I had a ringside seat while Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking, wrongly, their fellow Ukrainians wanted to kill them.
There is a similar pattern of designed division we have seen with less deadly consequences (so far) rising elsewhere in the world.
And if we can pinpoint how powerful Disinfolklore created and embedded division inside eastern Ukrainian society, where none before had existed, then, we will have a better chance to recognize and defeat similar efforts elsewhere.
Those Ukrainians who remained behind in Russia-occupied Ukraine after the 2014 invasion were kept, by Russia, on subsistence diets.
In its classic victim-blaming way Russian Disinfolklore propagated myths that Ukraine was starving those under occupation.
In international law a military occupier is responsible for provisioning those living under occupation.
Russia then portrayed itself in its Disinfolklore as the Knight in Shining Armour when it sprinkled a few breadcrumbs inside a community that had had no problems accessing food or fresh drinking water before Russia invaded.
Russia destroyed private enterprise in the areas it occupied. Every family, unless they had an entitlement to a Ukrainian social welfare system payment, became dependent on the occupiers for their subsistence.
Russia was able to exile, torture, kill, or imprison anyone who expressed dissent inside Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Or Russia’s coercive control operated more subtly. People understood that if they spoke out, they would lose their Russian-state funded job. They and their family would have no means to live on. This was another manifestation of the Russian coercive control governance model.
Russia ruined the economic viability of those parts of Ukraine it occupied by disassembling the factories and exporting their machinery as scrap metal. Through negligence and the looting of valuable water pumping equipment Russia destroyed the viability of coal mines in the region.
By August 2022, there was no freshwater left in Russia-occupied Donetsk city - online resources spoke of Donetsk residents waiting for rain to collect water to drink, cook with, wash their clothes, and flush loos. Prior to being occupied by Russia in April 2014 Donetsk, then a city of over one million souls, had ample fresh water.
Often the only means of subsistence for families stuck in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2014 and 2023 were the Ukrainian pensions of their older relatives.
In desperation, those entitled to social welfare payments from Ukraine needed to risk their lives on the bridge to collect these payments in free Ukraine.
This was the context of my job on Stanitsia Luhanska bridge.
I provided what is known in human rights work as “protection by presence.” The assumption was that merely by seeing me and my fellow peace-keeping diplomats there each day, Russia would be less likely to fire their weapons or behave contrary to the laws of war.
Occasionally, the similarity between the Donets and the ancient Greek rivers of the Acheron and Styx which separated the afterlife from our world manifested with ridiculous clarity.
For example, I often performed a bit part as the Heroic Healer. I would resolve endless negotiations over a ceasefire at the bridge so a dying person could be brought from one shore to the other by, like Charon, helping to ferry the person on a stretcher myself.
Some days I was the fool, there to absorb, calmly and humiliatingly, the trolling, rhetorical slings and arrows fired at me by angry, cold, bedraggled, and ragged-trousered Russian occupiers.
I was, for the Russian occupiers, as out of place there as I was for myself.
To them I was a scapegoat; a tangible emissary embodying everything their Disinfolklore told them to hate of the Western world.
I was no longer human. I was a stereotyped Other. I was the unbelonging Outer Realm foreigner whose endless stupidity in their world was a source of limitless mirth.
In Russian parlance I was the “idiot” and a “superfluous man.” As Dostoyevsky had portrayed in his novel entitled “The Idiot” such roles in Russian society are held by those who would refuse to play along and pretend the corruption and savagery was acceptable.
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