Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

  1. 1d ago

    Podcast | The Sberbank Troll & Infolklore (week 3)

    Part One. The Christening of the Sberbank Report Some of us might have seen last week a new character entered into our information space, and its Mana, its energy, doesn’t match its name. This is a core element in the Disinfolklore analytical method, so we can all learn how to do this. That when we see or perceive some piece of information warfare, we look for the Mana in the meme, and then we see if the name of that energy suits it. So if Donald says he wants peace while bombing Iran, then the Mana, the energy, the substance of what he is saying doesn’t match the name. It’s not peace. And obviously that example works for the Russians, and part of what I try to teach myself to do is learn to practise this in real time. And so this is an example of it from last week that some of us who spend our days in the Ukrainian information space might have noticed, this character. And you might remember my piece last year on how Disinfolklore, part of the Disinfolklore method, is to look at memes as characters that we would look at, like in a book. And then that enables us to examine them in ways which we don’t usually examine news stories. Ukraine being a perfect example of a character with female characteristics, according to the authoritarian mindset, who needs to surrender to the man, Russia. And so if we look at that in that analytical way, it does help us. Because people like Putler talk about Ukraine as a woman. Famously, the example I give on the 20th of February 2022, where Putler was giving a press conference. So four days before the full-scale invasion. And he used the term “like it or not, take it my beauty”. And Russians perfectly understood what he meant by this, because they understood the reference point. Which was a song by a Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mould. And Red Mould had this famous song in the 1980s called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin”. So again, archetypal Disinfolklore, in two senses of the word archetypal. And Putler communicates his threat via this piece of Disinfolklore from pop culture that is visible to the Russists, but not to these Western experts that we hear so much about. And the message was very clear, and it was very clear in gendered terms, as indeed that 1980s song is. “Like it or not, take it my beauty.” Perceiving Ukraine as a corpse, and also as the victim of necrophiliac, you know what. And it’s not just me who noticed this gendered speech and this means of threatening, what has come and what has been realised through the same means. He, and the adjudicated horrible word that Donald is, also use these same terms. So I did do a piece last year on gender mainstreaming, and the importance, the lenses of gender as one of the mainstreaming tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. But I just bring this up in the context of looking at particular elements in stories that we wouldn’t consider to be a character, because it doesn’t seem to be a person. And in this case, I’m looking at the Sberbank report, and some of you will remember this from last week, as one of the examples. A character is born So on the 25th of August, a Telegram outfit styling itself as Black Mirror published screenshots of a Russian language analytical note. Eight scenarios for the end of the war, dated April 2026, probabilities summing to a suspiciously tidy 100%. Every page watermarked with the Telegram channel’s own domain. The hackers claim the note was extracted from the correspondence of German Gref, chairman of Sberbank, with an unnamed interlocutor. Meduza - and some of you will know I am suspicious of Meduza - Meduza covered it the same day, and credit where it’s due, it said the quiet parts plainly. The screenshot’s authenticity is unconfirmed. But then went on to do a whole article about it. So the disclaimer is there, of course. And stated also that the note’s author is unknown. The bank had not commented, Meduza commented, and at the bottom of the article, Meduza appended an update. A financial market source suggested the text smelled of a chatbot, and an AI detection service scored the English version at 83% machine generated. But read the headline noun. Sberbank’s April document. Within four days, the Ukrainian aggregators had shortened it further. Hackers leak Sberbank’s note. Hackers crack Sberbank chief’s correspondence. And by the weekend, the thing arrived on my own desk already wearing its new name. The Sberbank Report. That, listeners, is a baptism. It’s a naming. It’s a naming of energy. And in this, the Disinfolklore analytical method, a troll is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind. And christening an anonymous PDF with the name of Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, is a troll of the first order, because the emotion it moves is trust. I know Ming may laugh at that. The trust at the Sberbank. But I think you know what I mean. And that naming is an enlistment of the listeners. So here’s the detail I focused on. The name outran the legend on day one. And this is something we see a lot, actually. So after four days passed, folklorists know that we won’t even remember, you know, the original qualifications in the articles. And if we want to be cynical, we would say that Meduza is well aware of this. So even the hackers never claimed Sberbank wrote it. Their claim was that the file turned up in Gref’s correspondence with a person they cannot or will not identify. That is provenance as location, not authorship. An inbox is a place PDFs pass through. The maximal true version of this story, a rich man once received an email with this attached, establishes absolutely nothing at all. Every ounce of the document’s new authority was manufactured in the retelling. Tool 3: look for the Mana in the meme Tool 3 tells us not to argue with the source. So we’re not like the European Union’s method, where you look at the behaviour, you painstakingly try and trace it back to Russia. Because in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we’re dealing with matters at great scale, and we don’t really have time to do that kind of stuff. And the stakes are a bit less for us on our timeline for proving provenance. But also mainly because it doesn’t matter if the provenance. Most of us can intuitively know now, and listening to Ming or Mockers or Wendy on any particular episode on Volya will know if things are Russian, basically, because it’s obvious to us. We’re intuitively looking for the Mana in the meme. We don’t believe their denials. We’ve seen the pattern before, and we remember the pattern from before. So we’re not like a newspaper article that seems to forget things one day to the next. And looking for the Mana in the meme tells us not to argue with the source. So we’re not concerned so much with the source itself. We want to read what is immanent. I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T. What is the Mana? What is immanent in the artefact itself? So let’s have a look at it. Let’s read. So the note’s Mana, the note’s energy, is about clock pressure. Time works for Russia. The note says so in nearly those words, four separate times. Every month of delay is priced as a Russian asset and a Ukrainian cost. Its agency grammar is just as legible. Ukraine, it states outright, is not an independent player but an object. So that energy is in there. The puppet. The puppet Mana, rather, whose payoffs are set by others. So this idea that Ukraine is just a proxy for the US or for France or whoever. And that is the energy in a lot of what the note is. Its probability mass tells the same story. The percentages pretend to complicate. Add the scenarios and Russia retains occupied territory in roughly 88 of 100 of the futures, while Ukraine’s 1991 borders are awarded two. So that’s 88 out of two. Its precedents are a matched set, which many of us in this space since February 2022 have seen. Cyprus is invoked four times, Taiwan, Korea. Finland’s amputation is rebranded as a success story. And every analogy, a partition that held, not one that reversed in the victim’s favour. So the Mana there is the support of Russia’s position inside this supposed note. So the energy inside the artefact says, partition is a sober centre. Patience belongs to Moscow. Urgency belongs to you. Now say the name again, the Sberbank Report. It promises the opposite Mana entirely. The system’s cleverest bank, privately despairing of the war, candour smuggled out of the citadel. The name says confession, but the energy says instruction. So I came across this because I saw the headline and I thought, that’s a bit rum. I don’t really get that. So that’s why I went to the memo itself. And the headlines we were seeing, the naming of it, did not match the energy when I looked into it in detail. And I’ve just detailed some of that energy now. The name fails its own audit So the name fails its own audit. Four tells, briefly, for those who like their scepticism itemised. The note cites Sberbank in the third person, once, in parentheses, as one of the outside forecasters of the key rate, next to a mid-tier retail broker. Institutions do not footnote themselves as external sources. Outsiders compiling public forecasts do. The document wears none of the furniture a bank product cannot appear without. No author, no addressee, no classification, no disclaimer. It explains Nash equilibria and prospect theory at textbook level, in a paper supposedly orbiting a CEO who has spent a decade putting Kahneman on Sberbank’s own stages. And I’ve spoken about Kahneman before, and his system one and system two model, as well as all his great work on how our choices are determined by who sets the decision frameworks. And it dates Ukraine’s Flamingo missile combat debut to February 2025, months before that weapon existed. An error no editorial layer caught, because there was no editorial layer. One more, because it matters for the genre. The note’s most probable scena

