoric, which we now know to be untrue. But this is now part of this justificatory memorandum, being used to compile lists of Americans and NGOs who are now persona non grata. Again, we can see where this is going. And it’s not very nice.

⚡️Why the Far Right Eat and Kill Dogs.

Poster on pro-English Northern Ireland bonfire demonstrates the ‘immigrants eating dogs’ trope is at least a decade old. Poster features my old boss the late great Anna Lo - the first ethnic Chinese legislator to be elected to a European legislature.

Mitt Romney’s presidential bid came unstuck after it was rumoured he attached his dog (and kennel) to the roof rack to go on holiday. Now every Republican candidate boasts about eating or killing dogs. What’s going on?

By modelling willingness to eat dogs, shoot horses, drone bomb or drown prospective immigrants far right politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty.

It has long been held that, as Sylvia Perera wrote, a human who aspires to being monarch in Indo-European culture must be:

“conscious enough to face the ugly, pain filled reality of the Outer Realm… they must be strong as a warrior, productive as a farmer, and wise as a druid.””

In dealing with the Chef of Disinfolklore in later chapters we will return again and again to Indo-European culture’s tripartite conception of the qualities sovereigns need to qualify for leadership - killer / warrior (Security), farmer (Prosperity/ Fertility), druid (Sovereignty)…” disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklor…

⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.

Then, we become the troll.

The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.

Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.

We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.

That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.

We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.

One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.

⚡️English russia Report published - it’s a troll.

English Parliamentary report on russian interference in English democracy has been published. In full. It’s rubbish. Seeks not to find anything.

Frames Brexit and russia merely as russia’s proven attempt to affect the information space. Whereas, we know the entire referendum was a part of a russian Active Measure.

English Parliamentary anti-European headbangers were easy prey: they were compromised by their willingness to Brexit at any and all costs.

Johnson and Cummings then purposely delayed publication of russia report to troll us into thinking there was anything of value in it. Many of us fell for that troll. Then we saw the report and understood: the report itself is a whitewash.

By comparison US Senate and House Intelligence Committees published substantive reports on russia’s interference in American democracy in 2016. Thousands of pages. They did though miss the one salient fact about the Steele Dossier: Deripaska managed to launder russian Disinfolklore into the Dossier. Thus, impugning the Dossier when, for example, it turned out Michael Cohen had never been to Prague.

Moral of this story? At least the truth is out there in America. Whereas, in England they still don’t understand they was trolled.

P.S. By branding a government report as “independent” English legislators engaged in putting Disinformation engaged in it:

https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf

⚡️On calling for another candidate.

Trump’s power (Mana) is 100% the 20 oligarchs whose channels amplify his nonsense.

Get rid of Biden, and Trump’s artificial Mana remains.

Projecting magical …

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Some of us will have seen this Harvard-Harris poll during the week. I wrote a piece on it: “Why America Trusts Donald — Disinfolklore.” Facebook is one of America’s most trusted institutions, along with the army, the FBI, the CDC, and the police — broadcasting Disinfolklore chosen by the algorithm to suit our own particular minds, stories that convey meanness and delusions. Most Americans believe America is on the right track, or at least not on the wrong track too badly. That’s a reference to how 40% of Americans believe America is on the right track.

Some of you attentive listeners will know I write a lot about right and ṛg and its origins. Those 40% are probably authoritarian followers. They believe it — and the R-t- sound is also an authoritarian follower’s sound. Those 40%, or at least a good smattering of them — some estimates suggest 30% of any group will be higher on the right-wing authoritarian scale — they believe America is on the right track despite some of our conversations in previous episodes. This is the power of Disinfolklore, Facebook’s power to wrap America and all of us up into a Disinfolklore universe.

However, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, despite all the anti-Ukraine Disinfolklore, is more trusted than anyone else alive in America — apart from the right-wing, far-right commentator Kirk’s widow, the ex-model whom Donald hugs quite a lot. Notice: Erica Kirk. You’ve got that RK sound twice in her name — Erica, Kirk. You have it once in Kirk, obviously, in Charlie Kirk’s surname. This demonstrates that Disinfolklore is not all-powerful, if Volodymyr Zelenskyy after this relentless Disinfolklore is on 13% positive.

There are only four people in this Harris poll whose favourable and unfavourable ratings matched out in positive numbers. Drum roll. Fourth was RFK Jr. — God help us — on 2%. Kirk himself was on 14%. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on 13%. And the late Kirk’s widow was on 16% — percent who thought they were favourable.

So: “Why America Trusts Donald” — Disinfolklore and Facebook’s vision, its change in strategy, seems to be matched. If both sides, or all sides, now trust Facebook to properly brainwash them, then that’s a win if you’ve got shares in Facebook.

Chanting “genocide” — the mantra “genocide” now performs the same role as “lock her up,” “Brexit,” “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Hunter Biden.” It serves to close off discussion, hypnotise, signal the left’s right arm. Meanwhile, russia forcibly transfers 20,000 Ukrainian children and the left is silent. Perfect russian troll: distract and detract. If you only oppose one supposed genocide yet ignore an actual genocide on your own continent, you’ve been trolled, hypnotised by russia’s useful idiot leftist elite. I’m sorry if that offends anyone. I’m an artist.

