This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through.
I suppose the first thing to address is the elephant in the room. I have three points to make on Donald at the moment. I cannot think of another orientating topic — or Iran, let us call it Iran then, to avoid Donald — and how it relates to Ukraine.
First, I think on one level, this so-called peace agreement, this so-called ceasefire, if it is real, if it was real, would be an appropriate acceptance by the United States, by Donald, and by Vance of their position in this mess that they got involved in. They had one option of escalating and losing a million American soldiers and treasure beyond all comprehension in a war that was impossible to win, given the hundreds of thousands of drones — which we must assume, if not millions — we must assume that Iran has ready for this, and the plans. In a position like that, I would analyse this as an honourable retreat from a situation they obviously should never have gotten into.
That is one point.
I am quite happy about that because I did not want a war. I understand there are a lot of people now who did not want the war who are kind of quite rightfully trolling Donald with the humiliation of this deal. The humiliation, in my analysis, is not this deal. It is the situation our country found itself in. This retreat is the most honourable thing that could happen.
What This Means for Ukraine
The second thing is what this means for Ukraine. If — and obviously this is all in fantasy land and total fairy land — if this peace agreement came to fruition and there was peace in our time and Iran had the sanctions lifted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then the example for Russia would be: cut your losses and leave Ukraine. There is no dishonour in realising you have made a terrible error.
Look at America. Look what it has done. It has the strength, the capacity to admit this was an absolute disaster. The entire Middle East was about to be depopulated and Iran was going to eviscerate millions of lives, perhaps. Therefore, unlike Russia in early March 2022, when the dogs on the street could have and did understand — and many of us did and many of us wrote about it at the time — we understood the true enormity of the error that Russia had made within a few days. The reverse Napoleon attack, as I archetyped it at the time on the 1st of March: invading Ukraine with too few resources to achieve its goals.
Ukraine’s dominant strategy was as Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy is described so brilliantly, with such pathos, such mythos — and it is part of the creation of this archetype of Russia as unbeatable — that all he had to do was draw the French further and further and further in, and that would take care of them. It has gone the same way for Ukraine.
Now we have an example of a superpower which realised that it overreached and has done what hopefully most of us manage to do in our personal lives. When we realise we have made a terrible mistake, we just get out of the situation. We understand the sunk cost fallacy, which the Russians clearly do not and just have no conception of: that at any single point in time, everything that you have invested into pursuing a particular strategy is lost anyway. It should not form any part of your decision about whether or not at this moment in time it is the right thing to continue.
If this peace agreement held and if the situation stays as it is now for more than the next five minutes — which, frankly, I doubt it will — in an ideal world, this would be a fantastic example to everyone. This is what perhaps J.D. Vance would try and sell as he defenestrates Donald.
Donald’s Pattern and the Ceasefire Troll
The third thing I had to say was really, obviously, the pattern we all know in Donald: this will not stay because he will realise he has done something terrible, the whole thing is terrible, and he will regret it and then he will send off the tweets, and maybe this is the end of him. I do not think any of us would be complacent about making that prediction. I thought it was the end of him on January 6th. I thought it was the end of him after the January 6th inquiry. I thought it was the end of him when he was held liable for the 34 felony counts. I have learned from that experience.
This certainly does not look too good for him because I recognise that my first point is a very — not that many people probably share it. From a strategic point of view, I do not mind that so much. I do not want the people who were opposed to the war in the first place now to troll Donald to such an extent that he is then trolled into resuming the war and bringing about this terrible catastrophe for the United States, and not least for the Middle Eastern countries and Iran. If there was a ground invasion, Iran would do to the United States what has been done to Russia today.
That is really all I had to say about that.
Maybe the last thing I wrote, which was basically influenced by a data set all of us are really tuned into — though most people in the real world are not, because we have been following Ukraine — to the extent that we can record what has been going on over the past two years with Istanbul peace talks, Riyadh peace talks, Qatar, and all of that malarkey, and then Donald archetyping that he wanted peace, though we all know clearly he does not. He is just surrendering Ukraine to the Russians for whatever reason.
