I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026.
I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught myself, somewhere about the 20-minute mark, beginning to relax — and that is the moment to name.
https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal
Tonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, at disinfolklore.eu, which I, Decoding Trolls, am elaborating on over these podcasts and over all of my life for the past three years.
The single hardest archetype to see is the one that arrives dressed as your friend. All of us will have experience of this, especially in conversations about Ukraine.
Shaw’s Test: Reasonable vs Unreasonable
There is an irony in my title that an erudite colleague of mine in eastern Ukraine would savour. He once called me, only half-mockingly, an unreasonable man — in Bernard Shaw’s sense: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” My sin, in his telling, was a habit of asking my superiors the questions that undermined their authority. Totally innocent questions on my part. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be the whole method.
The tyrant performs the reasonable man — adapted, accommodating, asking only for facts. The antidote is the unreasonable person: the troll radar that refuses to adapt to the costume and keeps asking the question the calm was built to stop.
Here is the claim of this piece, stated up front the way I state everything. The performance of the reasonable man is the costume the merciless sovereign wears to the press conference. The wolf in sheep’s clothing — the sheep’s clothing of the reasonable man. The calm is not the opposite of the threat. The calm is the delivery system for the threat.
By the end, I’m going to show you that Duncey Putler obligingly names his own method out loud, in his own words, and then dares us not to notice.
In everything I do as Decoding Trolls, everything is proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it true? Is it right? Is it patient? I name the archetype, because once you can see the archetype operating, you cannot unsee it. Recognition halves the mana.
The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a Mirror
Let me begin. The drone he had only heard about. A journalist from TASS opens with the news of the hour. A drone has come down on a residential building in Galați, in Romania, a NATO member. Europe says it’s Russia. Why didn’t they shoot it down?
Watch what Putin does. He does not answer. He performs not knowing. This is a trick many of us who watch Donald closely have noticed him also perform. Putler said: “I only just learned, before walking into this hall, that some event occurred with a supposedly ours drone. If you’d be so kind as to repeat it for me, I say this without jokes, without irony.”
Then he demands proof and dismisses the accuser: “Frau von der Leyen wasn’t in Romania. She didn’t examine the wreckage.” Then the pivot, the real move: “We know Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, into Poland, into the Baltics. The first reaction was always, oh, the Russians are coming. Then it turned out they were Ukrainian. Blown off course.”
Here’s what the apparatus — the Russian apparatus, which has cast Putin in the role of sovereign — wants us to think. Putin is the only calm adult in the room. The Europeans are hysterics, shouting before the forensics are in. It was probably a stray Ukrainian drone anyway.
Register the mana first: the feeling before the thought, the energy, the disarming calm. A man so unbothered, so reasonable, asking only for evidence. That feeling is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it and the voltage halves.
This is accusation in a mirror — the oldest move in the combat propaganda playbook, where you perform the violation and then, before anyone can prove it, hand the violation to your victim.
Proof it against the Code. Is it true? The honest answer, “we don’t yet know,” would survive. Putler doesn’t stay there. He says no one can name the origin until an examination is done, and in the very same breath he supplies the answer. Is it generous? No. It calls the bereaved hysterical. This is Disinfolklore. It violates the Code of Positive Trolls.
Standing on the Ground: Romania’s 28 Breaches
The counter is the ground that the apparatus needs us not to stand on. Romania says Russian drones have breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began bombing Ukraine’s Danube ports. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, did not reach for forensics. He said Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all, and that the Alliance stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory.
I noticed both the United States and NATO archetyped it as reckless behaviour — which I know from criminal law is: either you were reckless, or you did the act intentionally. By archetyping the act as reckless, they are giving Russia a get-out. No matter. The keeper of the open account does not need an autopsy on every single drone when the pattern is 28 breaches deep. The question is never “can you prove this one?” It is: who has been flying into NATO airspace for three years?