  2. Aug 27

    Podcast | Volya’s Nest and the Third Question

    Part One. Principles of Infolklore, Episode 3: Volya’s Nest The Most Valuable Position in the Room Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered: “I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.” The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why: “Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.” For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room. I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution. The Name Came First This series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice. I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolklore. You will see that in my last podcast. So Infolklore creation is a first-order creative practice. It is not just counter-Disinfolklore. That is where I was three years ago, when I created the portmanteau Disinfolklore to describe what I had witnessed in Russia-occupied Ukraine: stories which communicate a sense of meanness directly into our inner minds, using archetypes. That is Disinfolklore, and it is all around us. There is no shortage of it. I would not have bothered to create the creative practice of Infolklore if Disinfolklore were not affecting our world in so many different ways, whether it comes from Russia or America or Brexit England. Disinfolklore is everywhere we look. It is pickling us in its nonsense and in its manipulations. So we not only need to learn how to identify it and understand how it works, which is part of my mission. We also need a means of countering it, in the sense of creating a world in which we are pickled in Infolklore instead. Infolklore is a first-order creative practice. Making the true stories, not just refuting the false ones. Those words were written before I had ever read a Volya transcript. And when they were written, the practice of creating Infolklore had exactly one validated specimen anywhere on earth: the Battle of Kyiv study I spoke about in the last episode. If you look back at my fourth-anniversary podcast for Volya, you will find it on Disinfolklore.net, where I post my podcasts every week. I also post weekly podcasts on PowerofMana.net, which is the Finding Manuland Atlas side of my work, the linguistics side. You cannot understand Russian disinformation, or any form of disinformation, without looking into the linguistics that underpins it. Russian disinfolklorists learn linguistics. In fact, linguistics graduates in Russian universities study Disinfolklore. They study propaganda, what they call combat propaganda, as part of their course. And the reason they do it is the reason you must too, if you wish to understand, underpin and create a system that will help us interpret and create an Infolklore-saturated universe instead of a Disinfolklore-saturated one. That is why you must study it, and that is Finding Manuland at PowerofMana.net. You can subscribe to my work there, at Disinfolklore.net and at DecodingTrolls.net. My main site is Disinfolklore.eu. So here is this episode’s claim. While the name Infolklore sat waiting for specimens, this station built the practice’s operating system. The working rules everything else runs on. The evidence shelf, the source grading, the wish filing, the correction ceremony. You, on Volya Radio, built all of it without the name. Here is the evidence. First, an update on the reading. In episode one I gave you the scale. When I described you to yourselves in those first episodes, the close reading behind them had covered many of your shows. Now all of the shows are part of the analysis. What Are They Trying to Tell Me Now the toolkit proper. Where would you send a truth-seeking audience for evidence? These Volya shows send it straight into the aggressor’s own channels, and they teach the frame for reading what it finds there. Here is This Week in Absurdistan, one of the station’s long-running news marathons, on Rosstat, the Russian state’s own statistics agency: “We never look at it from the perspective of this is the unvarnished truth from Russia. We look at it in the perspective of what are they publishing here and what are they trying to tell me? What kind of story are they trying to tell me?” What are they trying to tell me. I consider people like Mockers much more expert than people like Mark Galeotti, who is pulled in to talk about Russia all the time but who knows nothing about Ukraine, or indeed Russia, in the way that Mockers does. So on Volya we are asking what are they trying to tell us. That is source criticism, the discipline scholars take degrees in, taught as a morning reflex, and aimed at enemy numbers as well as enemy words. And when the enemy admits a terrible thing, the admission becomes a floor. Here is World at War, the strand where the war’s hardest numbers get read, on the abduction of Ukraine’s children: “These are the 100% provable cases with data, that the Russians themselves say 700,000 plus children and women have been abducted to Russia.” And in the same breath: “Even the UN, which has lowballed these numbers, admits that that is extremely low.” That was from a December 2024 episode. Seven hundred thousand, from the abductor’s own mouth. Many of us will remember the day that was publicised. I have the receipts. I have the screenshots, as probably do most of us who listen to Volya regularly. Our phones are full of screenshots of the evidence, of the receipts. The one number the Russists cannot dispute becomes the floor under the charge. The Russists’ confession is the minimum, and the truth sits above it. And it is almost unbelievable to people who have not been paying attention, as many of us who try to explain these matters to people in our real lives find continually. Nobody here pretends this reading is a grim duty. On the morning of Operation Spiderweb itself, the day Ukrainian drones smuggled deep inside Russia burned the bombers on their own airfields, someone in the Volya room said “the biggest pleasure at the moment is also reading Russian Telegram channel.” That was June 2025. Verification on this station is not a defensive crouch. It is a craft, practised with visible enjoyment, on the enemy’s own material. Then the discount turns around and comes home, which is the part that would astonish any propaganda ministry on earth. Here is Ukraine News and russia’s Hybrid War, a show whose own title spells russia with a small r, on our side’s frontline news: “For the last 12 months, the OPSEC, the operational security, when it comes to the front lines in Ukraine, has improved so much that 90% of what we hear from the front lines, it’s only something that the Ukrainian military wants us to hear, or it’s a Russian narrative. So everything that comes from the front lines, we have to take it with a grain of salt.” This is especially relevant at the moment. We have recently had the final announcement, after six months of great, well-kept OPSEC, of Ukrainian advances, and there are now discussions about whether new advances are about to be announced. All of us repeat, again and again, that we would rather not know these things until they are properly confirmed. OPSEC is operational security, the discipline of telling the enemy nothing useful. Grain of salt, aimed at our own side’s good news, because good security means curated news. Everything gets graded here on Volya. Friendly sources included. And in the same segment, the tool I find most elegant: enemy silence used as the debunk. A panic was running that day about a Russian breakthrough, and here is how it was closed: “On Russian telegram there was no party there was no elation if that was a legit breakthrough of the front lines you know the Russians are going to go crazy with it but and they did not which told me that you know it’s not as bad as people trying to pan it out to be” That is the 12th of August 2025. No party on the enemy’s channels, therefore no breakthrough. The absence of celebration, read as evidence. The mirror of the admission floor: what the enemy cannot help boasting about, and

  3. Aug 20

    Podcast | What is Infolklore?