MAGA will never run out of Epstein distractions. This riffs off what I mentioned two weeks ago — my idea that really we’re in the metaphor of that show *Lost*, which I experienced earlier and realised after a couple of seasons that you never get to some apex. You never get rewarded for your commitment. The plot always just keeps extending and extending.

I think there’s an infinity of ways MAGA will find information alibis to support the idea that “Troll Epstein Russian Donald Mafia Don” doesn’t constitute enough to sink Donald. If we’re waiting, as many of us are, on the edge of our seat for that one final action which will tip it all over the edge and everything will return to how it was before this nightmare movie — sadly, the data doesn’t support this. The data supports the idea that there’s an infinity of stories to constantly roll, royal and troll us. That doesn’t mean I don’t foresee an end to MAGA and to this nightmare. It just means it’s not going to happen in the news space.

I’ve written before about “Unified Reich.” In May 2024, it was very clear when Donald tweeted a meme with the words “Unified Reich” exactly what he was signalling, and some of us picked it up. I wrote about it at the time, and we are seeing the Unified Reich being created around us — with the executive order instructing all American governance institutions that Antifa is now verboten. Now we’ve seen this national security memo basically setting out that anyone who professes anti-Christian views — we’re open to question what that means — and various other viewpoints can be subjected to the full power of the American government. Even if they’re US citizens, the Internal Revenue Service will investigate them. It’s a version of the foreign agents law in Georgia, the country Georgia.

I note this because what some of us write, what I try to write, is predictive. It’s not just looking at the past. I’m trying to give the tools to predict the future. Many of us here — James, I suspect you were tuned into it from the very beginning and you saw what was going to happen. And it is happening, very sadly. But we can use those tools to predict the future from here as well. I am doing that by saying: MAGA will never run out of Epstein distractions.

Then that story today about US Republican Nazis relying on Telegram. The thing which grabbed me was that they’re relying on Telegram. There’s just no awareness among this far-right elite, these people trained and radicalised over the last few years since the first Donald presidency, that the russian government owns, runs and controls Telegram. They have not only infected the smartphones of all of these unsmart US young Nazis — I don’t know how these documents were leaked. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were leaked by the russians to put pressure on Donald while President Zelenskyy is there. Who knows? That’s what struck me about the US Republican Nazis’ reliance on Telegram.

On a high note — although none of us are going to get excited because we know it could change around tomorrow — we saw Donald said yesterday: “Putin has lost about 1.5 million people in the war with Ukraine. It’s a terrible war. Putin doesn’t want to end the war. Russia’s economy could collapse. There are already long lines at gas stations. I wish them well, but he doesn’t want to stop. Ukraine has effectively stopped the Russian army. Who would have thought?”

This is what I’ve been trying to do, and what many of us have been working towards: re-archetyping Ukraine as strong rather than weak. I’ve written before about how fake hillbilly Vance — because Vance is a completely artificial character, a construction from the suburbs of Cincinnati, classic Midkid, gets to Yale and then re-archetypes himself as a hillbilly according to the script of Peter Thiel — becomes the voice of this fake idea that Donald was tapping into some pre-existing sense of alienation in areas of former coal mining and depressed industry. Rather than the truth: that MAGA and Bannon and Thiel and others created this sense of alienation using the Disinfolklore apparatus. Vance, the character, the fake hillbilly, was and is used to bring the story forward. In February, he was archetyping Ukraine as weak inside the White House. But now Ukraine has re-archetyped its image as strong.

That, for me, is the meta battle. That’s the battle of the titans. I spoke about it in my Munich speech in February. That’s where the war will be won and lost. Everything else is a tool to bring that about — the bombings of russian fuel stations, the gas-line queues, the amazing work done along the 1,400-kilometre-long front line by brave Ukrainian soldiers, the political game, the diplomatic game which Volodymyr Zelenskyy is playing in DC tonight. The real battle is all about re-archetyping Ukraine as strong.

Will Thiel has put it another way, which may or may not be happening right now. The signs are good, but I think we’ve all been through this episode of *Lost* before — we’re still only halfway through the second season of the Ukraine war, and it can turn on a dime. But the signs are looking good. I remember Will arguing that when it looked like Ukrain…

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One of our first encounters with the internet today was to see Donald’s tweet — or untruth. And the experience all of us had when we saw that untruth is the experience that every MAGA cult member had the moment they became a member of the cult. They probably didn’t notice that time when they read something or heard something of Donald’s that they just agreed with a million percent. And that turned them from a complete sceptic — and in many cases, many MAGAdians hated Donald, absolutely hated him, which is the case in most cults.

All of us collectively this morning had that experience. But also, I hope all of us secretly smiled and thought of all the people we’ve been speaking to, preaching to, explaining to since March — certainly in my case, early March 2022. Everything Donald was saying was in the tea leaves, the data. This is what the data said within a week of the full-scale invasion. And it’s interesting — he referenced that a normal army, a serious army, would have disposed of this within a week. Everything else has unfurled from that experience.

Many of us have spent many hours of our lives trying to not sound crazy and explain to normal civilians who live in the real world, who aren’t focused on oil refineries or land swaps and just pick up what they pick up from the news. And then to hear Donald speak like us — and here I speak for most people who listen to Volya Radio and have been watching and participating and experiencing this war through radio and doing what we can through the information space — to hear a US president, any US president, speak in these terms, we definitely deserve, and I’m sure many of us did have, a smile. No one overreacted. Everyone expects it to be rolled back in a day or two.