The Bridge Troll Dressed as Friendship: Armenia
Some of you will remember the bridge troll, the archetype from the beginning of my work on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2017. He went on with this press conference to talk about what I now see is the archetype of a tollgate. The tollgate dressed as friendship — the obstacle to be overcome, the exchange between you and he. This is where you have to keep your guard highest, because the next move is delivered as love.
He went on at length about Armenia, giving Armenia advice about the cost of moving towards the European Union. I won’t dwell on it, but I will dwell on its meaning. The mana here, the energy, is not fear. It’s something warmer and more dangerous. It’s gratitude. You’re positioned to thank Moscow for its honesty. Name the archetype and the warmth curdles.
This is the bridge troll, the keeper of the threshold who sets the toll for passage, fused with coercive control. I’ve stood on the literal version of that bridge at Stanytsia and watched armed men decide who crosses. The toll schedule is the threat — and note the tell Putin volunteers unprompted: “the crisis in Ukraine began with attempts to join the EU.” That is not analysis. That is: look what happened to the last neighbour who tried the other road. It’s a threat.
I’ve written before about how we — not we, because we are — we must get better at recognising Russian threats, because they are masked through reasonable men acting as the toll keeper.
Proof it. Is it patient? No — he’s demanding Armenia makes a choice “as early as possible,” before the bill can be weighed. It’s manufactured urgency. It’s inevitability farming. Urgency — whether it’s someone socially engineering your ID or your data, or in geopolitics — is always the red flag the Code is built to catch. Is it generous? No. The entire world’s weight is loaded onto a small economy and dependency is dressed as benevolence. Is it true? The 14 percent of GDP reduction is real, because Russia controls every lever in it. This is Disinfolklore, again delivered by the reasonable man.
The Mother and the Maiden: Starobilsk Converted to Kyiv
Some of you will also remember the mother and the maiden archetype, which I look at as being the base for most Disinfolklore. The centre of gravity of the whole performance of Putin in this press conference in Kazakhstan, the most engineered to switch off your judgement by switching on your grief.
Asked about his strikes on Kyiv, Putler turns the question into an indictment of Ukraine and of the journalists in front of him. Again, another trick we see Donald do. “Our strike too was in response for their crimes against children in Starobilsk. Our strike on the Kyiv region. They deliberately killed our children.”
Is this mass media? No. It’s the means of mass dumbing-down. It’s brilliant — a terrible, stupid little pun. Mass media becomes the means of mass stupefaction. It does three things at once: it grieves, it accuses, and it pre-discredits anyone who might check.
What the apparatus wants us to think: Ukraine murders Russian children, Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are righteous revenge, and any outlet that doesn’t lead with the dead children is a lie machine. Feel the mana, because it’s overwhelming by design. Protective fury — the oldest and most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. This is the mother-and-the-maiden’s grief and the martyred commanders. It must be avenged. Fused and loaded.
I will name the archetype precisely. It is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets, laid over an accusation in a mirror: the documented mass killer of civilians performing mourning in order to license the next strike.
I’m going to be more careful here about what the apparatus is, not less, because the method has to work the same no matter who is pointing it — or it’s worth nothing. So here is exactly what I claim. We’ve all seen the TV programmes from Russian TV demonstrating the Rubicon unit were operating out of this facility. Ukraine denies hitting the dormitory, calling the Russian account manipulation. A local resident told Reuters the site was a former base hit first by rockets. Reuters was not able independently to verify anything. The United Nations has no access to the territory, as we discussed last week, because it is occupied Luhansk, and could only confirm that reportedly six dead — even though TASS eventually drove the children’s count to 18, and, as we saw two days ago, Putler was banging on about Starobilsk again.
The Disinfolklore is not in the grief. The Disinfolklore is in the conversion of the contested grief into a warrant — into roughly 600 drones and 90 missiles against the civilian capital, one of them an Oreshnik, a nuclear-capable missile that the EU’s Kaja Kallas rightly called “reckless nuclear brinkmanship.” It is in the inversion that brands the only outlets reporting an occupied-territory strike as the liars.
