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.

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Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1

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.

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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.

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Saviour Trita and Dragon-serpent Vritra

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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’s office, might just become the next president of Ukraine. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? Yermak was given these lines by Veronica.

So when I say that on the Ukrainian side they’re a wily remnant of the Soviet bloc, and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular — we actually have the texts, in which this very odd character, under the name Luna, is actually suggesting that Yermak manipulate President Zelensky, the sorcerer, in this way. The plight always has the demons in it. Their whole work is to poison the moment power passes, to turn a handover into a killing.

The Sorcerer’s True Bind

Here is the sorcerer’s true bind, and it’s worth being fair to President Zelensky about it. He’s not a tyrant clutching power. He is the master who raised this apprentice, who promoted him on purpose, who wants him to rise. On one hand he wants to hand the reins on. On the other, the same voice says: not yet. He’s not ready. Or the country’s not ready. Or the war cannot spare the fight. This is why the 15th of July was not a Prigozhin moment. It was the master pulling his apprentice back from the threshold at the last second, unsure. The plight is not always the master’s cruelty. Sometimes it’s only the master’s doubt.

The Martyrdom Bump: Yemos and the Sacrificed Twin

Now, the martyrdom bump in the polls — and here the story goes deeper still. There’s a number the sceptics are right to poke at, and the poking leads somewhere older than the poll. In one week, Fedorov’s trust went from 35 per cent to 65 per cent. The pollsters at Rating asked five days after the sacking, at the peak of the feeling. A cool head calls that a martyrdom bump, and says it’s not a settled new judgment of the man, it’s a surge that comes when somebody is sacrificed. The cool head is right. I share that scepticism, and I want to go one step further with it, not around it.

The word martyrdom carries a story our culture has been telling for 6,000 years. The oldest king in the whole Indo-European world is the one who dies first: Yemos, the twin. Born on the Ukrainian steppe, not far from where Fedorov grew up, before our ancestors carried his story out across the earth. He is the sacrificed, and by being sacrificed he becomes lord of the dead, and leads all those who die after him along the road and the path to death. He is Yama in the Vedas, Yima in Iran, Ymir in the Germanic world, and Donn in Ireland. He is Jesus in the Christian religion, and Donn, who keeps the house at Tech Duinn off the western coast — born, according to the mythological record, of the daughter of the monarch of Scythia, that is, ancient Ukraine: twelfth century, 800 years before Nikitin’s Nature paper in February 2025 demonstrated that all living Indo-European languages emanate from there, along with these mythological tales, where they occur in more than one tradition. He is Odin, who hangs on the world tree and gives himself to himself, and takes a day of our week as his fee.

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The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

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In every branch of the Indo-European family the pattern is one pattern. The one who undergoes the sacrifice is not lessened by it. He is crowned by it. His death becomes the road every other death then follows. And beside the sacrificed twin stands the other one, the twin who survives: the lawgiver, Manu, who builds the culture on the sacrifice. His name in India is Manu; in Ireland, Érimón; Mannus in the Germanic tradition — and we, as native English, Germanic-language speakers, even call Germany after Mannus. We’ve already met him in this piece, because the MN is at the root of the whole vocabulary of rule too.

So look again at this and last month with the oldest eyes we have. The magister performs a sacrifice. He sets the young man down. The young man does not cling. He’s offered a soft landing, an advisory chair, and he turns it down. He takes the full political death and walks out. And the people do the thing our people have always done at the death of a self-sacrificing lord: they exalt him. The bump is not a polling trick, I contend, laid over an old story. It is the old story. Martyr’s Mana surges at the moment of the sacrifice. It always has.

The sceptic and the mythologist end in the same place, which is rare enough to mark. Both of them know the 65 per cent is the martyrdom effect. The only question either of them has left is whether the surge hardens into a real and lasting sovereignty, or fades as the feeling cools. In the old story, it hardens on one condition: the sacrifice has to be honoured, and the lord has to be restored.