We knew that America was out in terms of free arms deliveries. But this is what Ukraine has been playing for, for months. And Zelenskyy was perhaps one of the first people to see with complete clarity, from perhaps September 2024 onwards, that the very best we could hope for was that Donald would just sell arms to Ukraine. Thankfully, Germany is opening up the wallet, everyone is opening up their wallets, and everyone is sensing how Ukraine is going to be our security guarantor — and therefore we’d better keep it on side.

Let’s just enjoy this moment for what it is. But I did want to make that observation: this is how you get inducted into a cult, and into what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy. When you suddenly start agreeing with the cult leader like this. On the other end, you could argue he’s joined our cult. He’s clearly been listening — or whoever wrote this was listening — has been listening to all your radio. They’re finally seeing what we’ve been seeing. We’ve been watching the refineries go up over the past couple of weeks. We’ve been watching what’s going on around Pokrovsk, up in Sumy, around Kupiansk. We’re watching the radars being taken out in Crimea — at a granularity that clearly the people advising Donald are looking at. All of that has contributed to this huge volte-face in his mind.

Perhaps he is saying all of this because it is new in that world. It’s novel, and he loves that. He’s great at innovating and leading ideas and giving lines to people, which is essentially what his tweets do. They’re talking points and thinking points for the mainstream and for people. I think that is that for me. I’m very pleased about all of it. I’m not expecting anything else out of it.

Quickly moving on to what matters. On the battlefield: absolutely nothing has changed. What I have been looking for since the beginning of March 2022 — and it’s taken a while to gather the vocabulary, and some of you have been along this journey — is the re-archetyping of the identity of Ukraine inside the minds of humanity.

As previously discussed, for me this goes back — and I want people to understand from all of my work — the primary purpose goes back to 4,100 BCE, when the first Indo-European language speakers and their culture and religion, out of which emanate all of our languages, culture and Indo-European religions today, first emerged in Mykhailivka, in Zaporizhzhia. I previously said it was Kherson, but I’ve actually found the type site. Anyway, going all the way up to the present day — 6,000 years.

In the context of the short durée of the war, all of my work, everything I’ve written — the millions of words — and all of the words I’ve spoken, their primary purpose has been to try and change the archetypal identity in people’s minds: that Ukraine is a superpower. I first tweeted about this around the 8th of March 2022, when it became clear to me what was going on on the battlefield.

I’m not concerned with discharge petitions, Congress, money coming from America, what America can do. That isn’t where the focus of my work is. What is immanent today — the mana, the energy in that tweet — was all about Ukraine being a superpower. And that, for me, is the great victory, because it’s so far outside most normal people’s minds.

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⚡️I argue below that the force that led to Mass Infection policy (which was generated in Silicon Valley a year before Covid vaccines were invented), now is in charge of public health in America.

That force is now in control of the gatekeepers of health, well being and protection of the right to life in America: National Institutes of Health and Centers of Disease Control through PayPal Mafia-related lieges.

Now they can continue in earnest what they began with Covid: Mass Depopulation policies.

That that force was capable of persuading humanity that being repeatedly infected by a neuroinvasive virus that affects negatively over 200 bodily systems necessary for life is a Good Thing demonstrates its power.

That force, I argue, is even more powerful than russia, Donald or China: took two years but it even convinced China to go for Mass Infection.

Those of us who are paying attention should be as scared today as the European aristocracy was in the 1780s.

I’m Decoding Trolls. I’m here to give you some good news and some bad news. The good news is russia is finally going to die. This week, the russian state bombed the British Council and the European Union’s delegation headquarters in Kyiv.

This is in a long line of attacks on the European Union and on Britain and the West. In some ways, although it will pass many people by, this is the beginning of the end for russia. This kind of senseless violence cannot stand.

We will remember the first protests broke out around the 21st of November 2013 in Kyiv, protests against the refusal by the then pro-russia president of Ukraine to sign the European Union Association Agreement. Yanukovych, the then Ukrainian president, whose chief advisor was Paul Manafort — who was later jailed for tax fraud and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Ukrainian government. Manafort is back advising Trump now.

When russian propaganda talks about a CIA plot to capture Ukraine, that is kind of true, but not in the way the russians mean. It was a plot by Paul Manafort, paid for by four pro-russia oligarchs, to divide and ruin Ukraine from around 2004 or 2005 onwards, when he began to advise Yanukovych, until Yanukovych ran away in February 2014 after these protests.

Paul Manafort’s own children, in leaked text messages from a year after the Heavenly Hundred were murdered on the Maidan by snipers acting under russian provocation in Kyiv — it was Paul Manafort’s idea, according to his own children, that the protesters should be violently suppressed. This would create pressure from the European Union to pressure the demonstrators to accept the continuation of his boss Yanukovych’s presidency.

The current Polish foreign minister, Sikorski, was also foreign minister at the time. He was in Kyiv and had negotiated a deal between the demonstrators and the Ukrainian authorities — that the demonstrators would stand down. But this deal was upended when Yanukovych ran away.

We see many of the same players involved now, eleven years later. The European Union is one of them. Paul Manafort is still advising Donald Trump. Sikorski is still, or is now again, Polish foreign minister.

The demonstrators on the Maidan are no longer a large subset of the Ukrainian population. They are the entire Ukrainian nation. And they are not just a raggle-taggle army of football supporters organising around Pravyi Sektor and the Azov Battalion in Kyiv to hold back the might of the second army of the world. Ukraine’s army is probably the preeminent army in the world at the moment, due to their integration of drone technology and tactics which have brought and are bringing russia to its knees.