Proof it against the Code and the verdict writes itself. Is it patient? It demands immediate vengeance. Is it generous? It uses dead children as the load-bearing beam of a justification for killing more children. The UN’s own count is 337. I’m a huge critic of the methodology that the United Nations uses, and I participate in some of these fact-checking exercises myself, going into the morgues to visually ID the dead bodies of people in order to help these statistics. We understand that up to 80, or maybe as many as 100,000 people in Mariupol were killed, and many of them were children, whose numbers will never be counted in these UN statistics — because they need someone like me to see, they need two or three people like me to triangulate and to see the body, before it can be counted in the statistics.
This is Disinfolklore at its apex. The Code’s counter-move on the martyred commander is the subtlest one I know and the only honest one. Mourn the dead, refuse the liturgy. Do not dismiss the children. Do not let them be turned into the key that unlocks Kyiv. The UN said the only thing that survives the fog: civilians must be protected wherever they are. “Wherever” — that little word refuses to hold retaliation arithmetic.
The Goebbels Inversion
Asked whether Russia is preparing for the war that Europe says it is preparing for, Putler said: “It’s nonsense. It’s a lie. A crude, brazen lie. As Goebbels said in his time, the more incredible the lie, the faster they believe it. These are exactly the standards Western politicians and media implant.”
Sit with that. The president of the Rushist Federation invokes Goebbels in order to accuse the West of being Goebbelsian. Then he runs the full exculpation. “The 2014 coup in Kyiv forced Russia to protect the Crimeans” — here he’s playing merciful sovereign. Then the Donbas so-called republics: “We did everything absolutely transparently, legally, step by step.”
This is accusation in a mirror in its purest, laboratory form, fused with the merciful sovereign’s self-exculpation and the NATO-expansion bogeyperson.
The proof that it is the mirror is that he names the mechanism himself. A few answers earlier, on the drone, he had said: “The West tries to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy one.” He told you the trick. He told you its name. The work of counter-Disinfolklore is simply to refuse the transfer. The work of Disinfolklore is to point out that these kinds of phrases — “to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy” — are the way Russia communicates its threats from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy. That’s what I bring to the table with Disinfolklore, because as far as I’m aware, nobody else has seen that pattern and looked at it so closely as I have.
Proof it. Is it true? “Transparent, legal, step by step” is contradicted by a new 9th-grade Russian schoolbook edited by Medvedev, now Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council, that prints unoccupied Zaporizhzhia and Mala Tokmachka among it as the Rushist Federation. Annexation taught to children as geography — unoccupied land under UN Charter Article 2(4), which forbids exactly that.
The Goebbels projection has an evidential counter too. There is a serious Atlantic Council study, written before this press conference, entitled “Putler’s Next Move: Five Russian Attack Scenarios Europe Must Prepare For.” European defence is not paranoia invented to fleece taxpayers. It’s a threat assessment that predates the man calling it nonsense.
This is Disinfolklore. The one who quotes Goebbels to call you the liar has handed you the mirror. Let’s hold it up to him.
The Paper Conquest and ISW’s Verdict
A lighter move, but a revealing one. Putler says: “The situation is nearing completion. Our troops advance on all fronts. You see it every blessed day.”
What the apparatus wants you to think: the war is all but won, resistance is futile, better to settle on Moscow’s terms now. Name the archetype. This is the paper conquest — the claim that runs miles ahead of the territory. It has a real-world theatre attached to it: the move the apparatus reaches for whenever a city has to be declared taken. In late 2025, Russia invited foreign journalists, as I talked about last week, and even Ukrainian ones, to come and film the encircled Ukrainian force in Kupyansk.
Proof it against the ground, because here the ground answers with the numbers. The Institute for the Study of War, reading the same battlefield, found that Russian forces seized 104 square kilometres in the first five months of 2026, against 1,619 in 2025 — a 15-fold collapse. ISW’s verdict on the man himself is devastating: “Putler has likely developed a false perception of Russian military successes based on heavily exaggerated maps from the Russian High Military Command.”