    The Poison and the Antidote The poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything Russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote. Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything: we are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce. Two coined words in that quote. Disinfolklore is my name for folklore-like information told with meanness — stories built to bend our moods and our intentions, our attitudes and emotions. Infolklore is the positive kind: true stories, told with generosity, told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. The first kind, Disinfolklore, is an ocean, and we all swim in it every day, and it’s what motivates all my work. Because we swim in this ocean, I decided to try and work out what this ocean consists of. The second kind turned out to be scarce, almost to vanishing. This episode and this mini-series is the story of the search for it — the search for Infolklore. Months and months and months of failure. The best-loved books in the English language going into a machine, one after another, and coming back stamped: no. Automating Disinfolklore And for those who haven’t been listening: what I’ve been working on since January is actualising my long-held plan, which is to automate Disinfolklore detection — and, in our detection, to create an automatic engine that will enable us, in times to come, to plug in a module the way today we may surf the web or look at ChatGPT. In the future we will have cognitive modules. And what I’m trying to build is for the… So that when we are confronted with the vast amounts of information, and information flows that continue to increase, we will have a means of interpreting it really quickly — as quickly as we really need to. And so I call that cryptotypic engineering, or Automating Disinfolklore. So, my attempts to build this machine. I started off with the 10,000 propaganda items that I collected and hand-coded in Luhansk, which I talk about a lot, back in 2015. And so for much of the year I’ve been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart. Where the search ended was really not in any library on earth. And I went through so many texts and types of narrative, from EUvsDisinfo to war college reports to all kinds of different narrative forms. And the search ended, really, in this room, with Volia Radio. And it ended with you. With us. And this whole mini-series is our own practice — but I’m just a bit part in this, with just this short time once a week. The whole series is Volia’s own practice, read back to us as principles. And this first episode is how I came to be reading the Volia Radio transcripts. Great thanks to all at Volya Radio for their great support of my work over the years! Teaching a Machine the Two Kinds So for much of this year I have been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart: Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral. A frontier model — one of the big AI systems, the kind that can read a whole archive before breakfast. And you teach it by feeding it specimens. What I’m doing is creating training pairs for a locally held large language model. Well — not, I mean, it’s locally held, but it’s held in a data centre somewhere; but it’s proprietary. And here is the real Disinfolklore, and you learn its smell — which I first scented when I was in Russia-occupied Luhansk in 2015 — and real Infolklore, teaching the computer to learn the smell of it, the scent. And half of the job has been relatively easy, in the sense that I’ve managed to gather together a corpus of hundreds of millions of artefacts in Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese: hundreds of millions in each of these languages, and in Hindi, in Dravidian languages, in MAGA language. So that gathering together, that corpus, was relatively easy — the easy half. The graph tells us something about the world we live in, which won’t be a surprise to any of us on Volia Radio, but it also tells us about my motivation in all of this work, which is to try and do something active about it. And I’ve been on this task in various forms since 2015, as I gradually worked out what was going on. And here is how I described the task to you last month. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy — everything we hear from Strelkov will do. We’re going to kill you all. Basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. I’ve spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes; even — maybe Ming will appreciate this — P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster. The Reject Pile Wodehouse had company in the reject pile. Sherlock Holmes went in, failed. War college reports went in, failed. The Battle for Kiev study — which I’ll get to in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut report — towards the end, the Battle for Kiev study done by John Spencer, a friend of the channel, did go in. And that was really my only piece of archetypal Infolklore: a serious piece of military analysis, by serious people, about the defence of the capital. But what I’m trying to do is build a system that will recognise the archetypal content in any sized lexical unit. And so it needs to be really flexible, and needs to be able to be trained on lexical units which aren’t all in the same format. So that particular war college report gave me a lot of hope — but then I tried others, and it just didn’t work. The EUvsDisinfo stuff didn’t really work. And for the same reason that an academic from the information school in Melbourne found that fact-checking doesn’t work: because it’s a different narrative form. You have to counter magic with magic. So if Disinfolklore manages to meld itself into our minds and alter our intentions and our moods, our attitudes and our motivations, through a means that most of us don’t really understand or can’t detect in real time, then Infolklore — which is a creative practice rather than a countering practice — has to do the same thing. And fact-checking just doesn’t do it. So there’s a lot of value in EUvsDisinfo’s work; it’s the format it presents. And so my own witness writing went in. It failed too. And it failed in its own particular way. The person who named the framework — me — cannot be its neutral witness. And so, I built the instrument; I cannot also be the specimen that calibrates it. There I sat, month after month: a machine hungry for the positive kind, and a whole civilisation of shelves unable to feed it. Conan Doyle could not feed it. The finest comic novelist in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, could not feed it. The war colleges of two continents could not feed it. And I could not feed it myself. The Wodehouse Failure The Wodehouse failure deserves its own telling. And for those who aren’t familiar with P.G. Wodehouse, he wrote about a hundred — 110 — about the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster: a slave owner, or rather a gentleman, and his servant. And it came closest of anything. And the way it fell short taught me, really, what Infolklore actually is, in some respects. On the 19th of May I proposed to the frontier model the Jeeves and Wooster series as a training corpus for the positive kind, for Infolklore. I was confident that if any books in the English language were going to pass, it would be these sunlit, kindly, perfect books. And the adjudication that came back was, on its face, glowing. Jeeves is archetypally saturated: he’s the trickster servant, the clever slave of Roman new comedy, a figure the stage has carried for more than 2,000 years, still quietly running his master’s life. Bertie Wooster is the holy fool, the indulged innocent, whom the plot punishes and protects in equal measure. When I say archetypally saturated, I mean the stories are full of the old shapes — characters folklore has kept alive for millennia because they do something for us. And on the Code of Positive Trolls, Wodehouse passes everything: generous on every page, patient, non-coercive. Nobody in those books is ever mean to anybody. Temperamentally, Wodehouse is the exact opposite of Disinfolklore. Yet still, it had to be turned away. And I felt this refusal personally. Those books have been friends of mine for decades. I turn to them in times of stress and difficulty because they’re so light, they’re so easy to read, they’re so pleasant, they’re so joyful. But the machine had a reason, and the reason was right. One leg was missing: real stakes. Nothing in Wodehouse refers to a real problem in the real world. Nobody in the Drones Club is under fire. Aunt Agatha, terror that she is, never shelled a city. The stories are true to human nature, and true to nothing that is actually happening to anyone in the real world. That near miss sharpened the definition. And here it is, the finding that the whole season, the whole search, paid for. Infolklore must be true. It must be soaked in the old story shapes. And it must be told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. All three legs, no exceptions — not even for Jeeves. Lexical Units, and the Twelve Tools Those of you who are interested in the Disinfolklore analytical method can look at disinfolklore.eu, my main site. The twelve tools, the twelve-tool way, goes into detail there on each of the different elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method. And that is essentially what I’m looking for in lexical units. When I say lexical unit, I mean a sentence, a word, of any size — and it could be a 20,000-page article, or a one-page article. What I’m building must work, must be sensitive enough to work on every kind of lexical unit, and indeed on images themselves. So that’s the goal I’ve set myself, and it may take me years. The Code of Positive T