Where the Story Splits

So the story splits at the end, and the split is the whole point. Putler’s version ended in Disinfolklore, the poison-telling, where the master survives the handover only by killing — allegedly. Zelensky’s version is not finished, and it can still go either way. If it ends the way the Mahabharata says it should, it will be the bright telling: the apprentice freed and restored, the old bloc set aside without a killing, master and apprentice both left standing, the bond kept, and the people’s will the thing that freed them.

I think it will end that way. I think Fedorov does regain his seat; that President Zelensky comes out of this with the strength to push the old bloc aside for good; and that the modern team gets built. If that is right, we are watching the rarest ending the oldest story has to offer: the plight resolved without a death — as just happened in England, and previously with Leo Varadkar in Ireland, and indeed with President Biden in the United States.

And notice who does the freeing. In the Mahabharata it’s the demons who free the apprentice from the sorcerer’s belly, and then the apprentice honours the agreement with the sorcerer by using the power of eternal life to restore him. And on the streets of Kyiv, it is the people. That is what a democracy does to this ancient story. The demons become the citizens, and they free the young man — not with mutiny, but by standing in the square until the master remembers he wanted to let him go. That is the whole difference between the two countries, said in one line. On one side the plight is resolved by murder in the dark. On our side, it is being resolved by citizens in the daylight. The same story our ancestors told 6,000 years ago; the opposite ending. It’s still being written in the squares. Let’s watch which way it goes.

Outflank, Don’t Rebut: The Architecture of the Book

So I wanted then to go back to the fourth episode of Outflank, Don’t Rebut. Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. So I’m going to give the architecture of the book, and then we’ll go straight into it — straight into chapter one. So, the architecture of the book. Chapter two states the method in a single chapter, so we have it in our hand before we apply it. The method is: outflank, don’t rebut.

I should maybe just say: I’m Decoding Trolls. I tweet on X at Decoding Trolls, as Disinfolklore. You can subscribe to my work on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, powerofmana.net — and disinfolklore.eu is my main website.

So the method is outflank, don’t rebut. The chapter explains why rebuttal amplifies the apparatus, the Ruschist apparatus, and why foundation defence dispossesses it. It’s a methodological introduction that the rest of the book leans on.

Chapter three walks us through the twelve tools of the Disinfolklore method, and since you will be meeting this framework for the first time, I will introduce each tool plainly, and use the Cheburashka artifact, the Muslim Emperor artifact, the Europe Projection artifact, and the Mariupol Boat artifact — with Daria Dugina as the star — as the four worked examples that demonstrate each tool. By the end of chapter three we’ll have the method’s whole instrument set in our hands, and we won’t need to take it on credit any more.

Chapters four, five and six are the foundation-defence chapters. They’re where I explain the Manuland thesis, the Moon Foundation, the River Substrate, the Trita myth. These chapters have the most linguistic content in them. I’ve written them, I hope, so that a reader who has never read a word of Indo-European linguistics can follow every step. If at any point I’ve failed at that, you can butt in.

Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian decolonial voices, principally those collected and analysed by Erica Marat and Aizada Arystanbek. Chapter eight brings the decolonial voice from the place the apparatus can least afford to hear it — not the periphery, but the centre of the wound: Ukraine itself. Larysa Yakubova, in the view from the epicentre. Chapter seven dispossesses the Ruschist apparatus from the east; chapter eight dispossesses it from the centre.

Chapter nine names what the Ruschist apparatus is doing at state scale. The three mechanisms are coercive control, the abuser’s playbook, and the system of dual-use moments that cumulatively produce a genocide without ever requiring an individually criminal act. Each is a substantive framework with its own working history, and each will be introduced plainly.

Chapter ten is the technical chapter on cryptotypes, where I do the linguistic work most carefully. If you skip a chapter, this is the one to come back to. It’s the chapter that contains the method’s deep-grammar instrument, and it contains, near its end, the specific finding about the apparatus operator signature — like Dugin — that I want a careful reader to register, because that’s the key to outflanking, not rebutting.