The counter wrote itself in the most literal way imaginable. When Russia invited the cameras, President Zelensky was there, demonstrating the conquest Russia didn’t make. The Jamestown Foundation documents that Russia’s draft budget cuts military spending while raising state media funding by 54 percent. They’re buying the story because they cannot buy the ground.
What I Will Not Call Disinfolklore
The neural network that I’m creating has to be capable of dividing memes, or elements in memes, into Disinfolklore, in-folklore, and neutral. This is a neutral part.
When he explained the Russian export credit financing Kazakhstan’s nuclear plant, he talked about standard international practice: “we lend rather than gift.” That is ordinary statecraft self-portraiture. Not necessarily Disinfolklore.
Now, those of us who are aware that Rosatom is brutally occupying Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and bombing Chernobyl nuclear power plant, understand the idea of Russia being involved in building a nuclear power plant anywhere is to create the potential for nuclear catastrophe as leverage.
When he claimed Russia is one of three nations with sovereign artificial intelligence “that some firms build on, and Sberbank builds its own” — that is a national-champion sales pitch, and it could be argued with on the merits. Neither of those is really Disinfolklore, and I won’t code them as such. The whole method dies the day it becomes a machine that stamps Disinfolklore on everything a Russian president said. The discipline of refusing to overname it is exactly what earns the verdict when the real thing appears.
The Costume Slips: Kaliningrad and Latvia
Twice near the end, the costume slipped, and you see the thing the reasonableness was wrapped around. On the Baltic states’ talk of striking Kaliningrad: “Russia has every means to raze to the ground all who try.” On a claim that Ukraine had moved drone operators to Latvia: “All places from which to direct — I want to stress, direct — military threat to Russia emanates, our legitimate targets.”
What the apparatus wants you to think: don’t poke the bear. Any move near Russia, and the response is total and lawful. This is provocation logic, “don’t poke the bear,” in its naked deterrent form. It pre-licences strikes on the soil of UN Charter members by making the bogeyperson’s threat elastic enough to mean anything Moscow decides.
Here’s the contradiction we must hold up against the light. Four answers after calling the idea of Russian aggression towards Europe “nonsense, a crude, brazen lie,” he threatens to level NATO members. Set the two sentences side by side and the performance collapses on its own.
The Schröder Wedge and the Minsk Inversion
Then the door he pretends is open. He floats Schröder as a trustworthy European partner — the Nord Stream Chancellor — “yes, we are friends, what’s wrong with that?” That is the wedge: elevate the captured insider, delegitimise everything else, split the European public from its own governments.
In the same breath, he poisons the very idea of agreement. He now says the Minsk Accords were signed only to buy time and arm Ukraine. The independent fact-checkers at Myth Detector went back to what Merkel actually said: that Minsk gave Ukraine time to strengthen because the threat came from Russia. Putler takes her defence of admission and inverts it into proof of Western treachery. The same inversion one more time. This is Disinfolklore.
I’ll add the one thing I can say that he cannot, because I was there from 2015 to 2018: the man telling you Minsk was a Western trick is the man who broke it every morning before breakfast.
The Architecture: 18 Answers as One Engineered Arc
Let’s look at the machine behind the man — the whole architecture — because the 18 answers he gave are not 18 answers. They are one engineered arc.
The candour frame lowers your guard: “I’m only being honest, gov.” The merciful sovereign governs the middle: the generous creditor, the caring neighbour. The grievance engine loads the avenging mana: “they killed our children.” The exculpation discharges it at the scale of history: “you are the Goebbels liars; 2014 forced us.” And then the teeth: the legitimate targets, the wedge, the poisoned door.
The Propagation Apparatus: The Pravda Mirror Sites
It does not stay in Astana. Within 24 hours the same lines were splashed, near-identical, across a whole network of mirror sites — Pravda in English, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Turkish — each re-skinning the Kremlin transcript for a local audience, so that the same claims appear to come from everywhere at once, manufacturing the feel of independent corroboration. That is the propagation apparatus the questions never mention. That is the mana being mass-produced.