  4. Aug 6

    Podcast | The Plight of the Sorcerers: Putler and the Chef, Zelensky and Fedorov; and

    Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the Sorcerer So on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem, the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the sorcerer, and it’s featured in Indo-European stories for millennia. And since early March 2022, Putler’s magical, manipulative powers have been noticeably on the wane. Nothing has gone right for him — even for those who dutifully surrendered to his bespelling needs. I first noted how President Zelensky’s magical powers to curse, outwit and humiliate the sorcerer Putin were growing, in proportion to Putler’s loss of power, by the end of March 2022. And as I wrote then, on the 23rd of May 2023: until recently I had ignored Putler’s apprentice, the Chef, who is now at the height of his powers. Every day since 2012, the Chef’s trolling Disinfolklore has featured across global media. His Disinfolklore even got Trump and Brexit voted in. Only now, instead of the Chef’s Disinfolklore being the concealed trolling output of his St Petersburg Disinfolklore war-magic production factories — the Internet Research Agency — the Chef today is the star of the show himself. Why, and how, has this happened? The answer is simple. So I wrote, on May 26th, or 23rd, 2023: Putin’s Rasputin, this turbulent priest of the St Petersburg underground, is ready to take over the chariot. These days the magician apprentice doesn’t even disguise himself, or his ambition. Just an iPhone and grainy footage, and his every muttered thought — and trolling grandfather glasses — is front-page news across the earth. The Chef Saucerer has sacrificed 100,000 Ukrainians’ lives since 2016. And like every Indo-European monarch for millennia, he boasts of the human sacrifices he’s made. From these sacrifices his power and authority emanates. The magician Chef has vaporised entire cities in central Europe — Popasna, Bakhmut, and the rest. Seventy-five thousand Ruschists have died at his command in six months of Bakhmut. And before this, his Nazi-worshipping soldiers, in his Nazi-branded Wagner Group, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Yet the Chef’s power as the Apprentice Magus is such that the New York Times and the rest breathlessly quote, and report verbatim as truth, his every bespelling utterance — like they did before with the butcher Putin of Grozny. Then, now, they do with the Chef. Unknowingly, Western leaders and opinion formers promote the Chef, as before they promoted his sorcerer master, Putin. Every Western website reference eulogising the butcher of Bakhmut, with his trolling grandpa glasses, is echoed back into Ruschist information spaces as evidence that the West respects the Chef and will accept him as the new sorcerer monarch. The Chef’s Internet Research Agency bespelled America and England. That was his time as Putler’s apprentice. Now the sorcerer master, Putler, who created him, cannot destroy the Chef without destroying himself. Nor can Putler promote the Chef while being certain that, once promoted, the Chef won’t destroy Putler. That is the plight of the sorcerer. So: the Chef Saucerer against the Chief Sorcerer. Why I Bring This Up: Two Tellings of One Story So why do I bring this up? Two summers ago I wrote about Putler’s plight, and it’s the oldest story we have about power changing hands, and Putler was living out its darkest version. Now, in the past few weeks, Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped into the same story. He’s living out the bright one. The two tellings sit at opposite poles of a single tale that is 6,000 years old, and watching them side by side tells us almost everything about the difference between the two countries. Georges Dumézil. A master holds a power, and an apprentice grows into that power. One day the apprentice is ready to make his own way, and the master still needs him. How do the two part without one destroying the other? That is the whole plight, in one question. The young one always rises — that was never in doubt. The only question the story ever asks is whether the rising costs a life. The Mahabharata gives the good answer, and it’s worth holding in mind. The demons free the apprentice from the master’s belly, and they do it without killing the master. Both men honour the bargain. Nobody dies. The power moves, and the two who carried it are both still standing when it settles. That is the rare ending. The plight is dangerous precisely because that ending is rare. The Dark Telling: Putler and the Chef Look first at the dark telling, because you already know it. Putler was the chief sorcerer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chef, was his apprentice — the alchemist who turned mercenaries and African gold into power the master could use. By the summer of 2023 the apprentice was ready, and the master would not let him. Prigozhin forced the question the crude way, with a mutiny: the march on Rostov, a column pointed at Moscow, and for one evening the master submitted to the apprentice in front of the whole world. Then the plight resolved the way it resolves when there is no honour in the room. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell out of the sky — allegedly. The master kept his power by destroying the apprentice. That is what the passing of power looks like when a society is sick at the top: paranoia in the palace, blood on the runway. It is the serpent’s answer to the question. This story offers a far better answer, too. The Bright Telling: Zelensky and Fedorov Now the Ukrainian side, and the same story turned to the light. Mykhailo Fedorov — whom I never forget — comes from Vasylivka, which is right on the contact line in Zaporizhzhia. He has stood at President Zelensky’s side for seven years. He built Diia, and the state that fits into a phone. He built the Army of Drones, and he’s the face of the modern, un-Soviet way of fighting this war. Six months ago President Zelensky moved him to defence, and he moved him there to do a hard thing, which was to break the paralysis with the old command. On the 15th of July, President Zelensky dismissed him. The official reason was a cabinet reshuffle. The real reason was a fight that had frozen the top of the war effort, between Fedorov and the commander-in-chief, the last powerful man of the Soviet military generation. And here the ancient story shows its shape, because the people did not accept the dismissal. Crowds filled the squares, three generations deep. Fedorov’s trust rating leapt from 35 to 65 per cent in a single week, and 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the dismissal was wrong. Within days, President Zelensky dismissed Syrskyi instead. Well — the crowds had their scalp. They stayed in the squares anyway, and they remain in the squares, although I look forward to hearing an update from Lexicon, still calling for the young man to be given his seat back. Magister and Minister: The MN Vocabulary of Rule Read that through the old frame, and every piece falls into place. Zelensky is the Magus I have been archetyping him assince the end of March 2022 — the magister, the master. In Dumézil’s map of our societies, the first function is the one who holds the magic and the law of rule. And the ministers — the magister, minister — the ministers serve directly under it. That’s hardwired into our language and into our governance for 6,000 years, since this idea of organising community was formed in Mykhailivka, which is the village about 20 kilometres south of where Mykhailo Fedorov grew up, and the place where Alexey Nikitin’s paper, published in Nature on the 5th of February 2025, put beyond all reasonable doubt the origins of the Yamna, from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate — in that community, on the Dnipro. The words themselves carry the story: magus, magister, minister, monarch, mandate. The whole vocabulary of who may rule carries the MN sound, because that is the sound our language family has carried its idea of sovereignty on since before writing. Fedorov is a minister under the magister. That is not a clever overlay on the news; it’s the story’s own word for where he stands. Fedorov is also the apprentice, and his seat is the warrior’s seat: defence is the strong right arm every sovereign needs and every sovereign fears. He is ready. He is trusted. He carries a power the master cannot make for himself. That is the apprentice of the plight, exactly. The Demons Whispering And the demons are whispering. On the Ruschist side I named them once as the men of the Ozero Cooperative, the grey figures around the throne. On the Ukrainian side they are the wily remnant of the Soviet-era power bloc — and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular; that a minister the people love is not a minister but an heir; that the one who broke the old command will one day break you. And I remind you of Veronica, who runs under the callsign Luna, and whose father was an Opposition Bloc councillor and now, it is reported, serves the occupation administration. Veronica, whom Yermak consulted over the past few years on every major appointment in government, supposedly because he believes in her authority, her capacity as a medium — though some of us might be quite sceptical about a lawyer doing that, and perhaps might suggest, or suspect, there’s a certain amount of tradecraft about it. We’ve now seen the texts between Yermak and Veronica from after Yermak was defenestrated, metaphorically speaking, at the end of the year. She advised him to speak to our friend, President Zelensky, and suggest to President Zelensky that Fedorov, if he takes Yermak’s seat in the presidential administration

