The Archetype Series: Recap and Context
Last week, we started a new series, which is on actual archetypes, because what I have been trying to do is go back to where all of this began for me, which was in eastern Ukraine, looking at the Russian occupiers’ media. I saved thousands — 10,000 articles from the Russian occupiers’ media from between 2014 and 2018. In them, I found some archetypes at the time, but I did not have the word for it.
I have told you the mother and the maiden story, where we had that operation where I was sent to find a common-law wife and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. The moment I heard about that operation — I did not know anything about Jung or archetypes — I knew that the story sounded artificial to me. Then I saw the reaction of the people around me and above me in the chain of command. They did not react in the same way that I did. Only one other person did, who was a London Metropolitan Police officer. We were like: what are they doing? This is a ridiculous operation.
There began my suspicion that Russian propaganda was, either knowingly or not, using archetypes to manipulate our ideas of right and what is right, beneath our conscious minds.
Last week I started with the first three archetypes, and one of them was the merciful sovereign.
Over the year, I have introduced you to the Disinfolklore analytical method. I have gone through several different series. I went through the four years of the war, and everything I did is posted on my website, disinfolklore.eu. That is my main website, and all of the Volya shows up until about two months ago, or a month and a half ago, are there on the Spotify. If you just press play, it starts with me, because it is all about me in this small slot.
I have also been posting them a bit more systematically on my other website, which is disinfolklore.net. Disinfolklore.eu is the processed, sliced-and-diced, structured twelve-tool presentation: the origins of the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is over a million words, all in very short passages, over 1,700 short passages. It is a response to people who really liked and were interested in what I had to say and my ideas, but did not or do not have the capability to read the long Substack pieces where some of the material began. Then the 44,000 tweets — all of those have been sliced and diced and put in there as well.
On disinfolklore.net, which is based on the Substack and which is part of my tripartite Substacks — Power of Mana, Finding Manuland, and Decoding Trolls — one of which I use to publish pensées, which are basically my tweets with a bit of processing to try and preserve those. Then mainly on disinfolklore.net is where I post, and where tomorrow, for instance, I will post this particular show.
Trump’s Tweet on Hungary and Dumézil’s Trifunctional Hypothesis
Donald Trump tweeted this week. Let me read what he has to say:
“My administration stands ready to use the full economic might of Hungary’s economy, as we’ve done for our great allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” — spelt correctly, believe it or not — “and the Hungarian people ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. President Donald J. Trump.”
As many of you know, I worked out, through trying to process this experience that I had in eastern Ukraine in 2016 with the mother and the maiden story, and ended up looking at Dumézil. Dumézil is one of those people in human culture who discovers something that nobody else has discovered, yet all the data was available to them. To cut a long story short, in the mid-1930s, by looking at various myths from different Indo-European traditions, Georges Dumézil suddenly had a moment of insight, which he then spent the rest of his life articulating and elucidating.
The moment of insight was that Indo-European cultures — from Ireland to India, the eight main branches of living Indo-European languages — organised themselves according to three dimensions, three archetypes, three functions: sovereignty, security, and prosperity. All of my work is impacted by this.
Donald J. Trump and those around him have probably never heard of Georges Dumézil. Yet here is Donald playing the merciful sovereign. Literally, I am ticking off every element: his message conforms to these archetypes. Obviously, at this point, no one has ever heard of any of my work. These people have not heard of Georges Dumézil any more than I had. Yet they are kind of going through a tick list.
He is talking about “my administration stands ready to use the full economic might.” There we have administration — that is sovereignty. The full economic might — that is the third function, the fertility. These map onto the three castes in Indian culture. We have them in Ireland. We have them across the entire Indo-European world.
There are some elements of Georges Dumézil’s work which are still discussed and still a bit controversial, but it is widely accepted now that not only are Indo-European myths organised in this way, but the tripartite structure of our governments and of our communities is as well. This stretches all the way back to the Yamnaya in Mykolaivka village on the right bank of the Dnieper River, about 40 kilometres south of Zaporizhzhia.
We know that because, generally speaking, if you find an element in a living Indo-European language east of Ukraine — mainly Indian or Iranian — and you find that same element in an Indo-European language west of Ukraine, then you can, on the balance of probabilities absent any other evidence, deduce that that element was present before the split. Before one brother and sister of the Yamnaya community went west from Mykolaivka village or the area between the Don and the Dnieper, and one brother and sister went east, and they both carried with them this element.