This whole re-archetyping of the content of the word peace, of peace talks, of ceasefire, and of threats: this is a big concern in a negative way to me at the moment. Watching everyone fall for this ceasefire troll saddened me — all of these experts — because you are just like: have you not been paying attention to what has been going on in Ukraine? The mirroring where Ukraine offers the ceasefire, then Donald and Putler say they want ceasefires, and it is just all this nightmare of the decoupling of meaning from particular sounds and from peace meaning war, which characterises the last hundred years of Russian history, which Orwell himself picked up well.
It was strong enough an archetype and a decoupling from the true meaning even in — when was 1984 written? In 1948, I think it was. Then to hear Donald selling this pup in the public sphere and people, serious people, falling for it and promoting it and not seeing through it.
I recognise that is slightly contradictory to what I was just saying about how, on one level, this capitulation to Iran — given where we are today, and given the lack of power to prosecute the war that the United States has, as has been shown over the past few weeks. Iran has not even shown its hand in terms of the drones and everything we have seen Ukraine batter the Russians with. I recognise there is a slight contradiction between saying that and also the fact that archetyping Donald as this Machiavellian who is tricking everyone with his ceasefire — I mean, all of us have an opinion on this, but surely those pictures of him, that film of him beside the bunny rabbit on the balcony of the White House, like the Queen of England, talking about killing millions of Iranians while a bunny kind of waves and Melania — I mean, it is absolutely insane, and he must be insane not to see all of that.
If he was a Machiavellian, this whole ceasefire stuff — and maybe they are just holding back while they prepare and put special forces in line — I hope that is not what is going on. I do not get the feeling that is what is going on. We do see this same misuse of language from him, and many people we might have respected before we followed the Ukraine war — who write for the FT or the New York Times, the think tanks, Carnegie people — all suddenly going: ceasefire, it is going to be a ceasefire, that is great.
I referenced the experience I have talked about before, where the Russian model of ceasefire is: you call it a ceasefire, you get everyone to agree to it, and then you just continually shoot off your artillery. It is only ever a ceasefire in the information space. I hate that that lesson has now travelled from eastern Ukraine, from Luhansk, from even the Ukraine war space, to now globally.
Probably billions of people last night did not sleep very well because they were worried. They woke up this morning, checked their phones to see: has nuclear annihilation happened? Because he said he was going to end a civilisation. I just hate that that trolling has gone from page eight in the New York Post in the 1980s, through January 6th — which was just really only concerned Americans — through all of these other minor incidents, to this mega tweet on Sunday.
The conduct of war and peace is not, as it used to be a mere 20 years ago, conducted by diplomats in parliaments, in hushed rooms at the UN Security Council. Now it is conducted basically solely by Twitter, by Untruth Social.
The Decision I Made in the Autumn of 2019
On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about this, because I bet everything that I had — all my intellectual power, all my time, all my energy — that trolling and trolls was the most significant phenomenon in our civilisation. That was the decision I made in the autumn of 2019. That was the problem I was going to look into and try to come up with an understanding of what Donald was doing when he roiled humanity through Twitter. As I say, this was pre-COVID even. It was not such a life and death matter then. He had not killed that many. He did not kill a million Americans unnecessarily through COVID, or however many people have died in Iran or other places since then, through USAID cancelling and all that. They were innocent times.
I invested my time and my energy on this problem, which many people did not even see at the time. They just thought: they are tweets, that is just Donald being Donald. In some senses, seeing an Untruth, a tweet, credibly threatening as President of the United States of America, credibly threatening the end of Iranian civilisation — and which, as many of you will know, I have looked into very deeply because it is one of our main — it is very well documented through the Avesta, which is reconstructed about Zarathustra and Zarawaster and 1400 BCE, as the stopping-off point for the ultimately Ukrainian, ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya on their journey to India, to conquer and Indo-Europeanise India.