The Unreasonable Human
Here’s the single thing I want us to carry out of this episode. When a sovereign sits before the cameras and is patient and candid and reasonable and grieved, that is not evidence that he is none of those things. Reasonableness is a register. It can be worn. The merciless sovereign wears it best of all, because he learned a long time ago you will lower your guard for the calm man faster than you ever would for the shouting one.
He told us his own method: from the sick head onto the healthy one. Our whole task, yours and mine, is simply, every single time, to refuse the transfer from the sick head unto the healthy one — from the accusation in the mirror blaming Ukraine for Russia’s own murders.
That refusal has a name — the one a colleague pinned on me, half-mockingly, in Severodonetsk one afternoon on the ground in eastern Ukraine. It is the work of the unreasonable human. The one who will not adapt themselves to a tyrant’s reasonable world, who keeps asking the questions that undermine the authority performing it. If George Bernard Shaw was right that all progress depends on the unreasonable person, then so, every single time, does all counter-Disinfolklore.
That’s his press conference. That’s what I have to say about that.
The Counter Pole: The Arabat Spit Strike
Going back to the Starobilsk episode, which I talked about last week — I didn’t get to the positive bit, so I just wanted to go back to that a bit, which is what I call the counter pole, the Arabat Spit, and what I call the substrate truth.
I want to put against the Kyiv strikes that Wendy witnessed a counter-example from a few days before then, because the asymmetry is the substance of the case.
The 17th of May. The Arabat Spit — the long, narrow barrier island that runs north-south along the western edge of the Sea of Azov, near occupied Henichesk in Kherson Oblast. Ukraine Security Service Special Operations Centre A (Alpha unit, who many of us have helped) strikes a Rushist FSB headquarters complex. Nine buildings. A Pantsir-S1 self-propelled air defence system parked at the site destroyed in the same operation. Around 100 Russian personnel killed or injured. NASA satellite thermal data confirms the fires. President Zelensky publicly confirms the strike on the 21st of May. He released the footage on Twitter. He named the unit that did it: “Thanks to this single operation, Russian losses amount to about 100 invaders killed and wounded. The Russists must feel that they have to end this war of theirs. Ukrainian medium- and long-range strikes will continue.”
The Asymmetry: Open Ukraine, Closed Apparatus
Now apply the comparison. Ukraine’s Arabat Spit strike: named military target, in FSB headquarters, named air defence asset alongside it, named perpetrator on the Ukrainian side, public release of the footage, open attribution, international humanitarian law observed in the targeting, transparent in the announcement. This is what striking a legitimate military target looks like.
Russia’s Kyiv strike six days later targets the National Art Museum, the Chernobyl Museum, the Opera Theatre where Ukraine’s first parliament of the 21st century met, residential blocks, a water supply facility, a market. Casualties overwhelmingly civilian. Munitions including the Oreshnik nuclear-capable hypersonic. Attribution: the apparatus framing of retaliation for a contested stage-one event the apparatus itself probably had manufactured.
This is the asymmetry: Ukraine striking Rushist military apparatus openly. When the Western press treats these two operations as morally symmetric instances of “the war continuing,” the Western press is failing the Code of Positive Trolls. When the Western press’s headlines use Ukraine’s strike as the cause and Russia’s strike as the response, the Western press is doing the apparatus’ work for it.
The Pantheon of Heroes: Real Walls, Real Names
Against the apparatus’ annual mass memorial fabrication on the 9th of May — the Immortal Regiment photos of strangers — stand the genuine Ukraine memorials. The wall at St Michael’s Monastery, which I’m sure Wendy saw, and which I found at the beginning of the war. The Google Street View footage of St Michael’s, of the wall empty — and then gradually we’ve just seen it, this massive, massive long wall being filled with the photographs of the people who have died defending Ukraine. Those photographs of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who died fighting Russism since 2014.
