Podcast | Are We Complicit in Concealing Russia's War Against Us with Euphemisms like 'Hybrid War'?

Rearchetype “acts of war” as “hybrid warfare” or “Active Measures.” Then, get the most knowing people in your chosen enemies’ chains-of-command to take on that Archetyping.

While they earnestly, sincerely, confused and proudly model their knowingness (by explaining to others the intricacies of Russia’s own re-Archetyping of actual “War” with euphemisms) Russia continues its war by all means.

The delicious irony is that by subverting the signifier (War) that properly describes Russia’s attacks on our countries and implementing a new meaning (Hybrid War), Russia is proving that it is at war against us.

Concealing its war against us from Russia’s chosen enemies’ perception IS an instrument of contemporary warfare. It’s the very definition of Mental War which that now is 3/4s of War.

We all think we’d recognise a genocide or war, yet our mental models of war that’s forged through films about Napoleon or this or that kinetic battle in World War Two have not caught up with how war today manifests.

Here we see the full power of Russia’s Archeytypal Disinfolklore. It contaminates the very concepts we need to communicate war and threats and invasion. That is, it substitutes “hybrid warfare” for war. Then we see events on the ground we would otherwise characterise as “armed attacks” as “not war.” Note too how cleverest most strategic thinkers in our security architecture earnestly fall for this troll. Archetypal Disinfolklore literacy can help us perceive the Mana/energy inside such euphemisms and instruments of war.

Today I wanted to go right back to where we were at the beginning. This is our 26th episode — for those who are counting, and even for those who aren’t, it’s still our 26th episode.

Disinfolklore is an analytical method with 12 tools. The second six tools are basically the Code of Positive Trolls, which I’ve talked about. The very first tool — some might remember — is called Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy. I haven’t talked about that for a while, so I wanted to go back to basics.

To understand what I mean by archetypes, understanding what NAFO does is a perfect example of what I call counter-archetyping. Firstly, individuals archetype themselves with a nom de guerre, or in the form of a visual meme as a dog, and the endless creativity and self-expression involved in choosing one’s avatar — the NAFO avatar is in itself really charming, beautiful, lovely, agreeable, kind, not egotistical, humbly joyous. Some of us remember many people’s avatars and the way they’ve archetyped themselves.

But what NAFO does itself is an act of counter-archetyping. The 100,000 or maybe more people who spontaneously self-identified from May 2022 onwards into this amazing decentralised organisation of pro-Ukraine supporters — it de-archetypes, if you like, what the Russians tried to do.

The foundational meme, from the late NAFO Fellas — very sad that he passed before the liberation of Crimea. His engagement with the archetypal nasty Russian ambassador based in Vienna, where he summed up what Russia’s casus belli was, along the lines of, from memory: “So basically, a few Russian-language speakers in Ukraine were being discriminated against, and you decided to go in and kill everyone.” And as we all remember, the ambassador — the actual ambassador, archetypal villain — responds very negatively: “You pronounce this nonsense, not me.”

That is the foundational meme of NAFO. What it does is undermine the normal play of things. You have an actual ambassador, a country’s ambassador — this is probably one of the lows in any Russian ambassador’s time in Vienna — and he engages with a cartoon dog, with a guy in America, and he loses the engagement.

As an act of counter-archetyping, that’s quite typical. There have been millions, probably hundreds of millions of attempts to counter-archetype. We see it all over our timelines. Any time a Russian diplomat or figure attempts to re-archetype reality to favour Russia, oodles of NAFO members go in and in a very humorous way undermine what the Russians are trying to do.

In general terms, that is what I mean by archetyping. It can be conscious or unconscious. It’s actually an aspect of our cognition. In my understanding, we archetype the world when we resolve the booming, buzzing sensation that is external reality into items. We navigate it, and we archetype this as that or that as this. We take a risk when we get onto this aggregation of atoms and quarks we’ve aggregated into an aeroplane, sit down, and travel to a country — which itself is an archetype, an archetypal entity. It doesn’t exist in any way apart from in our heads. “This is Spain.” “This is America.” These are archetypal identities of highly complex systems of trillions of sentient beings and different memories and history.

That’s really what I mean by archetyping. It can be purposeful or accidental. In the case of NAFO Fellas and that engagement — the foundational moment of NAFO — that was completely accidental. He didn’t expect to found a movement. I don’t think Kama, the person who created the organisation around it, thought he was going to create this decentralised entity. And NAFO has been sustainable.