Iran is just a really important place and a really important civilisation, which I know relatively intimately. I was kind of happy to see Donald talk about it as a civilisation. I do not know where that came from because I do not think he sees it as a civilisation. Maybe that was Vance’s chat, or someone who was talking to someone.
The Mother and the Maiden: Archetype One
Anyway, I suppose that — the occupation used the folk memory of the older people, of the pre-Stalin era. By calling their security service in the Russian occupation of Ukraine the MGB, they were conjuring up the folk memory of Stalin.
This walk-in report stated that a man’s common-law wife and her underage daughter were about to be cut into pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi on my side of the river. I was on the Ukraine-controlled, government-controlled side of the Donetsk River at the time. I was asked by my boss: could you and your team, your patrol group, which I was in charge of, go and rescue them? Rescue these damsels in distress.
Now listen to that phrase again. Common-law wife and her underage daughter. No Ukrainian mother speaks like that. No Ukrainian husband writes like that. This is a linguistic formula. It is the mother and the maiden in drag. Jung’s primordial archetypes, reheated and served cold to a male diplomat who, it was assumed, would charge into the forest to rescue the damsel from the ogre.
The “cut into pieces” part was a bonus, a foundation myth straight out of Indo-European cosmogony, where the universe itself is sculpted from the dismembered body of a cow or of a human, depending on the culture.
This is the mother and the maiden archetype in Russian Disinfolklore: the innocent woman and child, forever at the mercy of the monstrous outer realm male. It is the archetype of Ukraine, loyal to Russia but misled by Europe.
We see the same archetype in Vance’s speech in Hungary, where again he is attacking the European Union for being the barbarians at the gate, trying to pervert the true course of Hungary’s destiny.
This innocent woman and child, forever at the mercy of a monstrous outer realm male, forever requiring rescue by the inner realm’s protective sovereign — which in this case was the Russians — it is the central moral theatre of Russia’s occupation. Every day the Luhansk Folk’s Militia issued bulletins about the fertility of the inner realm under threat.
I was on one side of the river. From the perspective of the Russian Disinfolklore propagation apparatus, I was in the outer realm. Ukrainians were in the outer realm. Every day in these propaganda newspapers, bulletins were reported about the fertility of the inner realm of the occupation under threat. The mother shelled at her stove. The child at her school book. The mushroom-picker grandmother blown up by a Ukrainian booby trap.
I watched hundreds of these tales be manufactured. I watched mushroom pickers genuinely killed by mines. I watched their deaths laundered within hours into folktale about Kyiv’s savagery. Being on this bridge, I was often 50 metres away from explosions. Both sides would instantly archetype a reality around that explosion which, by the time I was finished being fed all of these lines and all of these stories, all of this Disinfolklore, I did not know what had truly happened, if anything truly had happened.
It could have been an animal triggering the mine in the woods. It could have been the Ukrainian soldier who was polishing his grenade launcher in my sight as I asked him: did you hear that explosion? He said: nah. Or it could have been the Russian occupier on the other side of the bridge who had a whole story and scheme about it. Or the blood I saw on the ground could have been blackberries being smuggled across this bridge during blackberry season, or strawberries, or raspberries, or whatever it was. The closer you are to the story does not necessarily mean that you understand what has happened.
This archetype is strategic because once you accept that mothers and maidens of Luhansk are imperilled by Ukrainian ogres, you accept without noticing that only Russia’s bridge trolls can protect them. The archetype does half the politics for you before you have formed a conscious thought.
Look for the maiden in the meme and you will find a damsel on every front page of the Russian occupying newspaper Lug Info. Every siren sounded at eight o’clock in memory of Odessa. Every victory parade staged on Theatre Square in Luhansk. That Odessa reference is obviously to the pro-Russian terrorists who ended up being burnt in a theatre. It is constantly referenced in Russian Disinfolklore to this day, even though the Russians have killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians since that moment. It is still on Putler’s mind all the time.