The new National Military Memorial Complex, the Pantheon of Heroes, inaugurated this month, where Colonel Andriy Melnyk and his wife Sofiya were reburied. Statues throughout Ukraine: to murdered starosta Olha Sukhenko of Motyzhyn; to the forcibly disappeared Serhiy Tsyhipa from Kherson; to the named fallen or disappeared at the village scale. Real wall, real cemetery, real statues, named individuals with real biographies attached to real towns — not these fake Immortal Regiment photos that are tossed away at the end of the parade.
Foundation Defence and Right Mana
The framework’s name for this asymmetry is the Foundation Defence, where the apparatus tries to install Disinfolklore mana at the foundation pole — the cognitive substrate of the post-war Indo-European linguistic order. The in-folklore counter installs right mana at the same pole. Same surface, opposite Code adjudication, opposite substrate. Mana effect: the mana truly held, the energy truly held, is the substrate. The mana counterfeited collapses on the substrate it cannot back.
Running the Case Through the 12 Tools
Let me run this quickly through the 12 tools, because the toolkit — which I talk about a lot on disinfolklore.eu — is what turns the case from an outrage we shout about into an instrument we can hand to other people.
Tool 1, archetypal literacy: what archetype is being deployed? The provocation logic cycle — A accuses B of provoking A. Putler accuses Ukraine of forcing him to kill Ukrainians. Twelfth year of continuous deployment. The Starobilsk–Kyiv cycle of last week is the most recent instance of an archetype the apparatus has run since at least 2014.
Tool 2, troll radars: is this incoming or outgoing? Both. Incoming to me: the apparatus would like me to argue about the Starobilsk casualty figures, to litigate the Rubicon headquarters claim, to be drawn into the apparatus’ chosen terrain. Outgoing from me: what am I broadcasting? Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it? Am I distributing that picture of the black-haired French woman that so many people seem to be posting without realising that they are keeping the troll going? They may be writing in text “oh, this person is horrible” — I don’t even read the things, but I do mentally note anyone who shares a picture of this person is doing what the Russians want them to do. They’re putting a pretty, a beautiful, a sophisticated face on Rushism, on the filthiness of Rushism. Even if you criticise it in text, the image goes into people’s brains before they do it. Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it, by sharing the photos without naming it? The discipline is to gatekeep in both directions.
Tool 3, mana in the meme: the energy is moral inversion — the aggressor dressed as victim, the witch switch — executed in headline grammar at scale. The mana is the apparatus’ signature.
Tool 4, inner/outer realm: the outer realm — the public, collective conversation, the headlines, what we do on Volya, the institutional record, the stage-two echo — is the apparatus colonising the outer realm of democracies.
Tool 5, trigger-experience-reaction — the Dalai Lama / Ekman timeline of emotions, the cognitive model which is a core module in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. Trigger, experience, reaction. The trigger is the picture of this black-haired French person. The experience is, “gosh, she looks sophisticated and nice.” Then your reaction: “oh no, she’s awful, I’m going to share it.” The trigger is the Starobilsk story arriving in my feed. The experience is moral arousal. The reaction the apparatus wants is engagement on the apparatus’s terms: “oh, beautiful people like Russia — oh, I will like Russia then.” Tool 5 tells us to interrupt the chain, to notice “I’m being moved on cue.”
Tool 6, generosity: is it generous? No. The meme treats 21 dead adolescents as ammunition for justifying mass strikes on Kyiv. The meme is the opposite of generous.
Tool 7, right: is it right? No. The meme inverts the moral character of aggression. It is unethical at the root.
Tool 8, mana energy, implicit archetypes — the Vritra archetype. Vritra, who fought against Indra to keep the waters blocked up and stop the land being fertile. The Vritra archetype: the force weaponising substrate. The apparatus weaponises international humanitarian law, which underlies our entire civilisation — the moral substrate of how democracies talk about civilian casualties — and turns that substrate against itself, against its own purposes. International humanitarian law was built precisely to prevent the apparatus’s framing. The apparatus uses the language of the laws of war to invert the laws of war, against the UN, to publish their version of what happened.