    Podcast | The Plight of the Sorcerers: Putler and the Chef, Zelensky and Fedorov; and

  5. Jul 30

    Podcast | The Bridge at Stanytsia, and the Kindness of the Captor

    This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on linguistics, which is amazing. But I’m going to turn back to the first character, really, in this entire story. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m aware that for the first thirty episodes I mentioned this bridge a lot. I’m equally aware that for the past thirty episodes I haven’t mentioned it a lot. And it’s a really important character in the story. The story of Disinfolklore, and the story really of anywhere anyone you know exacts a toll. Whether that is an emotional toll or a literal toll. We see the structure of the toll troll at the moment in the Strait of Hormuz, in a geographical location. But we also see the structure of the toll in anyone we know who is, basically, a lot of work. Anything you have to do to get through that resistance in order to do your job, or get the cats out, or get the children to school. This is the structure of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. Of course, I didn’t arrive at this understanding straight away. It’s taken me years and years and years. As some of you know, I was a diplomat there, working for the international community, between 2015 and 2018. And the bridge at Stanytsia was a real bridge and a metaphorical bridge. On one side were the Russian occupiers, the bridge trolls. On the other side were the Ukrainian defenders. So I’ve been doing this series, one of the several series I have ongoing here, which I started a few weeks ago. We’ve gone through three episodes so far, and this is the fourth. It’s called The Bridge at Stanytsia. The bridge at Stanytsia Russia’s occupation administration in Luhansk cast itself as a kindly guardian of a broken bridge it had helped break. And that inversion of the bridge troll, the gatekeeper posing as protector, is how a crossing gets used to rewrite who you are when you walk across it. There is a bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, and for years it was the only legal way to cross the contact line into Luhansk region. A long wooden walkway, part of it blown out, with steps and ramps that pensioners climbed in the heat and the cold to reach the other side. I stood on the bridge. I filed reports from it. So when I tell you what was done with it, I am not reading you a theory. I’m telling you what I watched. And then I’m going to show us the words that were published about it by the occupiers. The old story comes first. In folklore there is a creature called the bridge troll. It lives under the crossing and it demands a toll. A riddle, a coin, a piece of you, before it will let you pass. Three Billy Goats Gruff. The troll does not build the bridge and it does not own the river. It simply controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place it controls everything. Whoever holds the bridge holds the story of who you are when you cross it. Are you a refugee or a returnee? A citizen or a separatist? You do not get to say. The one at the crossing says it. And this is the position, for example, both Donald and Netanyahu find themselves in. Donald launched this illegal war against Iran thinking that he was the bridge troll. And now it turns out that the Iranians are much more experienced, with millennia of experience and understanding of this essential structure. The bridge Donald wants to cross at the moment is simple. He just wants the war to be over, because it is an absolute catastrophe, for all the reasons most of us know. I think the figure is something like thirty billion dollars’ worth of American materiel destroyed by Iran in the last two weeks, according to satellite imagery that was released by Iran but taken from China. Because, again, Donald has exacted a toll on Planet Labs. Planet Labs grew out of an entrepreneurship project at my business school in Oxford, around 2010, when someone had the idea of building shoebox satellites. It was incomprehensible a year ago that this satellite imagery would not be available to the world. But it is unavailable to us. We can’t see it. The Chinese have helpfully released it. And so the toll which Iran is now exacting on Donald, as they escalate with perfect tempo, works like this. They know Donald is desperate to get this war over with. But every time he is ready to pay a price, the toll goes up. And he gets trolled. The arch troll gets trolled into doing another action, bombing somewhere. Yesterday, bombing Iraq with Saudi Arabia. And then the toll goes up. This is an essential archetypal structure in international relations. And it plays out in the micro and the macro. Here in Stanytsia Luhanska is how that archetype was actually used. In June 2018 the occupiers’ own news outlet, Luhinfo, ran this story, and I’m quoting it. The Luhansk Folk’s Republic, this is the fake occupation authority, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes, as it did successfully, “urges to restore Stanitsa bridge, as people are dying of heat in queues at the checkpoint.” And believe me, it was extremely hot there, many times, all through the summer. I stood there. I patrolled the one and a half kilometre stretch between the government-controlled checkpoints, across through this beautiful forest, on a path where spent munitions were scattered. Mostly older women and children crossed, and had to walk that one and a half kilometres of no person’s land to reach the bridge, and then the other side of the bridge. And the winter is ridiculously cold. This is part of the toll the Russians erect. They’re experts at this. They did it in Moldova. It is the concretisation of their occupation, part of the techniques they take out of a box whenever they occupy a territory. You see it in Georgia, in Abkhazia, as well. When I see photographs of what goes on there, it reminds me so much of the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge. So this is a news article in the Russist propaganda media in June 2018. And they quote their so-called negotiator, this guy who archetyped himself, he looked like Trotsky, I’ve spoken about him before. “We spoke about the two people who have died at the checkpoint outside Stanitsa Luganskaya because of the heat on June 24th, on the Ukrainian side. They are mostly elderly people who cross the contact line to receive pensions.” Because the Russists paid a tiny allowance to people in occupied Luhansk, and then people would cross the bridge to collect their pensions. Under Western pressure, Ukraine was forced for a long time to pay those pensions. Which in turn enabled the occupation, and encouraged people to stay inside the occupation when really they should have left, however horrific it would have been to leave everything behind them. Because it has only gotten worse. Two people died in the queue on that date. That part is true, and it is terrible. But look at who is speaking. The administration that fronts the Russist occupation, the side whose forces are dug in at one end of the broken bridge, has stepped forward as the grieving advocate of the people crossing it. It urges restoration of the bridge. It frets about the elderly in the sun. It points across the river, at the Ukrainian side. The troll under the bridge has put on a red cross armband and is weeping for the goats. That is the bridge troll inverted. And the inversion is the whole trick. The gatekeeper does not stop you with a club. It stops you, and then tells you it is the only one who cares that you were stopped. The toll it collects is not a coin. It is your understanding of who broke the bridge. Here is a second piece, from two years earlier. March 2016, the Russist outlet Riafan. Headline: “OSCE members headed by Hug fled from the Luhansk Folk’s Republic after receiving complaints.” The monitors, I was one of them, are walking from the occupied side towards the government side, and a civilian appeals to them. This is where the Russians stage events, where they shoot at people and blame the Ukrainians. And to set that up, they get people to speak on camera, in front of people like me. A real grief, someone did die. And again, pointed in exactly one direction, at exactly the moment the monitors are about to cross to where they could see for themselves. Stay on our side of the bridge. Do not cross. In one sense they are saying, don’t leave us, don’t abandon us. But in the other sense they are saying, if you abandon us, the Ukrainians will start shooting. And this did not happen in reality. The gatekeeper does not only control who passes. It tries to control where the witness looks. This is folklore-shaped storytelling, built on archetypes we already trust, turned to capture us instead of shelter us. And the thing about an archetype is that the same figure can be turned either way. Donald on the bridge is the bridge troll protecting Americans from all the criminals coming from abroad. From another perspective he is the uber bridge troll, until he met his match in the Iranian trolls. A curse on all of their houses. A guardian of a crossing can genuinely protect the people who cross it. Or it can pose as that guardian while it is the one holding the gate. You cannot tell from the costume. The costume is identical. You tell by what it actually does. Who blew up the bridge? The Russians. Who keeps it broken? The Russians. Who profits from the queue? The Russians. That is why the Luhansk operation worked so well. And I mean worked. It was so complete a piece of stagecraft that for eight years almost nobody reached for the plain word occupation. Look at the outlets’ own language. The occupiers’ press names the occupation almost never. Somewhere between nothing and three in a hundred mentions across the whole period. Even the Ukrainian side climbs only to about a third by 2018. The word for what was happening lagged years behind the thing itself. That is what a good bridge troll buys you. Not the bridge. The name. Most of us have learnt, for instance, that Russia was occupying most of eastern Europe after Yalta. But still, I ha