Chapters eleven and twelve are the constructive chapters. Re-archetyping, which Volya Radio does every day: re-archetyping is the move by which the apparatus’s archetypal claims are not just dispossessed, but replaced. And the production of Infolklore, which Volya does every day — my coinage for the positive counterpoint to Disinfolklore. It uses the same substrate the apparatus parasitises, but uses it in observance of the Code of Positive Trolls: that is, generously, ethically, patiently, mindfully, with focus, and with insight.

Chapter twelve asks what the symmetric code means for the 1945 international legal order, for the Geneva and Hague Conventions, for the UN, for the ICC, and for the human rights NGOs. Outflank, don’t rebut — said one more time, with the equipment now to do it. That’s the architecture.

The Artifact Read Again

So let’s look at the artifact again. With the architecture in place, let’s return to Dugin’s Cheburashka artifact. Let’s read those sentences one more time, attentively.

Cheburashka is not an innocent creature. He’s a toxic mutant, a demon of the moon. His true name is Shed bar Shemot, Shed Satan — the demon in the name of Satan. Cheburashka destroys the traditional identity of the Ruschist child. He’s not a bear. He’s not a hare. He’s a rootless cosmopolitan. He has no parents. He has no nationality. He might be Jewish, though. He’s a symbol of liberal post-humanism, sent to destroy the Russian archetype. That’s Dugin.

And when you’ve read them again, ask yourself the following. Is the writer of these sentences a philosopher? Or is the writer of these sentences an actor playing a philosopher, in a production whose script requires that a beloved children’s character be smeared as a Jewish moon demon? Whatever your answer, register that you’ve just made a code judgment. You’ve judged the sentences for the energy they carry. You’ve judged them for generosity, for whether they tell a truth, for whether they show patience. You will, by the end of chapter three, know that you have applied the Code of Positive Trolls, the six-perfections ethical instrument that sits at the methodological heart of the Disinfolklore approach. You will know what you have done. You will know how to do it again. And you will know, the next time you encounter an artifact like this, what to do with it. You will not rebut it. You’ll recognise it, name it, and you will outflank the Ruschist apparatus that produced it. That’s the Disinfolklore approach.

The Method: Outflank, Don’t Rebut

Now, the method itself. Outflank, don’t rebut. A friend of mine, after reading the first complete draft of the Cheburashka artifact, sent me a single line: all right, you’ve made me believe that Dugin is an apparatus operator and not a philosopher — now what do I do about it? That’s the right question, and this chapter answers it. The answer is three words: outflank, don’t rebut. That’s the whole method. The chapter that follows will explain why those three words are not just a soundbite. They are a methodological commitment with consequences. The commitment is the method.

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Why Rebuttal Amplifies

The instinct of a well-trained Western reader faced with the Cheburashka artifact at the end of chapter one is to refute it. Of course it is. The Western reader’s training has been, for several centuries, that an argument is met with a counter-argument, that a claim is met with a refutation, that a sophistry is met with careful dismantling. This is the disciplinary instinct of the academy, of the law court, of the editorial page, and of every parliamentary debating chamber. It’s the instinct that the Western intellectual stack is built on. It is, in most of its applications, the right instinct. In the case of the Ruschist apparatus, it’s the wrong instinct — and here’s why.

The apparatus’s outputs are not arguments. They’re deployments. An argument is a piece of intellectual work whose purpose is to convince an audience of a proposition. A deployment is a piece of communicative work whose purpose is to produce an effect: to recruit, to demoralise, to confuse, to capture, to corrupt, to terrify, and to elicit the response that licenses the apparatus’s next move. Arguments and deployments look similar on the page. They have sentences, they have nouns and verbs, they make claims, they cite sources. The well-trained Western reader, looking at one of the apparatus’s deployments, sees the surface of an argument and reaches automatically for the counter-argument.