When Donald archetypes himself as the saviour of the Iranian people, he is also performing the role that the Russians were performing inside the occupation. He was distressing everyone by threatening to eviscerate them and then offering a way of rescuing them.
The counter-move is almost embarrassingly simple. When you hear the phrase “common-law wife and her underage daughter,” or its Ukrainian equivalent — the mushroom picker blown up by the junta — turn on your incoming troll radar. Ask: who wrote this formula? Whose archetype is being activated inside me? Which direction does my rescue instinct now want to send me? Do I want to send a million American soldiers into Iran?
Then, as my head of security did when I texted him during this incident — and I texted the words: “Confirm manager’s order to approach house where mother and underage daughter are reportedly being cut into pieces” — name the archetype out loud. Speaking it out loud breaks the spell. In that case, it did break the head of security’s spell and he immediately ordered us to stand down.
Only one among 15 of my colleagues, whom I named the archetype out loud to that day, understood that this was the most artificial situation we were about to be set into, because they were under this spell. They were males who wanted to rescue damsels in distress, and they fell completely for the troll.
Russia’s Disinfolklorists do not need the mother and maiden to be real. They only need you to believe her long enough to arm yourself against her imagined oppressor. Once you name her for what she is — a costume rented from a folklore wardrobe — you will never again be mobilised by her tears.
In that case, this is kind of the origin story of all of my work since then, because it was that formula of words — common-law wife and underage daughter — which, even though I did not know anything about folklore or archetypes at the time, just sounded artificial in the same way that a really rubbish novel or a really rubbish film is just bad art. You do not believe in it. It is a monodimensional character that you cannot understand what they are going to do next.
That was kind of my initiation into how Russia uses archetypes to troll people quite successfully — smart people. That did not work on me that day. Other archetypes have worked on me at other times and in other situations.
The Bridge Troll: Archetype Two
The second archetype I want to talk about is the bridge troll, the archetype of the checkpoint. For three years, my office was a bridge: the Stanytsia Luhanska footbridge across the Donetsk River in the forest, between Ukrainian-controlled Luhansk and Russia-occupied so-called LPR — or as I call it, LFR, the Luhansk Folk’s Republic.
Every day, 10,000 Ukrainian pensioners crossed it to collect their pensions, kiss their grandchildren, and buy medicine. Every day they passed beneath the gaze of armed men who demanded their papers, their patience, their identity.
The structural similarity with the Straits of Hormuz — or indeed with Chinvat Bridge, which in ancient Iranian religion then passed from there into Islam — is striking. You cross over at the time of death. If Daena, who guards Chinvat Bridge, appears to you as a beautiful woman, you will pass your life in the heavenly house of song, in Europe, in the European Union. If Daena appears to you as a witch, then you will fall over the crevice and you will spend eternity in the hellish house of lies.
That is from 1400 BCE, as far as we know, from the time of Zoroaster. It maps perfectly onto the situation I was in, in 2015, in eastern Ukraine — completely artificially created by the Russians — where this idyllic area with songbirds and cool breezes and forest and a biosphere reserve and birds and a river close to the boundary, which since antiquity had been the boundary between Europe and Asia, the Donets River.
In this very place, 3,400 years later, one side of the bridge in Russia-occupied Ukraine was a house of lies, a house of Disinfolklore, a place where no one knew what was real. Yet this first appears in Indo-European lore, a religion, as a situation that you approach at the time of death — which echoes, obviously, in the Greek stories of Acheron and Odysseus, who passed into the underworld in the Kerch Strait. Ukraine, again, all over this place, all over it all.
Every morning I recognised the same folk tale being staged beneath me, which I was a participant in. I did not realise I was a participant in it for a while. Three Billy Goats Gruff: the oldest and most widely translated troll tale in the Indo-European canon. Three migrant brothers wishing to cross a bridge, one bridge troll demanding that they do not.