There are lots of exceptions to this general rule, but when you find an element in every Indo-European language family — all eight living Indo-European families — and then you also find it in the Anatolian family, then you know for certain it is part of the common source and was present. We have a few examples of this. I believe I have identified one, which is the M-N sound. I have written about that extensively. My main mantra is: look for the mana in the meme, look for the energy, look for the psychic energy, the synchronicity, the libido, the X factor — but I call it mana, M-N.
In this tweet, he has administration — the sovereignty. Full economic might — the fertility, which maps onto the farmer economy, the female aspect of society, which is the third caste in India. Hungary’s economy, as we have done for our great allies in the past. If Orbán wins, if they ever need it, we are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership.
This is archetypal merciful sovereign. We have Orbán himself playing a sovereign, but then we have the big daddy playing the merciful sovereign. He sends over his son, Vance, to go there, and then he decides to weigh in and uses Dumézilian language. What I am trying to teach, and what I now see with X-ray specs because I analysed this corpus — because it was so strange to me — is that I now literally see it everywhere. That is the perspective I am trying to help us see through, because when we see a tweet like this, if we can analyse exactly what he is doing — and it is very simple what he is doing, but he does not know it — these archetypal structures, they are not setting out to play the merciful sovereign, but he is acting in that way.
That is just a practical use for what I am trying to teach and the perspective I have learned to see.
The Changeling: Stealth Genocide and the Theft of Identity
You will remember last week I went through the mother and the maiden; I began at the beginning, the bridge troll; the merciful sovereign — and of course the bridge troll, here we are in the Hormuz Strait, this whole structure is playing out there; and then we had the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman. Now I am going to talk about the changeling: stealth genocide and the theft of identity.
Stealth genocide is a phrase I forged — I think in August 2022. I started using the term genocide in respect of the full-scale invasion after about ten days. At the same time, the then president of Poland, who was also a lawyer, started using it. Then, of course, President Zelenskyy used the term genocide when he visited Bucha and when he saw the dead bodies. Lawyers were very cautious about using the term genocide. Russia has been doing everything it can for the past ten years to determine what the term means, because everything they do, as is the case with Donald, is really a confession. You can predict what they are going to do by looking at their language and the archetypal structures in their language and what they are doing.
This is actually the hardest archetype to name, but it is one we must learn fastest because it is the engine of what I have come to call Russia’s stealth genocide. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. In Ireland, the Stolen Child — W.B. Yeats wrote an amazing poem about the Stolen Child, which the Waterboys put to music, which is beautiful. If you go into Apple Music or Spotify, you will find it. It is a ridiculously beautiful poem and will transport you through these beautiful valleys in the west of Ireland, which I know very well.
In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale is the deepest Indo-European fear.
Unlike Carl Jung, who did not have access to the same information we have, I do not make claims about universality any more. I can only make claims about the Indo-European mind — that is to say, minds whose first language is an Indo-European language, from India to Ireland.
The deepest fear: that those you love can be hollowed out and reoccupied while you are making the tea.
Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk is a changeling factory. From 2014 onwards, I watched it operate at scale. Ukrainians who had queued for European Cup football tickets in Donetsk in 2012, who had raised their children in Ukrainian kindergartens, watched Ukrainian television, voted in Ukrainian elections — they were gradually swapped, not physically, but archetypally.
Russia flooded the occupied zone with the Disinfolklore universe. Victory parades. Kazachi Vestnik. LugInfo bulletins. Sirens at eight o’clock for Odessa, for the fire there of the pro-Russians. People’s militia conscription drives. School textbooks rewritten. Street names changed. Ukrainian Orthodox Church driven underground. Within eight years, the cradle held a different child.
On the 11th of March 2022, that different child crossed the Donetsk River and murdered 400 of its neighbours in Kreminna. Ukrainians killing Ukrainians at the command of their captors. This is the changeling folktale run as state policy.
If any of us have been following, as most of us probably have, Chuck Pfarrer over the years, then we will be very well aware of Kreminna and its significance in the battle. Kreminna was a place, the sister city of Sievierodonetsk, where I lived. I am ashamed to say — and this is a lesson for all of us in our lives today — I did not get to know it. I never went to the forest there where Ukraine spent so long defending. I really regret not doing that.