That reach is the error. The counter-argument does not engage with the deployment’s actual mechanism. It engages with the deployment’s cover story — the argument-shaped surface the deployment wears. Engaging with the cover story leaves the mechanism intact. Worse: engaging with the cover story transmits the cover story to the engager’s audience. Every Western academic who carefully refutes the Foundations of Geopolitics explains to a fresh audience what the Foundations of Geopolitics says. Every podcast host who patiently dismantles the Fourth Political Theory explains, in dismantling it, what the Fourth Political Theory says. Every Cheburashka rebuttal essay published in the New York Review of Books — and I expect there to be several by the time this book is in print — will explain to a new audience that the apparatus’s senior operator has declared Cheburashka a Jewish moon demon. Most of those new readers will not have known. The rebuttal is the transmission.

This is not a Russia-specific observation. The same phenomenon is well documented in twentieth-century scholarship on propaganda. Jacques Ellul, in his 1962 Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, observed that propaganda’s first task is to occupy the mental space of the rebutter. Once the mental space is occupied, the propaganda is doing the work, regardless of whether the occupant has prepared against it. Hannah Arendt observed the same. So did Victor Klemperer, the Dresden Romance philologist whose diaries of life under National Socialism, collected in LTI, are the canonical study of how a totalitarian apparatus colonises a culture’s vocabulary one word at a time. Klemperer’s point — and Arendt’s, and Ellul’s — was that the vocabulary of the apparatus is itself the apparatus. To use the apparatus’s vocabulary, even to refute it, is to extend the apparatus’s reach.

The same point recurs in twenty-first century communication scholarship: the legal scholar Danielle Citron’s work on amplification cascades; the Berkman Klein Center’s Network Propaganda, 2019; Renée DiResta’s Invisible Rulers, 2024 — all converge on the conclusion that the act of rebutting a deliberately constructed disinformation deployment is generally more amplifying than ignoring it. The asymmetry is structural. The original deployment lands once, in its intended audience. The rebuttal lands many times — once for every member of the rebutter’s audience who would not otherwise have encountered the original. The apparatus, in modern attention economics, is paying the rebutter’s distribution costs.

The intuition that one must answer falsehood with truth is a good intuition. The intuition fails specifically in cases where the falsehood is structurally designed to elicit the response of truth-telling as its primary distribution mechanism. The Cheburashka artifact is exactly such a case. It’s too grotesque to persuade any Western audience of anything — but its grotesqueness is its distribution mechanism. Western intellectuals will refute it. In refuting it, they will explain it to their audiences. Some fraction of those audiences will register the apparatus’s Cheburashka-is-a-Jewish-moon-demon claim as the kind of thing the apparatus’s primary philosopher says. A smaller fraction will register that something about Russian children’s culture has been targeted by Western liberals, because in their hearing it’s the Western refutation that is most loudly talking about Cheburashka. A still smaller fraction will perhaps drift in the apparatus’s direction. The apparatus does not need a majority. It needs that drift.

What Outflanking Is

The structural answer is to deny the apparatus the distribution mechanism it’s engineered for. Don’t rebut. Outflank.

Outflanking is the alternative move. It’s the methodological commitment that we will not engage the apparatus’s deployment on its chosen terrain. We will not print that picture of that Russian who’s just been kicked out of France in every tweet complaining about that Russian. We will not reprint Donald’s tweets archetyping himself as God, or Jesus, or who knows what. We will not engage Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics on geopolitical doctrinal ground. We will not engage his Fourth Political Theory on political-philosophical ground. We will not engage his Cheburashka demonology on theological-symbological ground. Engaging on the chosen ground is what the deployment was built to elicit.

Instead — and here is the substantive method — we’ll work at the substrate. The apparatus’s deployments depend on, and ride upon, certain symbolic and linguistic substrates that the apparatus did not invent and cannot own: the Indo-European cognitive vocabulary; the river-name family that names the home of the Indo-European language family; the Trita myth, the oldest Indo-European story, the story of the hero who recovers what the serpent has stolen and restores it to the cosmos. These substrates are real. They are old. They are linguistically and archaeogenetically documented. And this is the substantive point: they do not belong to Russia. They belong to the steppe homeland from which the Indo-European language family radiated outward roughly 6,000 years ago, which is broadly the territory of present-day Ukraine and the adjacent Pontic-Caspian steppe.