But what Russia does is purposeful archetyping. I talked about this in about the fourth episode, when I discovered the Mother and the Maiden in the Woods — this mission I was sent on in eastern Ukraine as a result of a report from Russia’s security service in Russia-occupied Ukraine: that a mother and her underage daughter, the maiden, were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by another character in Russia’s archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal — the mythical Ukrainian Nazi. That was when I discovered that Russia was archetyping on purpose, using those forms of archetypes, or what Jung calls primordial archetypes.

What I now understand as archetyping is this: we have mobile armies of archetypes, some of which are primordial archetypes invested with new meanings and attached to particular policy choices that Russia or China or MAGA or other movements which wish to manipulate our minds invest them with.

In the context of what’s happened this week: this term “hybrid war.” We see today Italy’s defence minister describing Russia’s targeting of infrastructure, elections, public opinion and supply chains as a “hybrid war.” He says Western inaction is absurd. Polish Prime Minister Tusk slams the explosion on the Warsaw-Lublin line as unprecedented, sabotaged by a foreign state. Russia’s fingerprints all over it. “Hybrid war is here.”

Two leading NATO members’ senior politicians are recognising that Russia is behind these acts of war. But both are archetyping what are acts of war as “hybrid war.” At the Berlin Security Conference, NATO’s Ingo Gerhartz warned that the West is not at war but no longer at peace due to Russia’s threat, and noted Russia exploits Europe’s bureaucracy, slow weapons production and divisions to weaken the West.

We have senior leaders recognising attacks, recognising that Russia is behind them — which is a huge advance, no shilly-shallying about this. However, they’re quite comfortable archetyping these attacks, these acts of war, as “hybrid war.”

We saw this week — and I know this pains me, obviously not as much as Joanna because it’s her country affected — a Turkish-owned, NATO-flagged LNG tanker was hit by a Russian drone and set on fire. Romanian officials evacuated two villages, approximately 250 people, and as the owner pointed out during the week, all of their animals. These are not hybrid war attacks. These are acts of war.

Many of us will remember how we reacted when, I think, part of the German consulate in Kyiv was hit in maybe May 2022. We thought: this is Article 5 stuff. Now none of us have any expectation that Article 5 will be raised.

I want to try to explain what I believe is going on through the prism of the Disinfolklore analytical method — to help at least the people who listen to this understand what is going on, and the sense of indignation I feel and all of us feel that these acts of war are being archetyped as “hybrid war.” They’re recognised as such by senior leading politicians. The culprit is identified. And yet Article 5 is not being triggered, nor is, as far as we are aware, a Kosovo-esque NATO or non-NATO intervention force to go into Ukraine.

I cannot listen to any non-Ukrainian speak about the problems and the scandal around Mindich without asking first: are you calling out America for all of its scandals and all of the scandals in our countries? Why are you archetyping Ukraine in this condescending way, as if the aid you are giving is some sort of gift and gives you the right to determine what Ukraine should be doing — when the amount of corruption in the United States and with the current president and the Epstein debacle is extraordinary? I have no time to listen to any of them lecture Ukraine.

The “special military operation” — that’s another form of archetyping. And archetyping acts of war as “hybrid warfare” or “active measures” is an aspect of the way Russia wages its mental war.

I myself remember when I first encountered the phrase “hybrid warfare,” and it was pretty hard to get my head around it, even though I was involved in eastern Ukraine on this bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2018 — a grey zone, we called it. This was an area of a kilometre and a half between the Russian occupiers’ positions south of the Donets River and the Ukrainian defenders’ positions north of the river. About 10,000 civilians passed through this grey zone each day. I and my colleagues provided what’s known in human rights work as protection by presence and got embroiled in all these stories, involved in the Disinfolklore there.

The use of “grey zone” as a metaphor has a very real meaning to me, because it is an actual physical space where acts of war are happening: explosions, people being killed, people being injured all the time, people being threatened. At night, artillery duels going on in this very space. In the morning, going there, cataloguing the ordnance and determining from which direction it was fired.

That being characterised in London or Berlin or Washington at the time as “hybrid war” always seemed ridiculous to me, because it was war. And now here we are, several hundred thousand dead Ukrainians later, a million and a half dead Russians later, hundreds of billions of euros spent and trillions owed by Russia to Ukrainians. And we are still hearing, after Russia has blown up a train line and tried to do even worse damage, the Prime Minister talking about “hybrid warfare.”