On the 11th of March 2022, as some of us might remember, a tank — an LPR, Luhansk Folk’s Republic tank — blasted directly into this idyllic retirement home. You can see it is idyllic in the photographs, with flowers and a really nice, well-maintained building. It instantly killed dozens of people, pensioners, who were probably just like the tank commander’s parents, just like his grandparents. They could have been his grandparents.
At the same time, that day, according to intercepts that Ukrainian military intelligence obtained, we have evidence of the Russians killing 400 people in Kreminna. They were desperate. These are the Wagner people who came over the border at Shchastia, another place I know very well.
This is the changeling. These are the neighbours killing people. This is why I call it stealth genocide, because Russia does not need to kill every Ukrainian.
I cannot forget the woman I met in 2015 in a village near the occupation line. She told me her own sister, living inside Russia, would not believe her over the television. “I am your sister. Why do you believe the television over me?” That is the changeling moment. Sister at the threshold saying: I am still me. The sibling inside the other world looking back with a stranger’s eyes saying: Ukrainians are killing you. The sister in Ukraine, in Luhansk, is saying: no, they are not. The sister in St Petersburg does not believe her.
I use that story as the foundation myth — although it is a true story, and I remember the day very well — on disinfolklore.eu, to explain what I was thinking at the time she told me this story on a sunny Saturday in March 2015. Which was: what a strange place I am in. This could never happen in America. My sister, my brother, my father, my mother, my cousin, my favourite uncle could never go MAGA and become a changeling. This was before Brexit. Indeed, before many of the people in our lives were able to turn away from Ukraine and say: it is a terrible pity. You see where this fear comes into our daily lives. This is not just something we read about in fairy tales.
The changeling archetype is also why the Kazachi Vestnik newspaper matters more than its 5,500-copy print run would suggest. That was a newspaper in Russia-occupied Luhansk. Because it rebranded Kadivka — a town called Kadivka in Ukraine, but the Russians re-archetyped it as Stakhanov. Most of us will know who Stakhanov is. Even I knew exactly who Stakhanov was, because he was a key part of Russian mythology.
They rebranded Kadivka as Stakhanov because of all of this archetypal work done during early communism. They rebranded Stakhanov’s factory workers and the men who had first built the Soviet coach-building plants as Cossacks of the First Regiment, named after Platov. It gave them a new folklore, a new lineage, a new face. The changeling is not made with a scalpel. It is made with a story.
I myself remember meeting, in a city in central Ukraine which I will not name, one of the only female commanders at the time, part of Pravy Sektor, part of the volunteer forces who held back the might of the Russian army until basically May 2023, when they were dissolved into the Ukrainian army proper. She had been a very senior person in a local municipality administration in Luhansk oblast — not in the city, but in a town in the oblast.
I interviewed her in depth about how she ended up as the deputy commander of a battalion defending against the Russians. She described how, in February 2014 — while the Maidan was going on 1,000 kilometres west of there — she noticed these Cossacks, as she termed them, coming in to camp near her town, in her neighbourhood. I said to her: what do you mean by Cossacks? Because, of course, Cossack has a very Ukrainian heritage, from Zaporizhzhia. The Russians steal this. She said: Russians. In her mind, the word Cossack was already re-archetyped as a foreigner, as a Russian. I always recall that because it helps me orientate myself. Already the changeling archetype had been used.
What they were doing in Kadivka, which they renamed Stakhanov, was creating this fake group of people that they archetyped as a regiment, the First Regiment named after Platov. This gave them a new folklore, a new lineage, a new face. The changeling, as I say, is not made with a scalpel. It is made with a story. This is the significance and the importance of Disinfolklore.
To counter the changeling, we must hold on to the original child. We must keep saying their names, as we all are on Volya. Keep broadcasting Ukrainian television, Ukrainian music, Ukrainian language into the occupied zones, even when the signal is weak. I really enjoyed it this week — the Accidental Ukrainian, Ukrainian language into the occupied zones.
I remember meeting the head of Stanytsia Luhanska administration in 2016. I had an appointment to go and meet him. I often met him on the bridge and in his office. I interviewed him and got lots of information. I remember saying to him: what is the main thing you need? He said: we need stronger broadcasting aerials. We need stronger systems because the Russians are outgunning us in terms of broadcasting systems.
I use this as a way of remembering my own thoughts, because I remember being really surprised. I thought he was going to say ambulances or guns. What he wanted was broadcasting aerials to withstand the propaganda. It surprises me now that, even though I had been there for a year at the time, I still had not registered that this was the main thing.