The bridge troll, of course — like Donald did when he announced going for the US presidency in 2016 at the bottom of the escalator — archetyping himself as the protective troll, protecting the inner realm of America from these criminal migrants from Mexico who are going to affect the inner realm’s sovereignty, security, and fertility. They are going to steal your children, steal your daughters, steal your sons. They were going to adulterate your sovereignty, take away free elections. They were going to attack you. They are going to take your jobs. They are going to take your food.
These are the goats and the troll bridge. Donald archetyping himself as the troll, protecting the inner realm of America from these goats passing over — just as Iran is now taking charge and exacting a toll in the Hormuz.
My three-month trawl through 35,000 archived news sources in the Dow Jones Factiva database showed that this single Norwegian tale, Three Billy Goats Gruff, is the genetic ancestor of every troll craze in modern culture since the 1950s — online trolls and also folklore trolls. Here it was, alive in wood and concrete, iron and steel, on a bridge in eastern Ukraine.
One side of the bridge: the Russian occupiers controlling, exacting tolls, customs duties, acting out, performing statehood, but barring the entry of Ukrainians into their own country from their own country. Sometimes, yes, there were even goats crossing this bridge. The folk tale becoming reality, melding with reality in the structure.
The bridge troll archetype is Russia’s organising metaphor for occupation. Because what is a checkpoint if not a bridge troll’s stomach? What is the Luhansk Folk’s Republic if not a toll booth dressed as a statelet, demanding you pay in sovereignty, security, and fertility for the right to pass into your own and from your own country?
The LPR’s People’s Militia trolled; their bulletins were filed daily in the same voice: Kyiv forces violate ceasefire six times. Ukrainian punishers attempt to break through into the territory of the republic. Breakthrough attempts. Always the outer realm pressing on the bridge. Always the troll announcing that he alone stands between the folk and the abyss.
While this is obviously, hopefully, interesting to us — because Ukraine for us is a really sophisticated character and is part of our everyday life and has been for years now — this structure maps onto geopolitical problems almost everywhere.
Notice what this archetype accomplishes. First, it reverses agency. The occupier becomes the gatekeeper and the occupied become petitioners for passage through their own landscape. Second, it archetypes the occupier as the guardian of sovereignty, because the troll in folklore always owns the bridge. Third, it conditions the folk — the ordinary folk, the 10,000 ordinary folk whose lives I became a part of in this scene, in this one and a half kilometre stretch of the bridge between the two positions, the Ukrainian army and the Russian occupiers — it conditions the folk to accept being devoured.
Often in the mornings, or when I was talking to the people — usually older women, because if you are a military-aged man, you would not really cross the bridge if you could avoid it — I would ask: what time did you leave Luhansk city, which is about 14 kilometres from Stanytsia Luhanska bridge? These were epic journeys every day. These 14 kilometres would take — they would have left at four in the morning and I would be talking to them at eleven — involving queues and the whole performance of queuing. It was all a conditioning process.
The Billy Goats Gruff tale ends badly for the troll. The LPR version is run backward. The goats are eaten and the troll calls it peace. I watched this in real time. Ukrainian pensioners queuing for seven hours in the February wind. Ukrainian grandmothers — another archetype — paying their tolls in humiliation. Russian soldiers cosplaying as Cossacks of the 1st Regiment, named after Platov, printing their own folksy newspaper, Kazachi Vestnik, in Stakhanov, which they insisted on calling Stakhanov even though it had a proper Ukrainian name. Because nothing completes a bridge troll like a folksy disguise.
Think of Strelkov as the battle re-enactor, re-enacting the Second World War in Slovyansk, where he was calling for support in June 2014 and was abandoned by Moscow. Now I read Moscow still has not taken Slovyansk and is still trying to approach it while being pushed back.