To get the most knowing people in Russia’s chosen enemies’ chain of command to take on Russia’s own archetyping of how it conducts war — to persuade someone with the knowledge and experience of Prime Minister Tusk to describe the blowing up of his country’s railway line as “hybrid war” — is the height of Russia’s success in its campaign of archetyping.

These knowledgeable people, while recognising apparently the seriousness of the actual kinetic attacks against Europe — targeting infrastructure, killing people, hacking the health system in Ireland and other countries, the biggest crime of all: adulterating elections, adulterating the information space in ways that have never been done before — have normalised this in their minds with the use of “it’s just hybrid warfare.” Even if their tone is “Russia is conducting hybrid war, what are we going to do about them?” — that is an aspect of Russia’s success.

While earnestly and proudly we model our knowingness by explaining to others the intricacies of re-archetyping actual war with euphemisms — “hybrid warfare” is just a euphemism for war, for kinetic war, for armed attacks against our people, our culture, the persistence of our democracies and our right to free and fair elections, upon which all our other rights depend — Russia continues its war by all means.

While we’re engaged in indulging ourselves by discussing this kinetic war using Russia’s archetypes, its invented archetypes — all going back to Gerasimov’s 2013 paper on hybrid warfare, which itself is an example of how Russia conducts its war: it creates concepts which then flow into the minds of the people supposed to protect us, and those concepts act to prevent them responding to kinetic acts of war which have been going on on the European continent and in America at least since 2014.

“Hybrid war” is an act of successful archetyping by Russia — communicating those archetypes to us and persuading us with these seductive archetypes to parse and see reality in a way that doesn’t correspond to the actual substance of what is going on, which is kinetic war. Russia managed to conceal itself from its enemies’ perception.

Italy’s defence minister and Poland’s prime minister — I’m not picking on them, any number of people this week, and all our timelines are full of very experienced people characterising these acts of war as “active measures” or “hybrid warfare.” I’m using them as an example. Here they’re actually recognising Russia is doing it, and they’re still not identifying it as warfare.

These are extreme examples of how concepts are introduced into language, we take them on — and it’s the height of irony, because “hybrid warfare” is a term invented to conceal war, and it’s successfully doing so.

I go back to my origin story in Disinfolklore. As I was monitoring very closely the information space in Russia-occupied Luhansk over those three years, I encountered oodles of stories, some featuring me and my colleagues, all full of archetypes: Polish mercenaries, “punishers” — a lot of archetypes from the Second World War.

This archetypal Disinfolklore, in the form of thousands, millions of stories and memes, fed through the minds of the million and a half people in Luhansk and Donetsk and temporarily occupied Crimea. As I’ve spoken about, I didn’t know what they were doing. I just knew this was odd. It became most obviously odd when I saw the Mother and the Maiden — when I was brought to participate in this enactment of a piece of Disinfolklore.

My chain of command had been trolled into tasking me and my colleagues to go to this cottage in the forest and check on the mother and the maiden who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by this mythical Ukrainian Nazi. Then our participation in this operation became further food for Disinfolklore — stories promoted inside Russia-occupied Ukraine which had the effect, when aggregated with millions of similar stories over years, of brainwashing the people there into thinking the West was ridiculous, people like me were ridiculous, we shouldn’t have been there, and anyway everyone across that river, the Donets River, was a Nazi and deserved to die.

At the time, I didn’t know what was going on. And I wasn’t even thinking — even though I was trained as an international lawyer — in terms of the very definite, legally established archetype for Russia-occupied Ukraine: that it was under occupation, as defined by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Arising from that designation, a whole number of requirements arose that Russia as the occupant needed to observe.

However, Russia managed not only to conceal its occupation but to re-archetype what is a bog-standard traditional occupation of territory — definable in international law, and which, for instance, Israel has always talked about in terms of occupying territory — Russia re-archetyped that as a whole confusing mess of “civil war” and what have you. It trolled leaders in Europe and leaders in my organisation, the OSCE, and its 57 member states, into participating in the troll and avoiding the correct archetyping of the occupation as an occupation. It was just this confusing mess of an issue that Russia managed to put into our minds.

It was only when I was doing the work for the Moscow Mechanism mission in March 2022, helping to catalogue the minutiae of the occupation of Zaporizhzhia and the parts up near Kyiv, that I understood: I, despite having an education in genocide studies and international law, hadn’t even noticed the genocide — what I now call a stealth genocide — going on from 2014 onwards, because they were preparing people to participate in a genocide.