The Manuland Thesis

I call this the Manuland thesis. Manu: an Indo-European root that surfaces across the family. In Sanskrit, Manu, the first Vedic king of India. In Latin, manus, the hand that conveys power, or touch, and what it commits to. In Germanic, Mannus, the founding figure named by Tacitus — the Roman historian Tacitus, in the first century AD — as the ancestor of the Germanic people; Mannus had three sons, one of whom is Irmin. In Welsh, Manawydan, and in Irish, Manannán, two preeminent pre-Christian deities of Celtic-language-speaking Wales and Ireland respectively. Manuland, in my naming, is the territory whose deep substrate is held in those Manu, MN, MN sounds, and the words and concepts they write. It is the substrate the apparatus claims for the Eurasianism doctrine. It’s not the apparatus’s substrate to claim. It’s the substrate of ancient Ukraine.

Names are not the whole of it. The founding figures of six of eight living Indo-European branches carry the MN sound: Manu, Mannus and Manannán; Iranian Aryaman; Hellenic Minos; Armenian Menua and Manavaz. By Bruce Lincoln’s rule, a feature shared between the Indo-Iranian east and the Celtic west is inheritance from the common source rather than late borrowing. The founder-name pattern reaches back to the Yamna from Zaporizhzhia themselves.

The pattern also carries a number. Take every founding figure across eight branches, and ask how likely it is, given how often the MN sound occurs in these languages at all, that this many founders would carry it by accident. On the generous roster — any standard founding figure — seven of the eight branches carry the pattern, at odds of about one in a hundred billion. On the strictest roster, chosen sound-blind by role alone — the primary first man or first king of each branch, whoever that is — three of the eight still carry it: Manu, Mannus, and Érimón in Ireland, at odds of around one in 2,400. One coincidence is one event. Six is a system, and the system has a probability attached.

Relocating the Substrate

Outflanking, then, is the move of relocating the substrate from Moscow to where it belongs. The apparatus claims that Russia is the civilisational core of the Eurasian space. The outflanking response is not: oh, but it isn’t, because here are five counter-arguments. The outflanking response is: the substrate the apparatus is claiming is located in present-day Ukraine, and here is the linguistic and archaeogenetic evidence. Once the relocation is in the reader’s hand, the apparatus’s claim collapses without rebuttal. There’s no claim to rebut. The claim was always parasitic on the substrate. Once the substrate is correctly located, there’s no claim left to engage with. That’s the central move of the method, and everything else in this book serves it.

Chapter four shows us the MN substrate. Chapter five, the DN substrate, the river-name family — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Danube — the family that the Indo-European family named the home territory with. Chapter six shows us the Trita myth at work, which we see every day in Ukraine. Chapter seven brings in the second half of the outflanking move: the Central Asian voices that say Eurasianism is not a heritage we share, it’s a colonial fiction imposed upon us. Once those four chapters have been read, the apparatus’s substrate claim has been outflanked from the north, from the centre, from the east, and from the actual evidence base. There’s no substrate claim left for the apparatus to deploy.

The deployments themselves — Cheburashka, the Muslim Emperor, the Europe Projection, the Mariupol Boat, the Amnesty report, Alice Weidel’s don’t-poke-the-bear — every fresh artefact the apparatus produces continues to surface. But without their substrate, they surface as the apparatus’s improvisations, not as the recovery of ancient ground.

Name the Deployment, Then Do the Substrate Work

The reader who has read this book, and who is countering the next deployment, recognises what they’re looking at. They register the move. They strip the Mana. They don’t rebut. They do not transmit. They do not amplify. They name the apparatus’s improvisation for what it is, and they move on with their work.

A natural objection to don’t rebut is: are you saying I should ignore the apparatus’s deployments? Are you saying I should let the Cheburashka artifact circulate unchallenged? Are you saying I should pretend the Eurasianism doctrine does not exist? No. Outflank is not ignore. The two are opposite moves. Ignoring is the choice to act as if a thing is not happening, to refuse to acknowledge it, to bracket it out of analysis, and to leave it to other people. Outflanking is the choice to deal with the thing thoroughly, but to deal with it at the substrate level rather than the surface. Outflanking takes more work than rebuttal. Rebuttal is one essay. Outflanking is a whole methodological apparatus.