We must write down what village elders remember, which is what I did. I have three years of notes from there and a further four years of notes from meeting elected leaders, hromada leaders in the area which is now under occupation, south of Tokmak. All of that area, I ranged over like a tiger and met every leader that I could. I documented it all. I look forward to the liberation and being able to talk about what they told me. For obvious reasons, I cannot do so now.
We must photograph the old street signs and we must document what the cradle held before. Because the changeling archetype only wins when the memory of the true child is lost. Ukraine is right now in a folktale struggle for its own cradle. Every one of us in every free country has a role as a witness. We are the aunts and uncles who must look closely at the baby in the cradle and insist: this is not our child. Bring the real one back.
For those of us who are Americans, I think this rings true in a way that perhaps it would not have if I told the story five years ago. Now the child has been restored in Hungary, and I see Iona is there. I look forward to hearing her impressions of that — maybe after this she can talk a little bit about it. I have not had a chance to listen to Volya. I have not really heard it. I would love to hear the details of how she feels, or how people feel that she has been reading about, about how the Russians feel.
The Daily Liturgy: The Folksy Colonel
The next archetype I wanted to talk about is what I call the daily liturgy.
When I was in the Luhansk monitoring team for the OSCE as a diplomat, 2015 to 2018, I really had a choice of jobs, and by accident I ended up in Stanytsia Luhanska, on the bridge. It was probably the toughest place to be, because we had to travel about 200 kilometres there on really rubbish roads each morning, and then 200 kilometres back. It was quite a difficult place to be. There were other jobs in the office, in operations, and many of my colleagues who started off with me in the patrol group ended up doing those kinds of jobs. Something in me kept me there, kept me on the bridge, and I am really glad that I did, because it has changed my life, and you can see how much material from those years — you are listening to it all the time and reading it all the time.
I did have this interview in about April 2015 for a job as political analyst in the team, which would have meant staying in the Mir Hotel in Sievierodonetsk each day and basically just reading the media and writing pieces to send to Kyiv. By that time, I had already worked out that all of these stories about the founding of the central bank, or a parliament and courts, which I was reading about in the daily news briefings from Luhansk city from the Russian-occupied media — I had already worked out that these were fiction. I remember saying this to my colleague who was interviewing me at the time, and he kind of nodded his head.
They had this daily liturgy in the occupied Luhansk. If you parse the three years of daily news, which I have done and which I am reporting here, from Russia-occupied Luhansk, one name recurs more than any other — more than Putler, more than Plotnitsky, who is the fake sovereign, more than any single Ukrainian president: Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, Andrei Maroshko, official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, the Luhansk Volksrepublik’s People’s Militia. In my corpus of 10,709 items, he appears in 579 of them. Almost every single briefing from 2015 to 2018 has his byline.
Who is he? He is an invented character. When I talk about Disinfolklore and the Disinfolklore analytical method — using characters, abstract people, looking at Putin as a character, because we do not know anything about him, and yet people relate to him as if he is real, although the character was created entirely by Surkov. Vladislav Surkov himself archetyped himself from his Chechen background and his Chechen name and decided to go for Vladislav. He is not a Slav. He is from Chechnya, Ichkeria. He archetyped himself and then he created Putin.
Putin started his career as Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Surkov escaped his nondescript Soviet town by learning martial arts and being taken on by a teacher who then connected him with Khodorkovsky, and he became his bodyguard. Eventually, in the mid-1990s, Surkov was looking for a piece of the action. He wanted to get some money. He wanted to become like a partner of Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky said no. He kind of left and then found this job to create this character Putin, whom they wanted to shoehorn into the presidency.
I believe this is exactly the same process which is going on at the moment for another character. I do not know which one it would be. It might be Dmitry Kozak. It could be someone we have not heard of. It could be Khodorkovsky himself. You never know. You just do not know what is going on inside there. They completely create these artificial characters. That, again, is an insight from Disinfolklore, because we can look at all of these characters in the news — whether it is the character of Greenland in Donald’s mind, or Donald, or the people around Donald, or in these Russian-occupied territories — as the same as we would look at characters in a book. The origins of my insight about this come from looking at this corpus.
This man, Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Maroshko, is an invented character. He is not invented in the sense that he does not exist. He exists. He wears a uniform. He has a moustache. It is important always to remember, as I always do, that Surkov did theatre studies. I remember being surprised at hearing that, because I could not relate theatre studies to the spectacle. Of course, now, if we look at Donald as a performer, as P.T. Barnum, as the showman, then we can understand a bit more how the spectacle interacts with the real world.