I’m not picking on Prime Minister Tusk or Italy’s defence minister, because I was part of all this and I didn’t see it. I was subject to the same archetypes and archetyping by the Russians and the institutions I worked for. This is the full power of Russia’s archetypal Disinfolklore: it contaminates the very concepts we need. It substitutes the meaning of what it is.

The meaning of war is an armed attack — and this is what has been going on. People are dead. The meaning of war is interference in other people’s government, in how they determine who is in government. That meaning has been changed by calling it “hybrid warfare” or “just the Russians.” It substitutes “hybrid warfare” for “war,” and that becomes a contagion in our minds, leaving us more open to war. We see events on the ground we would otherwise characterise as armed attacks as “not war.” Even the cleverest, most strategic thinkers in our security architecture fall for this troll — as I spoke about last week with President Biden, who fell for it.

When I talk about archetyping, it’s empirical. I’ve talked about my own lived experience. We all have the lived experience this week of watching our timelines, the attacks in Poland and all of these events.

This is where I come to these mobile armies of archetypes. There are heaps of different concepts. There are archetypes of national identity invested with new meanings — which I mentioned the other week — and that is the main strategy Russia uses to influence our countries in ways that bamboozle and confuse us into inaction.

In the case of MAGA, they go to archetypes of national identity like slavery, discrimination against Black or Brown people, or they subvert the meaning of the flag. Donald and his crew also used the same strategies with the January 6th anthem, co-produced by Kash Patel, which replaced the national anthem at Donald’s election rallies.

It’s the same in all our countries. When you get your eye into this, whenever you come across aspects of national self-identity being weaponised — for instance, Georgescu’s campaign in Romania, sticking to this nostalgic idea of the past and using nationalist tropes to hack people’s minds — we can look at this archetyping as suspicious. Of course there is positive nationalism. We see it in Ukraine, have seen it since 2014, where archetypes of national self-identity have not been subverted. But the idea of corruption or Nazis — Russia is constantly throwing these archetyping linguistic weapons.

Someone this week sent me one of these graphic representations of the history of the world. The Histomap is one of the most famous, which still stands the test of time from the 1930s. It shows the last 3,000 years in various colours, different civilisations: when they rose and abided and when they fell. Someone who I don’t think had seen the Histomap before sent me one, and relatively little is happening before 1000 BC — just Babylon, Indus Valley. Then suddenly Persia and Greece arise. But there’s nothing about Ukraine, ancient Ukraine, and the beginnings of Indo-European culture. That graphic representation is again an archetyping of our civilisation with ancient Greece and Persia as the most ancient, coming out of nowhere at a certain time — which we know is not true from an empirical standpoint.

I don’t mean to say that archetyping as an act is wrong. But the Russians use it in subversive ways. Two weeks ago, I talked about how Vladislav Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, wrote about this when he was designing Putin’s presidency after the disaster of the transition of power from Medvedev back to Putler and those big protests. Surkov was under enormous pressure because he’d founded this fascist youth movement, Nashi — basically a Hitler Youth — who were supposed to protect against protests, and yet there were protests all over Russia.

Russkiy Mir as an idea had been around for a hundred years or so. What Surkov described was that he realised he was looking for a fig leaf to disguise what they were really doing: the imperialism, planning to occupy Crimea, planning to execute more wars, and brainwashing and transforming the mentality of Russians, which has happened since 2010.

He decided to choose Russkiy Mir as a fig leaf. But in all our countries the Russians use different fig leaves, different ideas. In Ireland: neutrality. By their very essence, they take what you as a nation — and also what you as an individual — this is where the micro meets the macro. What I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine was individuals’ identities transformed from being Ukrainian to being Russian.

Most of us think this could never happen to us. And yet we’ve seen it happen to people in MAGA, or anti-vax people, or people we know whose actions are so unusual they’ve actually transformed their self-identity, usually as a result of interaction with social media.

We’ve had our identities transformed since 24th February 2022. But how we differ is that what we’re trying to promote is completely consistent with the post-World War II legal order and international law: Russia out of 100% of Ukraine. If you are promoting a position inconsistent with that, then according to my Code of Positive Trolls, that would be a breach of the “right” or ethical discipline part of it.

So: archetypes. We’ve got the Jungian primordial archetypes like the Mother and the Maiden, and meanings can be disconnected from archetypal characters of this kind who appear in items of Disinfolklore and memes.

A NAFO member wrote to me recently to remind me that Joseph Campbell in the 1980s spoke of Star Wars and how the use of myths is — as she put it — bidirectional, not unidirectional. The current bidirectional mythology and history deserve the same treatment. We’re talking about updating these archetypes. Most people today don’t understand anything about Greek myth and the significance of those gods, but they do about Star Wars.

