Disinfolklore (12)
Disinfolklore (12)
Terrible Beauty of Fortress Bakhmut - Disinfolklore is a new analytical method to parse disinformation
In Russian Disinfolklore, the Soviet-era name for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut - Artyomovsk - is enunciated like a bewitching holy mantra. The Nazi inspired Russian “Wagner Group” which claimed the right to fight for Artyomovsk on behalf of the Russian government has created of Artyomovsk a giant. The Russian oligarch who funds Wagner is in control of one of Russia’s most successful Disinfolklore operations. The Internet Research Agency (IRA), for example, provides Disinfolklore services to the Russian State. The IRA was found by the United States Congress to have influenced Trump’s election in 2016. Today Wagner’s Disinfolklore operation provides what I term a Genocide as a Service to the Russian state.
These Russian Disinfolklorists and their diabolical twin - the Russian state’s official media channels - have been wholly invested in promoting the significance of what was assumed would be an easy win. Fighting in Bakhmut against the out-numbered, out-gunned and out-ammunitioned Ukrainian military was expected to culminate eight months ago. As the attritional fight has worn on, Artyomovsk - Bakhmut - has become a giant of Goliath-like proportions in the Russian imagination. Today, it’s looking like, yet again, Ukraine has lured the bear into a champagne flavoured honey trap of epical proportions.
After failing to take Kyiv “in three days”… After losing Kherson before Hallow’een… Having watched Lyman fall within twenty-four hours of formally annexing it into the Russian constitution (which I nominated for a Guinness World Record of the “fastest de-annexation in world history”).
And who can forget the legendary Russian promises to take the Donbas “by Victory Day [May 9th]”; “by the end of June 2022”; “by…”.
And here we are, a year into the full-scale invasion. Russia is still fighting to occupy what most commentators agree is the “strategically insignificant” city of Bakhmut. Bakhmut is indeed part of the Donetsk Region of Ukraine which Russia has been trying to seize since April 2014. Yet, even if it is occupied by Russia, due to the two diverging roads that emanate from it and its distance from the de facto capital of Donetsk - Kramatorsk - Bakhmut is by no means the key militarily to conquering Donetsk.
Yet, to the zombified Russian consumer of Russian Disinfolklore whose mind is brainwashed a thousand times a day with the Soviet-era nostalgia which drives the rationale for the occupation of Ukraine hearing the word Artyomovsk is like sipping Champagne. Literally. The most storied Soviet Champagne (Sovetovskoye Shampanskoye) was produced in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, formerly known as Artyomovsk.
In quickly understanding the semiotic importance of Bakhmut and Artyomovsk (as distinct from its mere military, geographical, or political significance), twenty-first century troll President Zelenskyy has yet again outsmarted his Russian counterpart - the twentieth-century Nordic Russian troll king Putin. President Zelenskyy repeatedly discloses his world class and unparalleled magical fluency in Counter Disinfolklore.
It is worth emphasising that President Zelenskyy in the words of the ex-US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, is a
“comedian … who had built up an entertainment conglomerate, …He’s a self-made millionaire. He wanted to make it clear that he had executive skills.”
This is to say that President Zelenskyy not only has a complete command of how precisely to provoke in others’ minds the whole spectrum of emotions - up until late 2013 and a few months before Russia would invade Ukraine President Zelenskyy was a regular fixture on Russian television; he was a household name in Russia - the television production company which he built with friends from his hometown and from university was one of the most successful content providers across the entirety of the former Soviet Union. President Zelenskyy is not just a theoretician of Disinfolklore, in the decades prior to his election as president of Ukraine in March 2019, he has perfected the art of moving others’ emotions through the control of symbols (vectors) and semantics (meaning).
Back in August 2022, Bakhmut was a lost cause for Ukraine. We expected a tactical retreat. Just after Russia finally occupied the de facto capital of Luhansk region - Severodonetsk (where I lived between 2015 and 2018) - I spoke to my ex-housemate. They told me of the fate of our gentle kind neighbour. He was “simply torn to pieces” by a Russian missile attack, as he had tried to douse the flames wrought on his garage by a previous Russian strike.
My ex-housemate was resigned, as we all were, to Bakhmut falling quickly afterwards - by the end of July or August 2022 certainly.
Yet, here we are in early March 2023. Ukraine still holds on heroically, epically and against the conventional wisdom of military “experts” who rightly say Bakhmut has no “strategic” significance (in the narrowest military sense of the word “strategic”).
Legend and actual conquest in Russian Disinfolklore (and in Counter Disinfolklore) are Divine Twins. The legend of the Little Green Men enabled Russia to occupy Ukraine’s Crimea. Russia’s legends of mythical “separatists” and mythological (non-existent) “Ukrainian Nazis” helped Russia to occupy parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. These entirely artificial constructs promoted in billions of instances of Russian Disinfolklore invaded the consciousnesses of the leadership of France, Germany, England, and America. Most of my fellow diplomats posted to eastern Ukraine to help establish the facts in relation to Russian Disinfolklore from 2014 were also manipulated by these myths. Ukraine underwent relentless pressure from Germany and France in particular to allow Russia not only to continue occupying part of its territory, but also to allow Russia to hold elections in occupied Ukraine.
A huge part of what persuaded Germany and France to pressure sovereign Ukraine in this way was Russian Disinfolklore promoted by the Wagner oligarch and Russian state media - this is one of the major themes of these one hundred episodes of Disinfolklore.
As I write in Disinfolklore (7), Disinfolklore which contains one of the two simple variations of Provocation Cycle Logic serves to paralyse the bystander - France and Germany in this example. War Magic or Disinfolklore can, as it did in the case of the occupations of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, enable military conquest. It can neutralise the responses by confusing, justifying and mythologising the permanence of what is actually ephemeral. Yet, as I never tire of quipping Russia’s military and genocidal doctrines of Accusation in a Mirror and Reflexive Control work both ways.
So in creating of the small town of Bakhmut a giant, Russian Disinfolklore felt it had finally bitten off less than it could chew. After failing to occupy the whole of Ukraine, Bakhmut must have seemed like a surely attainable goal. A Jerusalem on the hill that could justify the sacrifice in blood and treasure of Russia’s fiasco of a genocide in Ukraine.
The entirety of Russia’s Disinfolkore apparatus was mobilised to promote its imminent conquest of the home of Soviet Champagne.
Yet, in its heroic defence of Bakhmut, Ukraine has created a giant of Counter Disinfolklore - the true David in this epochal war of Good (Ukraine) vs Evil (Russia) has already slain Goliath in Bakhmut merely by holding on for so long, and ruining Russia’s easy victory on the field of Disinfolklore and on the field of battle.
We will see again and again in Disinfolklore how the character of Russia in Russian Disinfolklore shape-shifts between the underdog (the Bible-era King David fighting against all of NATO) and the giant Goliath who simply cannot lose (“Medvedyev: We will end humanity, rather than suffer defeat in Ukraine”). This shapeshifting between the bullied and the bully is a core part of Russia’s Accusation in a Mirror victim-blaming Provocation Logic Cycle Disinfolklore strategy.
Russia’s outgunned by President Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s mastery of Counter Disinfolklore, symbolism, meaning and mythologizing.
Whatever happens now, after the Battle of Kyiv, Kharkhiv, Kherson, Bakhmut will take its place in the annals. A terrible beauty, as William Butler Yeats wrote of the executed heroes of the 1916 Rising which led to Ireland’s freedom, is born.