He exists. He wears a uniform. He has a moustache. He stands at the podium at the Luhansk — as the Russians would call it — media centre. He is invented in the sense that the role he plays is a costume. He is Russia’s folksy colonel, the archetypal spokesperson, whose function is to turn each day’s artillery exchange into a bedtime story.
The origins of my insight were at the bridge, with the bridge troll — the chief bridge troll, who told me he was a forester until the Russians came, and then he decided to fight for the liberation of the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. He was a woodsman, a forester. Probably in reality, he was FSB or SVR or secret service, playing a former forester. His job was to tell me bedtime stories. It took me some time. Every day I would go there and meet him, and he would have these stories to tell me about what the Ukrainians had allegedly done the night before and the heroic exploits of his men.
It was seeing the pattern in the way he was telling these stories to me, and treating me when I crossed the bridge into occupied Ukraine, that gradually I realised this was — he was telling me bedtime stories. I became very circumspect about what I put in my reports because of this. This was also going on in Luhansk at the level of the regional capital of the occupation.
Let me read you three of his lines. Each of these is real, dated, and filed. I have the files.
21st of March 2016, LugInfo.com: “A visit by the deputy head of the Special Monitoring Mission, OSCE, Alexander Hug, to Donbas led to a decrease in shelling from the side of Kyiv security forces.” This was stated by the official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Andrei Maroshko. Notice the move. A foreign official — who was the head of my mission — a foreign official’s visit led to a decrease. Maroshko positions Russia’s proxy as naturally peaceable. Shelling only happens because Kyiv chooses it. When the OSCE visits, Kyiv pauses, like a bully caught mid-swing.
5th of April 2016, DNINews.com: “Kyiv denies its fighters’ deaths to avoid paying their relatives.” In the light of the stories that Mockers tells us every week, or that we hear, this is hilarious, but it is the same script: accusation in a mirror. The LFR People’s Militia official representative commented on the statement of the UAF Civil-Military Cooperation Department head, Alexei Nozdrachev, that there are no burials of the Ukrainian army’s military near Debaltseve.
Notice this second move. Maroshko accuses Kyiv of defrauding its own soldiers’ widows. The folksy colonel is not just reporting war. He is smearing the enemy state’s moral character to the families who might bury that state’s dead. His audience here is inside the occupation.
The hermeneutic importance of Debaltseve: just after the second Minsk agreement in February 2015 — I arrived there just before it — under which a ceasefire was reinstated and both sides were supposed to withdraw their heavy weaponry beyond the range of those weapons, main battle tanks 30 kilometres away from the contact line. As ever, just as it was being signed, Debaltseve, which is an important railway junction and was supposed to be inside Ukraine’s part of the contact line — the Russians, of course, did not obey this. They went on the attack and killed a large number of Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered and retreated. I was there the day of the Debaltseve talks, at the checkpoints, and it was a very dark day. The Ukrainian soldiers were asking us: do you know how many people were killed? The whole thing was horrible.
That is its function in the folklore, if you like, of everyone’s minds. This is the Russians, over a year later, talking about Debaltseve and how — rather than admitting the fact that they slaughtered Ukrainians who were retreating — the Ukrainians themselves were not properly burying their own dead.
The third piece is from the 22nd of February 2017, LugInfo.com: “Kyiv forces fired 147 artillery and mortar rounds at LFR territory over the past 24 hours.” A precise number, 147. No casualties reported. No location named. No photographs. The precision is the trick. The precision performs truthfulness. A number this exact must be real. This is a folktale mechanism. A tailor who stitched seven at one blow. The three bears. The forty thieves. Precise integers that encode authority.
This is the liturgy. Visit — peace. Funeral fraud — moral decay. Exact number — undeniable proof. Every day, in variation, for three years. Maroshko is not primarily delivering military information. He is delivering a moral architecture.
This is my insight in Disinfolklore: that we are actually being taught mental routines. That is the mana in the memes that we are getting. They are restructuring our minds. This is my fear over what Donald is doing with Iran. Iran is to what Donald and the Disinfolklore universe he is trying to weave inside humanity’s minds, what Ukraine is to MAGA Disinfolklore. It is just an instrument. It is a means to an end. While we are focused on Ukraine or on Iran or on the island there, actually our brains are being rewired, because this is what I saw being done in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I am dedicating my life to try and build up my own resistance to it, my own resilience, but also to try and understand how it works and to try and help others see it.