Tool 9, patience: the apparatus needs us to respond now, before the framing is examined, before the contradiction surfaces, before the asymmetry becomes visible. Tool 9 tells us: slow down. The cycle is 12 years old.
Tool 10, mindfulness, focus. This is the operative tool of the whole case. Mindfulness as gatekeeping. The apparatus delivers you a payload. You have a choice about whether to accept it. Trigger, experience, reaction. Most of the audience capture the apparatus achieves happens because audiences do not exercise the choice — because the framing arrives at speed, dressed in the visual grammar of grief, and the gatekeeping muscle is not trained.
Tool 11, insight, wisdom. The apparatus’s framing flattens who is the aggressor and who is the victim into a fog of “both sides strike things sometimes.” Insight requires restoring the substrate truth.
Tool 12, cryptotypic literacy: the RT cryptotype, the “right” substrate that underlies all of our civilisation. The apparatus is claiming “right” in international humanitarian law — protection of children, condemnation of strikes on civilian infrastructure — while operating as the backward pole of the same cryptotype. There are the cryptotype markers of the inversion: the Mariupol-boat artefact, where Darya Dugina explained to a Western journalist on camera that Ukrainians hide their weapons in schools to provoke Russia to attack the schools; the Amnesty report, which was spun by Amnesty’s tweets accusing Ukraine of exactly the same; the Pokrovsk invitation that we talked about last week; the Kupyansk encirclement claim; the Starobilsk announcement. Same cryptotypic deployment, different deployer class, 12-year plan. The deployer is incidental. They’re invoking “right” for something which is not right. It’s wrong, and it’s verifiably wrong.
The DN and ND Cryptotypes
One new observation as a closing note. The apparatus’s paper conquests — the Pokrovsk encirclement, the Kupyansk surrounding, the maps that claim territory 30 kilometres west of Kupyansk — these are operations on what I call the DN cryptotype, on the river substrate: the Don, Dnipro, Donets, Dniester, the flow-threshold, water as substrate, as dividing land from other land.
On the other side, this ND sound, which is in our English word “land,” is the opposite of the DN. It’s the static counterpart — ground, territory, anchor substrate. England, Ireland, the Russian Heimat equivalent, Russian land. The apparatus claims land it does not hold. The Ukrainian counter installs “our land,” nasha zemlya — we always hear President Zelensky say that. Substrate truth, naming at the same pole: real soil, real towns, real soldiers buried in real ground. Cryptotype at full force on both sides of the line.
The Counter Move: Outflank, Not Rebut
What is the counter-move? Because I’m not going to leave you with an analytical instrument and no instruction on what to do with it.
The counter-move is not to rebut. Rebuttal is the apparatus’s chosen terrain. When we rebut the Starobilsk dormitory framing, we’re already arguing about the dormitory, and the apparatus has already won, because the dormitory is now the subject of the conversation.
The apparatus wants the conversation to be about stage one. Stage three — the Kyiv strikes, the destruction of the Chernobyl Museum, the nuclear-capable hypersonic — that’s what the apparatus wants us to look away from. Rebuttal looks away.
The counter-move is to outflank. Name the deployment for what it is: the apparatus’s multi-month campaign elevation doctrine, Pokrovsk to Kupyansk to Starobilsk, $458 million per year of state-funded information warfare, Vodolatsky’s self-incrimination on the Voin telegram showing the Starobilsk facility, Vatnik Soup and Tankerfeller forensics within 72 hours, the provocation logic cycle in its 12th year of continuous deployment. Name it, then refuse to litigate the apparatus’s chosen terrain. Do not share these pictures of people.
Then put back on the table what the apparatus wants you to ignore — the substrate truth. The substrate truth is the Arabat Spit strike, Ukraine three days before the apparatus-manufactured Starobilsk framing, striking FSB headquarters, with public attribution, with named targets, with footage released, in compliance with the laws of war. The substrate truth is President Zelensky’s selfie in Kupyansk in December — the sovereign. The substrate truth is the wall at St Michael’s Monastery, the Pantheon of Heroes, the village statues to the named fallen. The substrate truth is that the apparatus’ grammar of retaliation is itself a Disinfolklore payload, and the right response to a Disinfolklore payload is to refuse to retransmit it.