To counter the bridge troll, we must name him. We must say: this is not a state, this is a toll booth. We must say: this is not a ceasefire, this is a troll demanding fatter goats. We must remember the crucial detail of the folktale. The troll wins every round until the oldest, biggest goat crosses. The archetype itself tells us the ending. Bridge trolls do not sustain. They are defeated eventually by a goat who refuses to lie about his size. Ukraine is that goat. The archetype knows how this ends.
The Merciful Sovereign: Archetype Three
The third archetype I wanted to mention is the merciful sovereign, the ogre who plays the father.
Let me tell you about Pavel Gubarev, who was the self-declared governor of Novorossiya. Novorossiya itself was an archetyping of parts of Ukraine and parts of the Russian Federation — mainly Ukraine — that was archetyped as such by Catherine the so-called Great in her time. They were playing, riffing off that.
Pavel Gubarev, the former self-declared governor of a state which never existed and never will exist — a man who, before Russia’s invasion, ran a business renting Santa Claus costumes in Donetsk. You see, Disinfolklore and folksy, bizarre stuff is never far from anything that happens in Russia, as all of us know from listening to Mockers and This Week in Absurdistan.
He said on camera, eight months after the full-scale invasion: if you do not want to be convinced that Russia should rule Ukraine, we will kill you. We will kill as many of you as we have to. One million, five million, or exterminate all of you.
Why would a man who once wore a red fur suit and handed presents to children say this on camera? Why would he stage himself so openly as the ogre? Because he has not staged himself as the ogre. He has staged himself as the merciful sovereign. This is the third archetype I want to name today.
The merciful sovereign is the father king of folktale, the monarch who decrees the execution, then spares the victim, then is loved for his mercy. Think about what Donald is doing today. The trick is that he manufactures the danger he pretends to relieve. Gubarev threatens to kill five million Ukrainians in one breath. In the next, he offers them the mercy of Russian rule. The threat and the mercy are the same act.
I saw this archetype everywhere in occupied Luhansk. The Luhansk Folk’s Militia would shell a village, then dispatch a Ministry of Emergency Situations lieutenant colonel to issue a tender bulletin about a wounded civilian. Can I just say that every time I hear Mockers say “Ministry of Emergency Situations,” it just makes me smile, because the idea that a developed country — most countries have a limited number of ministries: foreign ministry, interior ministry — but that a modern European country would have an actual ministry to look after emergency situations tells you how normalised they are. That is just en passant.
The Republic, as they tried to archetype their occupied territory in Ukraine, would shut down Ukrainian television, then “protect” the population from Kyiv’s lies. The MGB — remember, archetyped as the predecessor to the KGB — would stage a kidnapping, then publish a folksy news story about how its officers had saved the kidnapped.
This is not incoherence. This is the merciful sovereign performing a single, unbroken, archetypal move. I made the wound so that you would kneel for the bandage.
The European cousins of this archetype sat on thrones for a thousand years. The Russian Orthodox monarch. The Soviet General Secretary, the Father of the People. All of them merciful. All of them murderous. All of them performing the same folktale. Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk did not invent the merciful sovereign. It inherited him.
Every victory parade rehearsed on Theatre Square in Luhansk was the liturgy of the merciful sovereign. Every siren at eight o’clock in commemoration of their own staged murder of their own people in Odessa was a hymn to him.
This is why the archetype is more dangerous than the damsel or the bridge troll. Because the merciful sovereign captures the human longing for protection itself. Again, reflect on Donald, who plays the merciful sovereign. He does not ask you to hate. He asks you to trust. He does not demand obedience. He offers safety. Once he has placed his hand on your head, you will defend him against any stranger who calls him what he is.
To break this archetype, say it plainly. The hand on your head is the hand that made the wound. Again, Donald made this wound in Iran. Then look at the bandage. Then look at the wound. Then look at the face beneath the crown and ask: is this a father, or is this a Santa Claus salesman with a microphone?
The Ukrainian Nazi: Archetype Four
The fourth archetype is the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman at the forest edge.