When russia this week bombed the European Union delegation in Kyiv, this is a message from russia which is well received and understood by people such as me and others who have been following this conflict at close quarters since the very beginning. I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine working for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. What is going on in Ukraine informs all of my work.

It is not just because it informs my work that I am interested in Ukraine. From very early on, it became clear to me — from the summer of 2016, when Paul Manafort had suddenly become Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and Tom Barrack, Donald Trump’s best friend, who was later also convicted of acting as a foreign agent and is now resurrected as the United States ambassador to Turkey — Tom Barrack and Paul Manafort arranged for the commitment in the Republican Party’s platform for the 2016 presidential election to remove the commitment to arm Ukraine.

At the time, we were only talking about Javelin missile systems — anti-tank missile systems — which people like me, who didn’t know much about military things, thought would be enough to hold back the russians. For the first week of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, having anti-tank missile systems, each costing around $200,000, was great. But it was a complement to the civil and military discipline, enthusiasm and innovation which drove the russians back from Kyiv after the russians lost the Battle of Moshchun on the 28th of March 2022.

russia then retreated and declared that phase one of the special military operation was over and that phase two would begin. At the time, the russians were briefing that phase two would be concluded by so-called Victory Day, May 9th 2022. In order to reach that, the russians killed 25,000 civilians in Mariupol by carpet-bombing the city. They also killed 10,000 civilians in Sievierodonetsk, a city where I lived for three years between 2015 and 2018. Yet on Victory Day 2022 — I’ll post the picture — rather than Putin declaring victory, he sat at the Victory Day parade with a blanket around his knees.

Then it was briefed that by the end of June, russia would have concluded phase two. Remember, at this time, phase two is publicly simply to occupy Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, which russia had been trying to occupy since 2014 and had initially been held back by a raggle-taggle army focused around two football supporters’ groups that manifested as Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector) and the Azov Battalion, which today is a storied part of the Ukrainian army — another character in our story.

By the end of June 2022, russia still hadn’t captured all of Donetsk and Luhansk. So they concocted a plan to conquer Bakhmut, which they thought was a realisable goal. By the end of July, they sent their best forces there under the command of the chef of Disinfolklore, Prigozhin — who had got Donald Trump elected in 2016 through his disinformation operations, who got Brexit done in Britain also in 2016. Prigozhin’s Wagner military units were eviscerated in Bakhmut. As I record this today, it is being reported that their successors in Mali are being run out of Mali and run out of Africa as well. Ukraine did that. Ukraine destroyed russia’s best elite army unit under the Nazi brand Wagner, founded by Utkin, a russian soldier, first manifested in Ukraine when I was there in 2014–2015 in Luhansk.

Wagner then became part of the Disinfolklore apparatus, seen as a fierce, formidable force involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria, which drove millions of refugees into Europe, which led to Orbán’s election, the Law and Justice Party’s election in Poland, and of course to Brexit. The carpet-bombing of Syria by the russian army was part of their strategy to bring about political change in Europe. That carpet-bombing began in September 2015 — all to deliver Ukraine to russia.

Flash forward to 2022, and russia is continually being eviscerated — not only on the battlefield in Ukraine, where it has lost a million soldiers. It took them ten months to take Bakhmut, which was supposed to fall by the end of July. Bakhmut was held by the Ukrainian army, and the conquest of Bakhmut was a strategic dead end. It led nowhere. It brought russia no closer geographically or strategically to winning phase two, which was to c…

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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.

⚡️Why is it good news Ukraine now can strike any target in russia?

Since late March 2025 America was preventing Ukraine from striking russia’s fossil fuel infrastructure due to the ‘peace process’…

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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Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I wanted to give you my quick take on the proposals Ukraine is going to bring to the so-called peace conference in Saudi Arabia next week.

Obviously, my heart and many hearts sink at the prospect of Ukraine surrendering either to russia or to America’s concern trolling about deaths in Ukraine — especially as credible reports have emerged from the battlefield in Kursk which suggest that russia’s targeting of Ukrainian forces in Kursk has suddenly improved exponentially. Suddenly improved at the same time that Druidy Don’s special envoy mentioned that what they are trying to do to Ukraine is what these people would do to a mule who was too stubborn — slap them until they moved.

When we see this intentionality on the side of the American regime under Druidy Don, and then we hear reports from the battlefield in Kursk that suddenly russia’s targeting of Ukrainian positions and the killing of Ukrainian soldiers has improved — we heard similar reports in Avdiivka last year under President Biden. Yet again, we see russia relying on America to help it out of the hole it has dug for itself by invading a country which will continue to resist.

The two proposals Ukraine says it will bring to the Saudi Arabia peace talks next week are: first, Ukraine will propose a ceasefire involving a moratorium on the use of long-range weaponry to hit parts of russia — last night, there was a hit on a russian oil refinery some 1,200 kilometres from the border with Ukraine. Second, a moratorium on attacks at sea, in the Black Sea.

The team going to Saudi Arabia is very experienced with these kinds of negotiations. I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine between the years 2015 and 2022. I’ve seen this rodeo before. I’ve been on this rodeo before, I think is the proper phrase.