President Zelensky, July 2022: “No Logic in Terrorists”
President Zelensky named the substrate truth in July 2022, and the line still cuts. He said, quoting verbatim: “You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. The Russian army does not take any pauses. She has one task — to take people’s lives, to intimidate people, so that even a few days without an air alarm already feels like part of the terror.”
That’s the refusal of the revenge cycle historian’s framing in one sentence. The apparatus is executing the operation it was always going to execute. The framing of retaliation is what the operation wears. It’s a costume. The operation is what the apparatus does. You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. No provocation logic. The retreat from logic is the apparatus’s instrument. The framework is our way back to it.
That refusal is Tool 10. Should I allow this into my mind? No. Should I allow this into my conversation? No. Should I allow this into the framings I put into the world through my own speech or tweets? No. Mindfulness applied with discipline at scale across millions of audiences who’ve read this far in the work — that is what would eventually deny the apparatus its product. The apparatus’s product is the framing’s circulation. The counter-move is to deny the circulation, to name the deployment, to refuse the engagement, to move on with the work.
The work in this case is Ukraine’s: the Arabat Spit strike, the Kupyansk–Khartiya counter-offensive, President Zelensky’s selfie 1.15 km from Russia’s positions. That is what winning looks like. That is what right looks like — the RT cryptotype, where the action is aligned with the assertion of right, whereas the Russians’ assertion “we control this land” is unaligned with reality or right. The Kyiv strikes are what the apparatus’s response to winning looks like. The doctrine is a textbook deployment, and the toolkit catches it, which is why I focused on it.
Closing
If you’re encountering these 12 tools for the first time, the place to start is the disinfolklore.eu website. I’ll leave it at that.
Discussion: Strelkov, Akhmetov, and the Flywheel of Death
I’ve been waiting to see milbloggers talk or face the fact that the war will end when they lose Crimea and when they withdraw from 100 percent of Ukraine. Today I was speaking with Iona and Will and Ming, and a few others, and Lexicon. I hadn’t read the text of this post, which I then, re-listening to Mockers, re-heard. I focused on it because it was talking about the flywheel of death — a Russian blogger talking about this flywheel of death which the Russians are involved in in Ukraine.
I’ve been excavating archetypes from ancient Buddhist texts all week, so I’ve been very connected to this idea of the wheel of life and the Universal Sovereign. When I saw that phrase, I was like — wow, that’s amazing. It’s really interesting to hear. The real meat in that was — this is the first time I’ve heard anyone with a significant following, anyone anywhere in Russia, realise that the end of the war is when they leave Crimea. I’ve been looking for this indicator since early March 2022, and today it landed.
As I was saying before — I had read this properly to Will on the show — I see the same pattern in what Strelkov is saying now as what he was saying in early March: “oh, we need a mobilisation, things are terrible, awful, awful, awful, we need a mobilisation, we need a nuclear bomb, we need this, we need that.” They never vocalise this realisation, which I want to see take hold.
I’m very happy about that. I’m on record as saying that is the indicator I was looking for: when the Russians start realising that they’re not going to get away with stabilising the front lines in Donetsk.
Now I know the Russian official state position is still — I saw it again this week — didn’t we see that Russia says, if Ukraine just gives us Donetsk and Luhansk, then we promise we’re not going to conquer the rest of Ukraine. Which is just the most bizarre logic I’ve ever heard in my life. Basically: these villages in eastern Ukraine, which we can’t conquer militarily — if you give them to us, fine; if you don’t give them to us, then we’re going to conquer every city and village in Ukraine. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s embarrassing, as previously discussed, that Witkoff and Co fell for that troll.
Very interesting to see that. I’m very happy for that. We’ve all been through — not, obviously, as bad a winter as the Ukrainians. How about you? What do you feel? What’s the mood? Wendy, did you encounter many people?