    Podcast | The Bridge at Stanytsia, and the Kindness of the Captor

  6. Jul 23

    Podcast | Actor, Not Philosopher - Outflank Dugin, Don't Rebut Ep 2

    It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do For six months now I have been training a neural network to build the training data for a local language model. The model’s job, when it is ready, will be to read wartime information and sort it the way I do: into Disinfolklore, Infolklore, and Neutral. I have been working extremely hard on this and the progress has been remarkable. One challenge sits under everything. We are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce. I developed both concepts, starting from the propaganda that flooded Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine from 2015 onwards. Disinfolklore is the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds. It works on their intentions, their motivations, their attitudes and, importantly, their moods, without their ever knowing. Infolklore is its opposite: the tale that feeds the well we all who listen daily to @Volya4UA on Twitter spaces drink from instead of poisoning it. Most of us were together in the Mriya Report days, and while you were watching the war I was developing these ideas from the very material we all looked at each day. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy. Everything we hear from Strelkov will do: we are going to kill you all, basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. We have spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes. Even, and Ming will appreciate this, P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster. Great thanks to James and Wendy for hosting Decoding Disinfolklore every Wednesday. We’ve been going now for fourteen months every week! Three sources lit the instrument up. The first was written by a friend of the show. John Spencer jointly wrote the definitive account of the battle for Kyiv, a nine-thousand-word study. The moment I fed it in, the model recognised it as the best match for Infolklore it had seen. The second is a channel that still publishes every day: RIA Melitopol, now RIA Pivden, working out of Zaporizhzhia city while Melitopol is temporarily occupied. The third is Volya. In particular Will and M’ockers. In particular M’ockers, who wears her archetype on her moniker. Her whole method is: well, that will teach you to invade Ukraine. It is the complete opposite of the dark well. So a couple of weeks ago I recorded one of the Volya shows and put it through the method properly. It was the episode where the tanker fella told the whole history of the alumina campaign which his fellow Tanker Fella @realLangerDan had begun. And I am not really writing about that campaign here. I am writing about the pattern he was describing: a small group of people moving together, creating a great campaign, and the campaign moving monsters. The Trita pattern That pattern has a name. Most of us in the pro-Ukraine space carry an archetypal model of how the world works, and it works by the small person being victorious. There is another pattern, the Vritra pattern, the serpent who holds the waters back and always wins. Both patterns live in every Indo-European language culture. Celtic, Armenian, Iranian, Indic. In England it is St George and the dragon. In India and Iran the hero is sometimes called Trita, and every Hollywood happy ending is the Trita pattern working out. It is not mysterious. You do not have to have read about Trita. You just carry the pattern. Most of us on the pro-Ukraine side recognised from the very beginning that Ukraine was going to win, because there is no other choice. There is not a world in which Russia wins. Our certainty through the long struggle becomes clearer when one reads about the Trita pattern, which I came across in the work of one of the foremost Indo-European specialists, Bruce Lincoln, while researching Disinfolklore. So here is my analysis of what the tanker fella and everyone on that show were doing that particular day. On day one of the full-scale invasion, one man posted one question. Why is our country still shipping alumina to Russia when there is a war on? Nobody important answered him. He just tweeted, like all of us small people do, into the blackness. Three years later there was an investigative journalist on the story, more than thirty MEPs signing declarations, a government investigation and a vote in the European Parliament. And a couple of weeks ago the show told the story in its own words. The first line of the episode was the best summary anyone could write. “It’s amazing what regular people can do, isn’t it?” The moment I heard that, I knew I had my perfect case study. The two acts of naming As all of you know, I study wartime stories. As all of us do. We have become experts in it. I had to laugh this week when M’ockers chimed in with “did you see that?” about some particular explosion somewhere, and the tanker fella was able to describe it immediately. This is the kind of knowledge most of our friends in the real world would balk at. They have no idea any of this is going on. I have spent years building a method for reading these stories. The method has a simple engine: two acts of naming. The first act: name the story. Not the topic, the story. Wartime information runs on story patterns far older than any of us. Some are older than writing. When you name the pattern correctly, the noise drops away and you can see what the piece of content is actually doing. The second act: proof it. Take the conduct the story carries and hold it against the standard our grandparents wrote down after 1945. The UN Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Law of the Sea, the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Story plus standard gives you a verdict. Either the tale feeds the well we all drink from, and I call it Infolklore. Or it poisons the well, and I call that Disinfolklore. Or it is neither, and the method says so and moves on. When I teach a computer to do this automatically, this is the structure I give it. It loves it. First act: Trita against Vritra Start with the alumina story, because it fits one of the oldest patterns we have. In the Rig Veda, the oldest long text in our whole language family, there is a serpent called Vritra. His name means “the coverer.” He coils around the waters and holds them back. The rivers stop. The world dries. He produces nothing. He only withholds. Against him the tradition sets a hero. In the oldest layer of the story that hero is Trita, which simply means “third”: after Manu, the human, and Yama, the twin, comes the third brother, the younger one, the one nobody bet on. He has no army. He frees the waters anyway. And the seven rivers of ancient India run. The campaign story has the same shape. A flow that should move was being held. Not the alumina, which flowed freely, too freely. What was being held back was the truth about where it went, and the sanction that truth demanded. Around the flow sat a coil of reassurances. Don’t worry, it’s only for tin cans. Don’t touch it, the jobs. There’s an investigation, wait for the investigation. A hundred days and counting. That is the Vritra conduct. Nothing created. Everything covered. Then the third brother turns up. One tanker watcher with a tweet. Then a website. Then a handful of listeners. Then M’ockers and her enthusiasm for the campaign from the very beginning. Then journalists, the Irish Times and the OCCRP, who found the receiving smelters’ military contracts. Then the public lobbying register, which anyone can read at lobbying.ie and which showed the scale of the pressure from the other side. Then thirty MEPs. The campaign called its own method “polite persistence.” I cannot improve on that name. It is exactly how the third brother fights. He does not become a serpent to beat a serpent. He keeps asking for the waters until the waters move. Second act: proof it against the standard This is where the campaign shines, and I do not think we even notice it ourselves while it is going on. Someone said on air: you have to have a solid argument, you have to base it on facts. That is the first mark of the bright side. Fabrication is the serpent’s tool, never the third brother’s. The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ethical discipline. We do not get anywhere by lying. Then somebody (@willthiel) in the community pointed the campaign at the Genocide Convention. I think that was Heather, as ever just behind the scenes, suggesting it to M’ockers. The duty of every country to prevent genocide arises as soon as it becomes aware it is involved. A group of ordinary listeners, on a medium most of our friends do not even know exists, reached for the post-1945 legal order as their spine. Not for a conspiracy theory. Not for rage. For the charter world our grandparents built. In my method, that is precisely what separates the two kinds of story. The verdict writes itself. This is Infolklore, and it is anchor-grade Infolklore. There was one more line in that segment that bears repeating. You don’t need to be well-funded. You don’t need a big lobby group. You just need people. The old Indo-European world had a word for the power that gathers in a community when it acts rightly. Our cousins in the Pacific still use it. Mana. That sentence is what mana sounds like in an Irish accent. The troll under the bridge Inside the campaign story sat a smaller, nastier pattern, and the show displayed it perfectly. The jobs line: touch this export and the jobs are at risk. Every folklore tradition in Europe knows this figure. It is the troll under the bridge. He does not own the bridge. He did not build it. He just sits at the crossing and demands a toll. The toll here was silence. Leave the export alone or your neighbours lose their livelihoods. The method asks one question of every toll. Is it fair? This one was not. And Volya answered it, not by shouting, with facts again. Over half the output going to a single buyer whose war economy must e