In the autumn of 2019 — which may be remembered or unnoticed by many people — Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington were all ranged against Ukraine. They were colluding to pressure Ukraine into accepting what was named for the current president of Germany, the Steinmeier solution. Under the Steinmeier solution, Ukraine would agree to allow russia to hold elections in russia-occupied Luhansk — where I worked between 2015 and 2018 — and russia-occupied Donetsk, before russia gave Ukraine back control of its borders. Essentially, this was the international community colluding with Moscow to get Ukraine to accept the occupation, the brutal genocidal occupation and continued brainwashing of Ukrainians inside russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, by allowing them to hold elections.

At the time, I and a colleague, a former British Army officer, were tasked with working out in rough general terms what it would mean to hold elections in russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk — elections which, under the OSCE framework, would need to be proper, free, and fair.

The first problem was to bring in the 1.5 million Ukrainians who had fled from russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk and allow them to vote. The second problem: we worked out it would have cost the international community around 1.5 billion euros and involved armoured vehicles and army squadrons at every polling place in Donetsk and Luhansk, which obviously the russians wouldn’t agree to. It was a non-starter.

There was a meeting to be held in December 2019 in Paris with Duncy Putler and the comedian President Zelenskyy, hosted by Emmanuel Macron — Jupiter is his call sign. At this meeting, President Zelenskyy — who was then perceived by many in the international community as not up to the job, just a mere comedian rather than a great artist, a great business person, and a true Ukrainian patriot — some papers emerged in the weeks before this meeting where the signature of Andrii Yermak, who is still the chief of staff in the president’s office, was on documents that suggested Ukraine was going to allow these elections under the Steinmeier solution in russia-occupied Ukraine.

There was an immediate explosive movement across Ukraine called the No to Capitulation movement. Many people who concern-troll about Ukraine or try to pressure President Zelenskyy or Ukrainians to surrender to russia just in the name of peace aren’t aware that President Zelenskyy doesn’t have the power to impose a peace on his people. He’s not an autocrat, even if he wanted to be. There’s no evidence he ever wanted to be.

This No to Capitulation movement — I went to many of the demonstrations across Ukraine — involved thousands of people saying: we will not accept the Steinmeier solution, we will not allow russia to hold elections in russia-occupied Ukraine.

Flash forward from 2019. It is now 2025. russia has killed over a million people — its own people and Ukrainians — in the full-scale invasion. I detect and pick up no sign that Ukrainians are desperate to get peace like they were given under Minsk I and II, like they were pressured into accepting under Minsk I and II.

Secondly, I do not actually detect any pressure, rightly, from the international community — except from Washington. What we see in Washington under Druidy Don and all these characters around him, including Paul Manafort, who himself — according to his daughters, his own daughters — sparked the murder of the 100 protesters on the Maidan in February 2014 as part of a plan.

At the time, Paul Manafort was working for the soon-to-be-impeached Ukrainian President Yanukovych. Manafort’s plan was to spark this violence and these deaths, which would in turn troll European leaders into trolling Ukrainian protesters into surrendering to continued rule by Yanukovych. The Heavenly Hundred were martyred and killed on the Maidan. A year later, we saw in leaked texts from Paul Manafort’s daughters that they believed it was their father who had advised Yanukovych to follow this strategy, which almost worked — because European leaders at the time were pressuring Ukraine into allowing Yanukovych to continue if the protesters would stand down. But Yanukovych got scared and he ran away. The whole master plan fell apart.

Flash forward to December 2019 in Paris. We have this great picture of Macron with President Zelenskyy, who’s looking extremely devilish and quite rightfully happy, because he said in no uncertain terms — he laughed when Putin at the press conference after this meeting suggested that Ukraine would allow russia to hold elections. Putin looks very embarrassed and very upset.

It’s the same team advising President Zelenskyy now on these so-called peace talks. This is not their first rodeo. They understand that Druidy Don has just surrendered — he has just capitulated himself and withheld sanctions against Mexico and Canada. It is still not impossible that America and Druidy Don will end up opening the floodgates of aid to Ukraine.

It’s equally not impossible that Druidy Don has ordered American military assets to communicate to russians the exact coordinates of Ukrainian positions so that russians can then devastate them. If that is the case, then I would expect someone — as happened under Druidy Don’s first impeachment, when Vindman, who was on the National Security Council, made a confidential complaint which led to Druidy Don’s first impeachment on the grounds of withholding $270 million worth of Javelin missile systems until the comedian, President Zelenskyy, announced an investigation into President Biden. That was the basis of the complaint, and it was held true in the impeachment trial in the House of Congress.

It is not impossible that if America is today aiding russia to kill Ukrainians, someone who has taken an oath to the Constitution and to defend the Constitution of America — someone in the chain of command involved in leaking information, if it has been leaked — will themselves make a complaint, and this will lead to a second impeachment trial of Druidy Don.

However, even if this eventuality does not happen, I do not expect the Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia next week to capitulate. I expect them …

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⚡️Making ‘Peace’ in Ukraine stick - with a stick.

2015-2018 as a diplomat on the ground between russian occupiers and Ukrainian defenders I watched russia’s adherence to Minsk I and II.

Every day russia breached the ceasefire many thousands of times. Meanwhile, Ruschia continued to brainwash Ukrainians inside its occupation in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk - preparing Ukrainian males inside the occupation to die during meat assaults against the rest of Ukraine when the full-scale invasion began.