He is delivering a moral architecture. Russia is the protector. Kyiv is the predator. The OSCE — this is me — is the wandering saint who visits and brings silence. The number is the incantation.
Why does this work? Because the folksy colonel is structurally identical to the village elder who gathers the children around the hearth and tells them what the forest is like at night. This is the experience I had on the other side of the bridge, speaking to the forester each day. Especially at the beginning, I thought: this is amazing. Look at me now. I am hearing the truth about what life is like here. I am meeting this village elder-type character. He is playing on all my vulnerabilities and my desire to be treated as a serious player in this military situation.
Maroshko’s uniform is incidental. His authority is folkloric. He performs the role of the one who has seen the thing you have not seen. That was my experience with the forester. He has come back to tell you what it means. In the Russian occupation, he told them the outer realm — that is, across the Donets River, where I lived and where I worked, but then I crossed over into this other world each day — was populated by fraudsters, monsters, and liars. Because he told them the same story every single day, they began, many of them, to believe it.
Think of how people in America often think of the inner cities as being wild territories. I used to get told all of these stories by my relatives and my family friends about how you could not go to these places because of this or that. It is the same story — a story which we hear from Donald about Minnesota or Chicago or what he calls them, freedom cities or whatever, as he tries to usurp their power.
The counter-move to Maroshko is not fact-checking. Fact-checking arrives too late. The liturgy is already sung. The mana is already in the meme. The counter is to name the role. He is not a spokesperson. This applies to Karoline Leavitt, for instance. She is not a spokesperson. He is a folksy colonel, a stock character in a very old play. Once you have named the role, the costume falls off.
Kyiv Forces Violate Ceasefire: A Linguistic Autopsy
This is a discourse which has only gone global recently. It went global for us in the Ukraine space probably about two years ago, where we started seeing the subversion of ceasefire. Most normal people who have not been paying attention to Ukraine were only introduced to this with the Iran war last July — and now, again, where Donald keeps on declaring a ceasefire but there is nothing of the sort on the ground. Israel does the same thing. I went through all of this in eastern Ukraine.
In that Silicon Valley dictum — the future is out there, it is just not evenly distributed — the future was out there, strangely enough, in this place in eastern Ukraine. Many of our futures were out there. I did not realise it at the time. At the time, I thought the future was in Silicon Valley, and I was desperate to get a job in Silicon Valley. Ironically, and this is a lesson for us all, I was in the centre of things, but I did not realise it at the time. Thankfully, I stayed there long enough to gather all of this.
From September 2014, when the first Minsk Protocol was signed — and I have written about this extensively before — Ukraine was not given the credit for this. By September 2014, Ukraine had the Russians on the run, in the sense that the Russians were still playing their little green men troll. The Ukrainian army by that time had managed to get itself together. It had these volunteer battalions — loyal Ukrainians like Kolomoisky, who obviously then turned into Abaddon, and he always was Abaddon probably, but he was funding Dnipro-1 and Dnipro-2 battalions, which held back the might of the Russian army in Donetsk. The Ukrainians really had the Russians on the run, partly because the Russians did not expect any resistance then.
The Russians signed the first Minsk Protocol in September 2014. Some of you might remember, they were threatening to take Mariupol. Then the ceasefire line was basically frozen at that point, from the coast — Shyrokyne, which is about 20 kilometres east of Mariupol — all the way up to where I was on the contact line and the Donetsk River. That was not done out of generosity or a goodwill gesture. It was done because the Russians were not quite sure how blatant they wanted to be. They had already been sanctioned over MH17, and militarily they were on the run. Really, all they wanted was Crimea. They thought it was going to be an easy run to take the rest of the country. They signed this Minsk Protocol, but there was still a lot of fighting.
From when the first Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014 to the full-scale invasion, Russia-backed outlets in occupied Luhansk used one sentence in variation every single working day. In my corpus, it appears 511 times. It is one of the most repeated formulae I have ever catalogued: “Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.”
Five words. Let me take them apart one at a time, because each word is doing Disinfolklore work.
Kyiv — not Ukraine, not the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Ukrainian state. Reducing Ukraine to its capital city performs a geographic demotion. It archetypes the real state as a single belligerent municipality, the way a medieval chronicle might speak of Prague or Novgorod. Meanwhile, the fake state — the Luhansk Folk’s Republic — is inflated upward. The Republic. The sentence is a seesaw. Ukraine goes down, the occupation goes up.