I quoted it in full at the start of chapter one, and at the end. I named it for what it is: a tender object of childhood affection recoded as a hidden enemy, by means of antisemitic coded vocabulary, an invented pseudo-Hebrew etymology, and an attempted hack at the foundation metaphor of the Indo-European cognitive substrate, invoking the moon to justify the hack. I did not rebut a single word of it. I named what it is, and moved on to the substrate. That’s the move. Don’t argue with the apparatus’s claim. Name what the deployment is doing, then do the substrate work.

The substrate work is this book. The reader who finishes this book has acquired, by the end, the linguistic and historical and methodological equipment to do the substrate work themselves. The next Cheburashka — and there will be one soon — is to be met by them with the same move. Name the deployment. Name what it is doing. Decline to engage on its terms. Direct the reader’s attention to the substrate. Watch the deployment lose its purchase.

The Amnesty International Report, 4 August 2022

The first long-worked example I will give the reader, of outflanking applied to a real case, is the Amnesty International report of the 4th of August 2022. That report — issued by the world’s most august human rights organisation, founded in 1961, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 1977, 38 national sections, three million members — claimed the Ukrainian armed forces, by stationing their military personnel and equipment near civilian objects, were putting civilians at risk. The report deployed the same structural move as Daria Dugina: the provocation logic.

The Amnesty Ukraine team resigned almost immediately. They issued a public letter explaining that they had not been consulted, that the report’s methodology was unsound, that the report misrepresented. The report was lightly amended in a follow-up statement. The substantive position was maintained.

Over the following nine months I wrote on Twitter a great deal about this report. I tried at first the generous read. Amnesty, I argued, was a well-governed organisation that had made a serious mistake, and well-governed organisations correct serious mistakes. What one was looking at in August 2022 was a serious but recoverable governance failure. I held that read for a long time. I kept holding it until it became clear, by June 2023, that the institutional response was not going to be a correction: senior management was going to defend the report; the Ukraine team had been sacrificed; the institutional capture was visibly, in the institution’s own behaviour, complete.

In June 2023 I wrote: what destroyed Amnesty’s brand wasn’t the initial issue, amplifying eight-year-old false Russian Disinfolklore that Ukraine purposefully lures Russia into attacking schools. It was the institutional inability to get to grips with the mistake. So Amnesty sacrificed its local staff, while keeping those who had fallen for Russia’s Disinfolklore, and then misrepresented international law.

There is the outflanking move applied at institutional level. I do not, in that paragraph, rebut the Amnesty report. I name the deployment. I name the institutional pathology. I refuse to dignify the deployment by treating it as a debatable position. I cite the discriminating evidence — the resignation of the Ukraine team — and I name the falsifier of the generous read, the institutional non-recantation, and I move on.

The Amnesty case is, in technical terms, the same provocation-logic deployment as Daria Dugina’s Mariupol boat artefact. The same line, the same structural move, the same code-failing logic, deployed by an ostensibly neutral Nobel laureate NGO instead of by the family member of the Russian apparatus’s senior philosopher-operator, stroke actor. The structural identity is what matters. The deployer class is interchangeable. The apparatus’s deployments have the same shape across the captured NGO, the captured electoral party, the captured podcast host, the captured academic. The book’s whole point is that the deployment is the unit of analysis, not the deployer.

What Amnesty headquarters refused to do — the recantation that would have restored its standing — is the institutional move that the symmetric code in chapter twelve prescribes when an institution discovers that it has deployed Disinfolklore. Recant immediately. Name the deployment. Restore the Ukraine team. Retract the report. The institution that does that survives the deployment. The institution that does not is captured by the deployment. Amnesty’s Secretariat, in 2022 and the years following, chose institutional capture over recantation. The book is not pleased to say this, but the book has to say so. Naming the institution’s capture is part of the outflanking move, applied at an institutional rather than an individual level.

And I’ll leave it at that for this week. Thank you so much for listening.

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