Ruschia also continued its information warfare (Disinfolklore) attacks on America and Europe - yielding the Syrian migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald’s first election, Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice government.

‘Peace’ for Ruschia is another means of war. ‘Peace’ is an opportunity for Ruschia to continue attacking our civilisation and to prepare our children to participate in meat assaults in Ruschia’s future kinetic wars against EU states.

Result? Full-scale invasion and a US defence secretary who pretends not to know that during Donald’s first presidency russia attacked Ukraine every single day.

If Europe is going to provide peacekeeping troops know that every day russia will test their resolve.

Minsk III was breached when Prigozhin’s aeroplane was destroyed.

Minsk IV should be an attacking force of 100,000 troops guarding Ukraine west of the Dnipro River. Thereby, freeing up Ukrainian forces to expel Ruschia from Ukraine.

Then once Ruschia’s back in Ruschia, an aggressive European ‘peacekeeping’ force will keep the peace via full economic blockade on russia, information warfare (Counter Disinfolklore) attacks on Ruschia, and nightly drone attacks across Ruschia, until Ruschia actually is peaceful.

⚡️Keep teasing Ruschia with hope of Ukraine’s capitulation via a ceasefire and peace agreement.

Meanwhile arm Ukraine to continue destroying Ruschia’s force power.

Ruschia keeps thinking it’s one meat assault from ‘victory’ in Ukraine. And with every new meat assault Ruschia gets weaker & weaker.

Must never be another Minsk.

My Munich speech:

⚡️Ukraine Peace Offer: Taurus for Budanov?

Ruschists’ leak German military generals’ conversations. Germany embarrassed by having zero counter intelligence capability. President Zelenskyy offers Ukraine’s military intelligence chief to Germany for 24 hours. Price? 1,000 Taurus missiles. Haggling continues.

⚡️In Praise of Slow-Witted Being Come to Sense

Ukraine as the source for ALL Indo-European languages, cultures and religions has been at the centre of our civilisation since 2,500 BCE (👇🏾).

Welcome @EmmanuelMacron to the club now of many who get that there is no good thing in our world we will touch again until Ukraine routs Ruschia. Routs.

Utterly. A terrible beauty has been born.

Budanov on Ukraine’s expanded war aims:

“Ukraine should destroy its rear - oil and fuel bases, plants producing weapons and ammunition, and other strategic targets, he says. In order to start peace talks, Ukraine should take back all its territory.

“Ukraine will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminal are prosecuted, its nuclear weapons are destroyed, and nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.”

Some geopolitical dabblers have yet to get the message: Ukraine has been central to US, European and Ruschist politics for a decade.

All roads to defeat of Ruschism from Ruschia’s border with Luhansk to the fields of Japan and the Bering Straits run through Ruschia’s utter defeat in Ukraine.

⚡️Ruschia’s Aviator Meat Assaults: Ruschia failed to capture Ukraine using human-only meat assaults (Ruschists’ word not mine - they coined use of word ‘Meat’ to describe their way of war).

Now, Ruschia’s throwing aeroplanes at Ukraine’s air defence, like so much aluminium meat.

Ukraine has shot down fourteen Ruschist fighter jets in one eleven-day period.

⚡️Cremations in Ruschia-occupied Melitopol concealed by meat-plant tyre burning?

Residents of Occupied Melitopol question why acrid black smoke's emerging from meat plant furnace?

Ruschists are disappearing used tyres from residents gardens and courtyards.

⚡️It's what I saw too in occupied Luhansk 2015-2018. Hacking universities to create the Cannon Fodder we see fed into the Ruschist meat grinder (Ruschia outsources genocide of Ukrainians to Ukrainians it brainwashes.

⚡️EVERYTHING Ruschists do in Ukraine is for Ruschist TV audience, either directly or indirectly. Often stuff is done merely to shock The West®, who amplify it, & that serves as more fodder for Ruschist TV. Ukraine, Ukrainians, the rest of us are actors in this drama.

UN Ruschist diplomat promotes an FSB "Lines To Take" troll about school textbooks for children in Mariupol.

Everything Ruschia does in 🇺🇦 is to feed its own propaganda channels. Last year Ruschia imported $7b of television equipment. Ukrainians mere props in this diabolical show.

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I’ve written before about russia’s Stealth Genocide.

This podcast and the evidence below is about the openly admitted violation of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition against transferring children across international borders in times of war.

Many struggle to understand or to explain the aggregate of the billions of actions that constitute russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

The mass kidnapping of children is the point of the war. russia wants to repopulate its 1/6 of the world’s surface with white Europeans.

This is the whole point of the war I argue in this podcast.

See below for some of the documentary evidence I have collected and published about these Crimes Against Humanity, the Laws of War and the Genocide Convention:

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I want to decode the actual rationale, the real substance of the meaning of the Ukraine-russia war. I want to decode the motivations of those prosecuting this war and leading this war. One word sums up the entire basis for the whole war: demography.

When you hear these stories about russian language speakers in Ukraine, or NATO expansion, or “Ukraine was asking for it,” or “Ukraine is run by criminals and therefore Russia came in to liberate” — this whole system of stories which we constantly hear in our information space — I want in future you just to focus on this one word: demography.