Forces — not army, not soldiers, not defenders. Forces. Faceless, menacing, unmarked. It does not wear a uniform you could mourn. It is simply a mass, like weather. The listener cannot picture a man, only a phenomenon.
Violate — this is the core move. A ceasefire is a rule and a violation is a trespass. The verb positions the sentence in the grammar of law. Grammatically, the LFR has become the aggrieved party. The LFR is the state that was keeping the rule. Kyiv is the criminal. A violator, in English and in Russian alike, is a category with legal resonance — one step from violator to that horrible word beginning with R-A-P, that Donald is an adjudicated one. That slippage is not accidental. It is the Disinfolklorist working beneath the conscious attention.
The ceasefire — not a ceasefire, not this ceasefire. The definite article makes the ceasefire sound eternal, unconditional, pre-existing, as though it had descended from heaven rather than been negotiated in a sweaty hotel in Belarus. The definite article sacralises the thing it names.
Now hear how the formula lives in the wild. 23rd of September 2016 — all that summer of 2016, I had to go and spend maybe four nights there every couple of weeks in Stanytsia Luhanska overnight and count the ceasefire violations. Some nights I counted thousands. As any of us who know — if you have ever tried to count explosions and bullets or artillery strikes, it is really hard. You lose count. You mark them on a piece of paper with little marks and then at the end you count them. Some nights it was thousands.
This is at the end of that summer, 23rd of September 2016: “The situation along the contact line has a tendency to escalation. From the 22nd to 23rd of September, the ceasefire regime was not observed by UAF.” 28th of September: “Ukraine’s forces are violating ceasefire near Stanytsia Luhanska, a key condition for implementing the recently reached agreement on disengagement of forces.” At that time, there was a ceasefire for the school year. We had all of these ritual times each year to allow the school children to go to school.
22nd of February 2017: “Kyiv forces fired 147 artillery and mortar rounds at LPR territory over the past 24 hours.” Every single item follows the same template. Agent: Kyiv, Ukraine, UAF. Verb of violation: violate, fire, shell, breach. Passive LFR: LFR territory, our positions, the Republic. Numeric flourish: six times, 147 rounds, three cases. Day after day, year after year.
The reader does not remember any individual incident. The reader just sees the pattern: Ukraine attacks, we defend, we count. The purpose is not to report the war. The purpose is to install in the occupied population a stable emotional identity: we are the ones attacked, they are the ones who attack. Once that identity is stable, any Ukrainian counter-offensive is self-evidently criminal. Any Russian expansion is self-evidently defensive.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was not a new story to the people of occupied Luhansk. It was the eighth year of the same sentence.
The counter is a different sentence. Try this: “Russia-backed forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” Agent named. Violation stated. Duration marked. The listener’s mind, offered a different grammar, begins to build a different story.
While all of this was going on in Russia-occupied Luhansk, the same story was being told on every single news briefing all the way across Russia. At that time, I had no visibility of that. I had no idea that this was going on. Many of us still do not. That is the real value of what Mockers and Will and all of us — but especially the Absurdistan focus, and Iona reading Komersant out to us — this focus we have on Russia, wrapped obviously inside a very careful way that we tell the stories, is giving us a really clear idea of what is going on in there, and the brainwashing that is going on in there.
All through 2014 to 2022, I did not have any visibility of that, even though I had all the visibility of what was going on in Luhansk and that brainwashing process. The value of what we can add is by explaining to people we know what is really going on in Russia, because that is really the process of brainwashing. The enemy that we need to understand — they are not getting normal news and they are totally brainwashed.
Unfortunately, all of the OSCE’s reports did not do what I said. They never said: “Russia-backed forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” It was always: “The OSCE observed three artillery rounds being fired from the south-west to the north-east, 20 kilometres south of X.” I remember meeting a senior NATO officer in Vienna once. He was just asking me: I have to read your reports every day, but I do not really understand them — could you just explain what all this stuff is? Because the Russians are part of the OSCE, we were never blatant like this. It was a huge disservice to everyone that we were not.
The Fake State Liturgy
The final archetype I have is the fake state liturgy.
The Republic’s defence authorities: 1,085 items from my data set. The same nouns recur hour by hour, year after year. The Republic. The People’s Militia. The People’s Council. I use the word folk’s because of Disinfolklore. The LPR defence authorities. The Ministry of State Security. These are not descriptions. They are a liturgy.