Then we have the Joseph Campbell archetypes, the Hero’s Journey, which a lot of screenwriters are interested in — Greek myths, which Campbell based a lot of his work on. These are archetypal structures. But they’re not the totality, or even a significant part, of what I mean by archetypes. They’re useful, but they don’t help explain what Russia is doing with memes and the “hybrid warfare” framing or labelling.

We can’t really see these archetypes — the characters, the memes — without the stories necessarily. That’s why I told the story about the Italian defence minister and Tusk and those quotes. The archetypes are in there: this “hybrid war” bit.

A very important aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method — some of the tools for seeing Disinfolklore, parsing it and countering it — are different archetypal structures. Like inner-outer realm switching: I use the example of what was happening in Mariupol when Russia murdered the 600 people sheltering in the drama theatre. Most of them, if not all apart from the babies, were native Russian-language speakers.

However, as soon as the bombs dropped, they were cast — from Moscow’s perspective — from the inner realm into the outer realm. They became “Nazis,” “dead Nazis” who deserved to be dead. They actually metamorphosed in Russian information space from mothers and maidens into dead Ukrainian Nazis. We have this inner-outer realm switching, transformations of people through storytelling, through Disinfolklore.

Even my concept of mana energy is a form of archetyping, of defining things. And then those three great archetypes which Iona so clearly helped me see: Russia is invincible, Russia is indispensable, and Russia has the right to interfere in its neighbouring countries’ destinies — and in fact in all our countries’ destinies. We talk about normalising election interference. That Italian defence minister is complaining about it. But somehow it’s being executed without us reacting appropriately, apart from Romania and Moldova.

I’m not seeing too many other countries really understanding the significance of those two examples in protecting the foundational structure of our communities. The Moldovan government and intelligence services released their findings, and the Romanians did the same. But the Moldovan one sticks in mind because they really went through all the different dimensions of Russia’s interference: training people so they could cause riots in Bosnia, bringing them under the care of the Church, with priests and cards, and all these very different dimensions of affecting the information environment — all with a view to affecting elections. This is a form of imperialism, an execution of power by Russia inside our countries.

While people in our communities argue over whether this is “hybrid war” or whether Russia would attack us, the actual attack is happening. Many people would argue Russia isn’t an empire, and yet it’s executing imperium inside our communities — as it did in America in 2016, and in all the elections since. Until we get rid of this thing — which is partly what I’m trying to do with my work.

I’ve talked before about how characters in stories help archetypal Disinfolklore take hold of our minds. Ukraine can be a character. For us, it’s the plucky David against Goliath. We’ve watched its archetypal identity in people’s minds change, transform. The last ten days have been a nightmare from that perspective, but we press on and trust that President Zelensky will find the way through.

These characters appear as solid concepts with fixed meanings — “Russia is invincible,” “Russia is indispensable” — and yet those of us who listen to Mokrushyna and Denys Davydov and Will and Iona and others each day understand: Russia is on its last legs and may only have a month or two left of existence. We must never forget this. It’s a source of great joy in all our lives, even when we see the attacks on Chernihiv and such.

Good luck to the Russians with election interference when millions of Russians over the next few months are without internet access — even fixed-line internet access is gone from many parts of Russia, where they can only access government websites. Good luck to them as they starve and freeze with continuing these attacks, or thinking they’re getting anything from them.

The absurdity of Russia’s persistence in trying to take Myrnohrad or Pokrovsk when it’s falling apart at the seams is — well, I suppose Jung would have something to say about it.

What Russia does is legislate its archetypes through historical memory. I did a podcast this week with Betty, Heidi, Kuba, and the author — this brilliant Ukrainian academic who wrote the “mental war” piece which I talked about before and will talk about again — where she highlights what Russia has really done to legislate for historical memory inside Russia. This is a form of archetyping that is key to its success in brainwashing its own population. And indeed the people we know who are caught up in this idea of Russkiy Mir or “the great Russian culture.”

A really insidious form of archetyping, which I’ve only really got my head around recently, is this use of the word “opposition.” Most of us, probably all of us listening to this, understand: whenever we see the Russian opposition, so-called opposition — that’s how we should call it — it’s eyes raised.