I worked in eastern Ukraine for seven years between 2015 and 2022. One abiding joyful memory I have of my time there was every now and again I would be invited as a foreign diplomat to speak to groups of school children. In one school, one day, in a now-occupied part of eastern Ukraine, as I arrived, the head teacher — as was always normally the case — met me and said: “You’re going to be delivering your talk and your lecture and answering questions from the final-year students. However, I have picked out all of the activist students from all the previous years. So there’ll be a few boys and girls from each school year, and they’ll also be asking you questions.”

There was a look in her eye and a sense of pride as she presented this group of activist children to me. That really warmed my heart at the time. It really stayed with me. Here was a modern, European-outlooking teacher who had this concept of activist students, which I didn’t really understand until perhaps I met them. There was the girl with the spiky hair wearing black. There was the nerdy college kid who was doing political campaigning. There was somebody who talked to me about Greta Thunberg, and actually two students who wanted to do the school strike.

We had a great chat and a really engaging time. After the de-occupation, maybe I can post pictures of this. But what breaks my heart today and every day I wake up, and what motivates my work to help us decode the trolls around russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and in fact its invasion since 2014 — is the memory of these children in this school and how, almost as soon as the occupation began, russia began forcibly transferring children from the occupied territories into russia.

As some of you might know, I was one of the main sources — acknowledged — and if you look at my pinned tweet, you’ll see the link to this report. I was a main source for the first intergovernmental report on russia’s invasion of Ukraine, published in early April 2022 by the OSCE Moscow Mechanism Mission. It was commissioned by 44 nation states. I worked with a group of legal scholars to outline the different crimes russia was committing — not only in invading Ukraine, but the particular way in which it was invading Ukraine.

One part of this was about the forcible transfer of Ukrainians and children, which is a specific breach of the Genocide Convention, signed by most states. It’s also a breach of the laws of war. russia, from the very first days and moments of the invasion, was focusing an enormous amount of resources on corralling children and humans through what they call filtration centres and bringing them into russia.

For much of the first year of the war, I focused a lot of attention on this wonderful city called Melitopol in southern Zaporizhzhia, which was an area I covered as an OSCE diplomat looking after environmental security and political issues. I went to meet as many of the elected officials leading village, city, and town councils, particularly in this area, because I knew it would be subject — even as far back as 2015, I and many others anticipated the full-scale invasion. I did not anticipate the horrors, and I did not anticipate the forcible transfer of at least 700,000 children, which russia itself boasts about.

Putin, the so-called president of russia — a warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court in March 2023 for the specific crime of the forcible transfer of children from Ukraine into russia. In order to have this warrant issued against a sitting head of state who enjoys the presumption of immunity, the collection of evidence — which I participated in collecting in the early part of the war, and which I and others have continued to collect, including the confession by Putin and his accomplice, who is ironically the head of the Children’s Commission — all of this has come together.

There are many different strands to this war. Essentially, what I have come to propose as my hypothesis is that the entire war itself is a cover for the conscious and determined policy to transfer 700,000 and millions of white Ukrainians to populate the vast expanse of empty territory that russia needs to populate.

russia, as we know, possesses one-sixth of the world’s surface, and much of that is empty of people. We know the history — the whole of communism, all the mass deportations of people from the Baltic states, all of the genocidal policies of the USSR. It’s also about this mad idea to fill up the space between Kyiv, Lviv, and Vladivostok — from central Europe all the way to the coast of Japan and North Korea and China — with white Europeans.

I’ve talked before about the russians I worked with in Ukraine, who were all from the security structures and were diplomats. In candid, unguarded moments, all of them always betrayed at some point this visceral fear that in the very depopulated parts of the russian Federation which border China — China and russia have thousands of kilometres of shared border — on the China side, in some places, there are massive cities of 10, 20 million people. On the russia side, it’s just a handful of people with no resources or villages. I’ve never met a russian who isn’t obsessed with the idea that the Chinese will come over this border and gobble up all of their land.

I agree with Timothy Snyder that in many respects we can conceptualise russia’s obsession with Ukraine, and murdering Ukrainians, and destroying Ukrainian culture, as stemming from their madness that Ukraine is an easy touch. This is a displacement of their real fear, their fundamental fear, which is of China coming over the border and lopping off vast tracts of its one-sixth of the world’s surface. When I heard Timothy Snyder talking about this, I agreed wholeheartedly because of the russians I had met who betrayed an obsessive paranoia about how their land and people would become gobbled up.

The plan is to populate this area between central Europe and Japan with white Westerners. This also explains the threats to conquer Lisbon, and the mass deportations which are a perennial factor and part of Soviet and russian governance — under the guise of criminals, prison camps, or stopping nationalism, all this nonsense. Just as today we hear all these bogus history lessons, both from those actually leading this war — Putin and his criminal accomplices directing this criminal enterprise — but also from people in our information space and cultures who have fallen for the troll, who have fallen for all this nonsense about NATO expansion and “America provoked the war.”

All of this is accusation in a mirror, a phenomeno…

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Decoding interviewed by Ronan Swift.

The text of that interview, edited from the remastered recording for reading, with Ronan's words in italics.

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

Hello everybody, I'm Ronan Swifty. This morning I'm going to be talking to Decoding Trolls.

Hi, I'm Decoding Trolls. Great to be with you. Nice to meet you, Ronan.

Thanks for stepping into my podcast arena. I want to get onto the name, because I know it's a project of yours. Decoding Trolls. I can understand the decoding bit, I think. But the troll side of it, for me, was always something. Something that I just associate with people being nasty to other people online. What is it that you understand by trolling? Is there more to it than what I originally thought?