A liturgy is what the church does on Sunday morning. Heather will know all about this. She will probably correct me on this. It is not primarily communication. It is a performative act. The words make the thing real by the act of speaking them. “This is my body.” “This is the Republic.” The worshipper who hears the phrase becomes a believer, not because they are persuaded, but because the repetition changes what they perceive as normal.
From my corpus: 10th of March 2016, the People’s Militia of the LFR. 5th of April 2016, the official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko, commented on the statement of the UAF Civil-Military Cooperation Department. 17th of February 2017: LFR and DPR heads Igor Plotnitsky — whose parents, by the way, died eating poisonous mushrooms, which I also found very suspicious even at the time, before I discovered this motif in folklore — and Alexander Zakharchenko called for Kyiv to allow the Republic’s observers to carry out inspections. This at a time that literally every piece of metal was being taken out of the LFR and DPR and brought to Russia, sold as scrap in Russia. They systematically took out all the equipment, the pipes, anything in any factories — total looting. Yet here they are calling for Kyiv to allow the Republic’s observers to carry out inspections there.
I remember reading all of these and thinking: the chutzpah. Who do you think you are? You are a bunch of occupiers and you are speaking to a sovereign state as if you are a sovereign state.
Read the last one again. “Heads expressed concern.” “Demanded.” “Republic’s observers.” These are sovereignty verbs, sovereignty nouns. No actual state is doing anything here. Two men funded by Moscow are being photographed at a table, and a Russia wire copy is inflating the photograph into a diplomatic act between two fake states. The costume does the work.
There are three moves in this fake state liturgy, and every item in my corpus performs one or more of them.
Move one: the institutional name. Never the militants, never the occupiers, never the armed group — always the People’s Militia. The adjective “people’s” or “folk’s” is a direct theft from Soviet iconography: the Supreme Soviet, the People’s Court, the People’s Commissariat. It connects the LFR in the listener’s unconscious to the whole memory architecture of the USSR. It archetypes the occupation as a continuation of something they once belonged to.
Move two: the title. Never “Maroshko said” — always “the official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko.” This is partially why I am always really careful about always saying and writing President Zelenskyy. Maybe for the first year of the full-scale invasion, I was a bit more negligent about this. I even tried to subvert the Z archetyping by referring to him as Z. Almost every time I did it, I got pushback from people. Now I try always — never Zelenskyy — because you hear people like Vance, or people in our lives who know nothing about Ukraine or President Zelenskyy, talking about him dismissively as Zelenskyy. That is why I am very respectful. I try, even in my tweets: President Zelenskyy, always.
Always: “The official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko, said.” The rank, the role, the institution — all incanted every time, a magician’s repetition. The listener absorbs without thinking the premise that there is an LFR, that it has a People’s Militia, that it has an official representative, that they hold ranks. Four fictions stacked into one grammatical subject.
Move three: the counterpart. The liturgy always frames Ukraine as Kyiv — a city, not a state. Kyiv forces. Kyiv-controlled territory. Kyiv denies. I noticed this from journalists, even in the Kyiv Independent. It always screams to me: you are a bit of an amateur, you have not really been paying attention. When I see a journalist from the FT trying to perform impartiality by referring to Kyiv and Moscow — maybe you can do that in the context of other wars, but this war has been going on for eight years, and the Russians have been using this to demote Ukraine’s sovereignty. You, the Financial Times journalist, are playing this game for them. I think, and I know, their intentions are good. They are just trying to distance themselves and perform impartiality. But it screams to me: amateur hour.
This is the inverse move. While inflating the occupation into the Republic, it deflates Ukraine into a single municipality. The fake state becomes weightier than the real one — grammatically.
What does this liturgy accomplish? It produces, in the minds of the occupied population, the thing it claims to describe. The longer they hear “the Republic” every day, the more real the Republic becomes — not as a fact on the ground, but as a concept, as cognitive furniture. It takes its place next to the weather and the weekend. It becomes unremarkable. Once unremarkable, it is almost unchallengeable.
The counter is to refuse the liturgy. Never repeat their nouns. Not LFR — the Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province. Not the People’s Militia — the armed Russian-backed militia. I actually just call them the Russian occupiers now. I do not enter into the game at all when I have my attention. Not the Republic’s defence authorities — the Russian-occupied administration. Each correction is small. Cumulatively, they drain the spell. Liturgies work by repetition. So do counter-liturgies.
That is all I have for you for today.
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