There’s something about Navalny. And this is what the Russians do — they did it in Ukraine in February 2014. Paul Manafort — Trump’s adviser, who had advised Yanukovych, and whose work there had been paid for by oligarchs: Akhmetov, who seems to have seen the light; Deripaska, who hasn’t as far as we can see; Firtash, who’s still hiding from American justice in Vienna; and one other whose name escapes me — Manafort reborn, renamed, re-monikered, re-archetyped the Party of Regions as “Opposition Bloc.” This party, even in 2019, had about 30% of the vote and had entire TV stations run by Medvedchuk, which were very successful at brainwashing. Even people I knew, people who worked with me, married to Ukrainians, watched this nonsense until it was banned. The entire brainwashing apparatus was banned.

But “Opposition Bloc” — this is archetyping a part of the people who are against the government as the whole of the opposition, and then they can be controlled. It’s an old trick the Russians use, and many of us fall for it because we think: they must be the opposition.

Other archetypes: “Banderites,” “neutrality,” “Moldovan language.” One thing I learned this week from this great historian now at Vilnius University: Russia consciously used the word “Soviet” to conceal the domination of the USSR by Russia. They were looking for a fig leaf. Again, the same form of archetyping that Surkov employed in 2009–2010 with Russkiy Mir. Documents demonstrate that “Soviet” is a cynical imposition, imprinted over “Russia” to conceal Russia and convince people they weren’t being dominated by these Nordic and Slavic Russians from Moscow, an imperial entity.

“Punishers” — from World War II — that was in every newspaper article, every day, that I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. It meant nothing to me, but it triggered memories, complex systems of thought, in the minds of the people who read it, and acted to brainwash them.

“Fake news” is of course Donald’s way of archetyping the truth as fake. And then people who don’t understand this refer to items of propaganda as “fake news.” These are smear-tactic forms of archetyping.

That is really all I had to say about archetyping. That’s how I see “hybrid warfare” fitting into it. Our own identities are made up of endlessly dynamic, mobile matrices of interlocking archetypes. Almost the first barrier in research on Disinfolklore, as I often say, is to convince people that their identities are up for grabs.

Once you accept that your identity is itself the product of mobile armies of metaphors, of truths, of archetypes, then we can begin to look more critically at how our minds and identities can be affected by Disinfolklore and manipulative people — whether it’s so-called pickup artists negging you to try to provoke you into pleasing them, or Russians trying to convince you, as they attack us and try to break the very sinews of our culture and our countries, that they’re not engaged in war, so that we’re not aware of what they’re doing.

Wealth, intelligence, access to information is no barrier to Russia’s use of weaponised archetypes. Russia and all con persons have the same tactics, tropes, procedures and strategies for the whole spectrum of cognitive frames. That’s why David Birkenhead’s work on scams was really helpful, really useful — because again, this is the micro, but what we see is exactly the same strategies used by Putin and Donald to change our realities and change our minds.

I’ll leave on this: Russia has declared the war. It’s there in the documents. We have them, signed by Putin himself. InformNapalm has exposed them — not only Surkov’s email inbox but a document from 30th November 2023, which Vladimir Putin himself signed: “Accordingly, to solve the problem of social entropy in such a system of social relationships, the most obvious solution is to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad — that is, diffusing internal tensions through external expansion.”

Russia has declared war. For me, it’s simple: we are at war. Any obfuscation of that through the use of the term “hybrid warfare” is to fall for the troll. It is a declared war, so even talking in euphemisms... We can see its substance with the attacks against Romania, against Poland, against Ireland, against Britain — hundreds and hundreds of kinetic attacks and murders and assassinations. It’s part of a system of 150,000 war crimes on the European continent. It’s war.

This is probably what we have to get used to in our minds. But the concept of “hybrid war” and all of these euphemisms are very useful for Russia. That’s our vulnerability — because we don’t want to face it. Not us necessarily, because we spend all our days in this. But Tusk doesn’t want to face it. He doesn’t want to get the tanks out or put everyone on alert. Nor does the Italian guy. So they talk about it as if it’s something happening elsewhere, something that isn’t happening. And it’s that vulnerability the Russians are very good at exploiting.

I will leave on the positive note: I still don’t see what Russia gets out of any of this. We clearly don’t get anything out of it. Ukrainians aren’t getting anything out of it. But the Russians aren’t getting anything out of it either. That is a source of great joy to me.

While they’re engaged in exporting chaos through these kinetic activities, their own place is absolutely falling apart. I really look forward to Fridays this week — “In Absurdistan” and Mokrushyna’s accounts — because very few people really understand what is going on in Russia at the moment. They’re still captured by these archetypes.

That’s the positive note. I’ve got to go. Thank you so much. Bye.

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