Trolling is about movement

As I see trolling, it's about movement. My definition of trolling is emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. Most conceptions of trolling focus only on the medium, like the internet. And so we focus on a particular form of communication in a particular arena.

I researched many different aspects of trolling, through academia and through participating in groups online myself. That led me to look into the linguistic root of trolling. That in fact led me into folklore, which is the origin of the metaphor of trolls. And eventually I realised that actually trolling on the internet is merely one form of communication.

If we are going to understand how trolling on the internet works. Then it's a good idea to look at how we troll each other in real life as well. And so that led me to this conception. Trolling is any form of communication which moves the emotions of another person.

And then I realised, actually, sometimes I'm trolling myself internally. And so this is partly how I arrived at the definition of trolling. It is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. And so we can fit how any sentient being trolls us. Our cat, for instance, wants some food. They're running around our legs as we're coming in with lots of shopping, and there's lots of children around. And we feel a bit annoyed, or great joy. That feeling of emotion is what's essential to trolling, whether it's online or in real life. And it can be positive.

It doesn't have to be negative?

Absolutely, yeah. Once you see trolling as any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. We need a way to determine the quality of the troll. We need to ascertain whether it is positive, neutral or negative. And the clue there is in the troll: neutral, no movement.

And so that led me on a hunt. For a way of determining the quality of particular, I call them, informational units or memes. A meme isn't a cartoon online. It's any informational unit, whether it's a sound or a word or a whole essay, for instance. Well, that's probably a bad example.

And so then once you see it, there's every form of communication. You need a way of thinking, okay. Because we get trolled positively all the time. Our lover, our romantic partner, will have particular routines. We'll have particularly nice routines with our pets, or our lovers, or our wives, or our husbands, or our children. They bring us great joy. And what we're doing is purposefully moving their emotions. That's positive.

And so I was hunting for a way of determining what's positive and negative and neutral. And that's how I arrived at what I call the Code of Positive Trolls.

A code for the quality of a troll

I see. So you've got a code, a checklist of sorts, to determine that positive or negative or neutral troll. And that's the decoding part of the title.

Checklist is a great idea. I actually hadn't made that link before. The Code of Positive Trolls and decoding. Back in my past, I trained as a lawyer. So I was looking for a code, in terms of law-code criteria that, say, judges use in cases. They often have these four-limb tests. To see whether you have the right to do something without criminal liability, for instance. But I recognise now that the code is actually in the decoding as well. That's really cool.

I was hunting around for this code. And I found it actually in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Dalai Lama's form of Buddhism. It is summed up into six criteria. If you perfect each of these six criteria, then in Buddhism, according to Buddhists, you will achieve enlightenment.

Obviously, we're not looking for enlightenment when we're online, or dealing with a really annoying situation. We're trying to resist making it worse by trolling the emotions of the person we're dealing with. But we are looking for codes which are proven, which have worked. Billions of Buddhists have run their life to a more successful extent, according to these six criteria. I then rebranded them as the Code of Positive Trolls.

And the idea is that you have this algorithm, these six criteria that you intuit. You learn them very quickly. And because billions of Buddhists have used this, what they call the six perfections. It's clear that humans can do this.

If you proof any communication that's emanating from you according to these six criteria. Then, if not achieving enlightenment, you have a chance of avoiding trolling others in negative ways. But equally, when you're receiving communications from people, you can run the sensory inputs. I talk about having a troll radar.

We have this idea that we're now proofing communications as they're moving into our minds, according to these six criteria. And if they contravene any of these six criteria, then we run a new battery of tests.

So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to ensure that we don't get manipulated. Our energy doesn't get manipulated negatively by others. And we're trying to avoid ourselves accidentally negatively manipulating others. And so I use these six criteria to decode trolls: my own trolls outgoing, and incoming trolls as well. And I've been using this for three years now.

I think the listeners are on tenterhooks as regards what this code of six is. Because it's been mentioned a lot. Is it helpful just to list them all?

The six criteria

Totally. So: generosity, ethical discipline - right is the same as ethical discipline - patience, energy, Mana - what I call Mana - focus and insight. So six of them.

So, generosity. Is the message you are communicating to someone else an act of generosity? Equally, is the message you're receiving from someone else? Say it's a post about migration. And they're saying, you know, our house is full, we can't take any more migrants. They're stealing our jobs. They're eating our dogs. That is not generous. So sometimes trolls fail that.

The second one is right, ethical discipline. It's always wrong to breach the laws of the land, international law. In the context, say, of migration, this set of ethics is set by the Refugee Convention. Most countries in humanity have signed it. That means that if you have a well-founded fear of persecution, you have the right to seek asylum. So this idea of illegal migrants, illegal asylum seekers is not only not generous. It's a breach of the law. And it's not right in that sense.

Patience. You want to communicate that you are yourself patient. And obviously, most of us fail on this front a million times a day. So it's an aspiration.

But some of us in work will have done these courses on how to avoid being trolled or phished online. And they'll always say one of the triggers for this is someone putting you in a pressure-cooker situation. Are they saying you have to use five seconds to press this button, to respond to this email immediately?

So this is where the patience element comes in. When you're receiving these trolls, if they're putting you in an impatient thing. So a political campaign, like Donald's campaign, will say, vote for me to save America. And you've got five days to save America. And sometimes, again, you will need to react quickly.

So this is why I say, if the …

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