Every folktale community needs a bogeyman. The Bavarian had his Krampus. The Russian had Baba Yaga — and now the Russians have another Baba Yaga. The Irish had their fear dearg. The bogeyman is the outer realm creature who lurks at the edge of the forest, who will eat your children if they stray, who justifies the high fence and the locked door.
Russian Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk manufactured a bogeyman of its own. His name is the Ukrainian Nazi. Unlike Baba Yaga, he is industrially produced, day after day, in the DNINews.com bulletins, the LugInfo.com briefings, the Kazachi Vestnik weekly, and the MGB’s leaked confessions. He is the single most documented fiction in the Luhansk news monitoring corpus that I kept from 2015 to 2018, with over 10,000 individual items of Disinfolklore with archetypal identities immanent in them.
Let me show you how he is made. In April 2017, the LPR defence bulletin reported that after selective inspections of houses for weapons by fighters of the nationalist battalions of the Kievan Rus and Krim — I remind you, this is April 2017, not 1917 or 1617 — valuable things disappear from local residents’ apartments. Read that again. The Ukrainian Nazi is not just a killer. He is a thief — not just a thief, a petty thief, stealing silverware from pensioners. The archetype is assembled from small, plausible, domestic details. That is how the bogeyman is carved. He is given a uniform, a weapon, a name — always folkloric, like Kievan Rus, Krim, Azov, Aidar — and a taste for your grandmother’s earrings.
I saw a post today by someone talking about how this famous Ukrainian artist in Bucha — her house, where her family still live, thankfully — they left during the occupation and the Russians occupied the house and did what they did to houses. I lived in Ukraine. They raided and broke and stole everything. They stole the toilets, the loos, and everything. They left this folk art, which is worth a fortune, on the walls, because they are such Philistines they did not even notice it.
In November 2015, a Ukrainian extremist was quoted in the Kazachi Vestnik claiming that ISIS fighters were allies of Ukraine against Moscow imperialism. In the last couple of days, we have seen this troll going around, trying to archetype President Zelenskyy as meeting this mythological organisation that I had never heard of, and then I looked into it and realised it only exists in Russian Disinfolklore. Immediately I then knew.
There were people posting this picture of President Zelenskyy with two men with beards and Budanov as well, who turn out to be Ichkerians who are fighting for Ukraine. These pictures were actually taken in Ukraine at Iftar, the breaking of the fast. Someone — the Russians — were trying to archetype President Zelenskyy as meeting Caucasian or ISIS-like terrorists in Damascus the other day. Loads of people are falling for the troll. It is quite easy to see either gullible or actual Russian transmitters of Disinfolklore because they have been sharing these wrong photographs.
This is the same pattern I used to see all the time in Ukraine. Read that carefully. In one sentence, the Ukrainian Nazi is welded to the Islamic terrorist. This is what they were trying to do to President Zelenskyy in Damascus the other day. Two bogeymen fused into a chimera. Grendel marries the witch of the woods and their child stalks Luhansk. This is industrial-grade archetype fusion. This is the Disinfolklorist at work.
The Ukrainian Nazi serves three purposes. First, he justifies the fence. If he is out there, the bridge troll is benevolent for keeping him out. Second, he absorbs blame. Every mushroom picker killed by a Russian landmine is reassigned to his account. Third, he offers a mirror. By shouting “Nazi” at Kyiv, Russia cleanses the word from itself so that its own Wagner Nazi units with their Odin tattoos can pass merely as polite folk.
I met, during my years on that bridge, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. I met farm boys, welders, teachers, medics, drunks, poets, and one conscientious objector who had become a quartermaster. I met no Nazis. Not because none exist anywhere — every country has its fringe — but because the Ukrainian Nazi of Russian Disinfolklore is not a description, he is a construction. He is a Baba Yaga with a trident. He is a Krampus in a balaclava.
To counter him, describe the real soldiers you have met. Say their names. Describe their grandmothers. Describe what they cook. The bogeyman cannot survive specificity. He is a silhouette, and he dies in the full light of a face.