  7. Jul 17

    Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

    Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

    Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

  8. Jul 16

    Podcast | Outflank Dugin. Don't Rebut - Ep. 1

    I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galaxy, such as MAGA, Iran, Ruschia, Italy, wherever. I am going to read three today. Then I will start another new series: Outflank Dugin. Don’t Rebut. Outflanking enemies in the information war - the battle to free our minds from manipulative Disinfolklore-borne brain-washing memes. That is one of the main tactics I deploy. It’s why, for example, I go as far back and deeply into the past 6,000 years of Indo-European culture as possible. When arch manipulators like Modi, Putler, Donald or Dugin (or even local characters in our own lives deploy mysticism and superstition to gain power, one way to understand what they’re doing and to defeat them is: Outflank. Don’t Rebut. This new series gives everyone the tools to do this. 1. The Word That Wasn’t There I am talking about a word that was not there in the context of Russia-occupied Ukraine. I would like us also to think about the word that was never there while Muscovy was occupying most of Europe after 1945. It is the same phenomenon. Many people did not see it in the context of Russia-occupied Luhansk. They also did not see it in the context of that massive military occupation of Czechoslovakia, Poland and all the rest of it between 1945 and 1990. And I include myself in that, until relatively recently. For eight years, the most important word about Russia’s war in Luhansk was missing from almost everyone’s mouth. The word is occupation. It was missing from occupiers and Ukrainians alike. This episode teaches us to read the silence. The thing that is not said is sometimes the operation. Here is a strange way to catch a disinformation operation. Do not listen for the loudest word. Listen for the word that should be there and is not. The setting is Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, from 2014 to 2018. These are the years before the full-scale invasion. Russia has taken a chunk of the region and stood up a fake country there. It is the so-called Luhansk Folk’s Republic, the LFR. I spent time on the contact line at the Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, doing monitoring work for the OSCE. That is the European security body that oversaw the so-called ceasefire. I read thousands of items of propaganda during those years. The thing I want us to notice is what nobody was saying. Listen to the occupier’s own outlet, the Lugansk Information Centre, in February 2017. The LFR, it reports, “demands”. Demands. It demands “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as it calls it, on a contractual basis. This means the power to conclude contracts.” Read that again. Notice the word that is not in it. Two parties. A contract. Coexistence. This is the vocabulary of one state talking to another. It is not the vocabulary of an occupier and the people under its boot. Or here is the same outlet in 2016, on the LFR’s so-called border guards. They patrol 274 kilometres of the so-called border with Russia. A border. A state has borders. A fake republic is dressing itself every single day in the costume of a country. That is the operation’s foundational move. It works by what it leaves out. Say republic. Say border. Say minister, parliament, ten thousand times. Never once say occupation. And the missing word starts to feel like it was never true. Now here is the part that should stop us. The other side left the word out too. Look at how Ukraine’s own news agency, Ukrinform, described the fighting in January 2018. “Events in the anti-terrorist operation, the ATO, zone.” The ATO, the anti-terrorist operation, was the official Ukrainian name for the war for years. For all the years I was in Ukraine. Think about what that name quietly does. It frames a foreign invasion and occupation as a counter-terrorism problem. It becomes something a country handles inside its own borders, against criminals. It is a true description of a real fight. But it is not the sentence. The sentence is: a foreign army is occupying our land. The word still is not there. You can watch the word arrive in slow motion. In 2017, the phrase “temporarily occupied territories” starts creeping into the Ukrainian wires. In 2018, Ukraine renames the war from the ATO to the JFO, the Joint Forces Operation. Still an operation. Still not repelling an occupier. If you measured across the whole archive of ten thousand propaganda items, the occupier’s outlets called it an occupation almost never. Under four per cent. And the Ukrainian side climbs from about three per cent at the start to a third by 2018. The word everyone now uses without thinking was, at the time, the word almost no one reached for. I will give you the cleanest measurement I have. It is myself. I studied international law at Cambridge. I did monitoring work on that very contact line. And I did not call them occupiers. Not in my own head, until the tanks rolled in 2022. I was inside the frame they built. That is not a confession. It is data. If the frame can hold a stranger who has read law and stood at the bridge, it is a very good frame. In my framework, I would call this Disinfolklore. It is folklore-like storytelling built to capture you rather than shelter you. Usually we hunt it by the characters it deploys. The Nazi bogeyman. The merciful sovereign. The saintly grandmother at the checkpoint. Those are loud. This one is silent. The archetype here is not even a character at all. It is a shape with a hole in the middle. Like a shell hole in a fairy-tale kindergarten, of the kind Victoria Amelina wrote about. So let me give us the tool, because it is a small one and we can carry it everywhere. Call it reading the absence. When we meet any account of a contested thing, a war, a firing, a closed factory, a vanished neighbour, let us not only weigh the words that are present. Ask the quieter question. What word would honest description put here, and is it missing? Who benefits from its absence? A border instead of a front line? An operation instead of an invasion? A republic instead of a seizure? Here is what seeing it gives us. It is the only reason any of this matters. Once you can hear the missing word, you cannot unhear it. The silence stops being neutral. It starts pointing, at every turn, on every side, to the thing someone needed you not to name. The frame only works while the word stays gone. The moment you supply it yourself, the operation is over. It took us collectively eight years and a full-scale invasion to say occupation out loud. We do not have to wait that long next time. We can learn to hear the hole in the sentence and put the word back ourselves. I think about the reporting this week on Venezuela, and the occupation by the United States of Venezuela. 2. The Republic of Liturgy This piece is about how a fake state’s ordinary rituals made occupation feel like the weather. A parade. A foreign minister. A children’s hospital transfer. And it is about what naming the liturgy hands back to us. Here is a small thing that could stop us. In the spring of 2017, an outlet called the Lugansk Information Centre put out a notice that the OSCE would be coming to a parade. The Lugansk Information Centre is the in-house news agency of Russia’s fake republic in eastern Ukraine. The OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In those years it ran an unarmed special monitoring mission along the front line. The observers were people like me, whose whole job was to watch and report neutrally. Here is what the fake republic’s spokesperson, Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Marochko, said about them on the 10th of April 2017. “They said that they will monitor the event.” The event was a Victory Day parade. It is the most sacred date in the Soviet calendar, the 9th of May. It was staged in occupied Luhansk by an entity that does not exist in international law. And the monitors allegedly agreed to come and watch. I want us to see how ordinary that is. It is not dramatic. It is not a battle. A parade, with observers RSVPing. That is the whole trick of this episode. This is about archetypal Disinfolklore. It is disinformation that works the way folklore works, by archetype and repetition rather than by argument. An archetype is just a familiar character, or a familiar shape, that a story slots into without us noticing. The one we are reading today I call the fake-state liturgy. Liturgy means the ritual you repeat. The parade. The holiday. The ministry doing its dull rounds. The tell, the thing that gives it away, is not the lie. The tell is the boredom. The fake state performs competent, tender, normal government. Watch it perform diplomacy. In February 2017, the same outlet quoted the republic’s acting foreign minister, Natalia Nikonorova, talking to the Russian news agency TASS. In her words, she spoke of “coexistence with central authorities, Kiev, as they call it, on a contractual basis.” A foreign minister of a thing that is not a country, conducting foreign affairs on the record, in the register of any chancellery in Europe. You read it and your eyes slide right past it, because it sounds exactly like statecraft. Watch it perform care, which is the most disarming face of all. An LFR-controlled newspaper in occupied Stakhanov reported, in April 2016, that the LFR Ministry of Health had transferred sick children for treatment. Stakhanov is not the town’s name. Kadiivka is its proper name. Now, those children are probably real, and we should want sick children to be treated. But notice the sentence is doing two things at once. It is moving children, and it is conferring existence. A Ministry of Health did this. R

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Decoding Trolls's "Battling Archetypes" podcast applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method (see Disinfolklore.eu) to the folklore-like structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality. Infolklore, by contrast, is a first-order creative practice: the active, conscious, Code of Positive Trolls-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes in the service of generosity, right, patience, creative Mana, focus, and insight. This channel helps us learn to see the immanence of Infolklore and Disinfolklore in our information streams. www.disinfolklore.net

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