Podcast | Four Years: The Arc of a War, of one Word

The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-Archetyping

I wanted to reflect on the four years of war. So everything everyone’s been talking about for the last hour and a half or so, hopefully it will strike a chord with them. I want to go through the four years of the war, not merely as battles, though we’ll visit some, but as a journey through Disinfolklore, through the archetypes we project onto Ukraine, through the archetypes Russia projects onto all of us, and through how Ukraine has fought back — not just with weapons, but by re-archetyping itself inside our minds.

Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy

Because, as I wrote, Disinfolklore is how you conceal a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Disinfolklore is how yohu pull the wool over people’s eyes, and this works both ways. So all of us on Volia and who contribute to Volia from day one have been re-archetyping and counter-archetyping against what Russia has been trying to do to Ukraine in the information space, and what many others have been trying to do to Ukraine unconsciously in the information space.

So this is a process we’ve all been involved in. I didn’t have the words for it when the war broke out, but because of the war, I do now. And I want to tell you the story of that word — not the word Disinfolklore, though we’ll get to that, but the word archetype.

Because here’s the thing. For the first two years of the war, we were doing something I had no name for and we perhaps had no name for. We were doing it instinctively. We were re-archetyping Russia, re-archetyping Ukraine, re-archetyping the entire war through memes before we had the vocabulary to describe what we were doing. And the arc of what I was going to talk about tonight is the arc of that word, from instinct to naming to power (mana).

The Bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska

So that word, archetyping. While many anti-disinformation specialists describe themselves as working on the front line of the information war, as many of you will have heard a million times, I worked on the actual zero line between 2015 and 2018, separating Russian from Ukrainian army. I worked at the actual geographical and physical separation point between two of the greatest armies in human history. Because between 2015 and 2022 I was in Ukraine as a diplomat, again as you’ll know, and for three years at that time I was at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.

And I intuited there was something folkloric about the situation there. Armed men on both sides, civilians crossing — pensioners, mostly, collecting their Ukrainian pension from one side and returning to Russian-occupied territory on the other side. And at the checkpoints, Russian-controlled trolls. Not internet trolls — actual literal bridge trolls, the oldest archetype in European folklore. Of course, I didn’t really know that consciously at the time.

In the manner of a 19th-century folklore collector, I collected the stories that Russia used to brainwash Ukrainians living across the river in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And in 2016, I made a discovery that changed my life: that Russia was using Jung’s theory of archetypes to manipulate the moods, attitudes, motivations, and intentions of consumers of its combat propaganda.

In the woods near Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, Russian FSB operatives — archetyping themselves as the Stalinist era’s KGB predecessor, the MGB — in occupied Luhansk, constructed a story containing these archetypes: “my common-law spouse who lives with her underage daughter.” There was, in the labyrinthine layers of this incident, the jarring recognition of artificiality. My jarring recognition. The story contained Jung’s primary archetypes — the Mother and the Maiden — as if someone had a manual containing all of the primordial archetypes and had constructed the story to ensure it contained these elements.

Eight years later, I understood. I had discovered how Russia and MAGA purposefully and purposely reverse-engineer tales with fairy-tale and folktale-like emotional resonances as a means of hacking our minds, hacking our consent, and undermining our civilization. Disinfolklore is what I named it — the folklore of disinformation, the disinformation of folklore, both at once.

Druidy Don and the Battlefield

So in the autumn of 2019, I was really trying to understand what Druidy Don — Trump’s power, his mana — consisted of. I wanted to understand it in order to counter it. At the time, I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, based in Dnipro at that point. I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real-world effects on the battlefield. When Donald withheld Javelin missile systems from Ukraine, demanding that President Zelensky announce an investigation into the son of President Biden, I watched from Dnipro and from areas which are now occupied in Zaporizhzhia as the balance of power shifted. President Zelensky navigated out of that trap. Donald got impeached. President Zelensky escaped. But the lesson was seared into my mind: the information war and the kinetic war are the same war.

Year One: Instinct

On the morning of the 24th of February 2022, I had been out of Ukraine for three weeks. I listened very carefully to President Biden’s strategic disclosures in the fall of 2021. And by the end of November, after a conversation with my father about them, I had all my car packed. I was ready to leave at ten minutes’ notice. I thought the invasion would probably happen at Christmas, but when it didn’t, I made the decision to leave and I crossed the border on the 29th of January 2022. And I marked it with a tweet on Twitter — just a picture of my cat and me at the border with Poland, but not saying that I was leaving Ukraine or why I was leaving Ukraine. I just slipped out of Ukraine, because I didn’t want to scare the horses and I had no access to any secret information. I just had access to the same information others had, but I became convinced that the invasion was going to come.

So that morning of February 24th 2022, I was back home in a remote part of Ireland. And my first tweet was two words: Slava Ukraini. Glory to Ukraine. That’s all I could manage. I was still an OSCE diplomat at the time, and I had to model impartiality. So I was still being cautious online. I’d never mentioned Ukraine online up to that point.

Germany’s initial response to the invasion, as our great German listener was still saying — although rightly you have nothing to be ashamed of now — but Germany’s response to the invasion: 5,000 helmets. Not rifles, not anti-tank missiles. Helmets, to fight 190,000 invaders. I remember that the head of the BND was in Kyiv, and I assumed he had been there to try and extricate President Zelensky, in my naivety. But I share your shock that these people had access to all this information, clearly not only did not see the invasion coming — they didn’t see the invasion coming. “You’ve only got a few hours” was how one German official put it to the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. There’s no point in putting sanctions or exiting Russia from SWIFT. You’ve only got a few hours. Get out, save yourselves — was the basic message, which I also delivered to friends of mine in Ukraine. And maybe I would say the same thing today, but it shocks me and impresses me that many of the people I knew in Dnipro didn’t leave. They were like, “This is our home, we’re not leaving.”

RF’s Mythos Is Done

And on February 28th, I wrote nine words: “Why Russian Federation is doomed by this venture. RF’s mythos is done.” Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done. I did not have a word for what I was witnessing, but what I was witnessing on day four of the full-scale invasion was the destruction of an archetype. Russia had spent centuries constructing a mental archetype, a mental model, a data-resistant archetype of itself as an unstoppable colossus. In four days, Ukraine broke it.

For those incidents that Latyn was just talking about and many others — we were looking at these data points and they didn’t match our archetype of what a proper army, how a properly prepared army would behave.

Reverse Napoleon

And on day five of the invasion, I made a call that has held true for four years: Russia in Ukraine has done a reverse Napoleon. Tolstoy brilliantly shows Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy in War and Peace. Draw the French further and further in so their supply lines are stretched. Napoleon sat in Moscow waiting for surrender. They never did. And so it goes. This is exactly where we are still, four years later.

And the evidence I used which prompted this tweet was a Telegram post from the 27th of February 2022 from a Russian soldier complaining that no one of the invading force could communicate with their commanders. “Almost no one can get a hold of central command. It’s not even a matter of jamming. There’s just no long-range comms equipment or relays that went with the troops there.” Now, as Telegram and Starlink are no longer available to Russia’s forces four years later, we see the seeds of the future were imminent in those first few days.

And the data point that had led me to understand the significance of this lack of communication was — I always remember reading or hearing when I was much younger about how when America went into Grenada, the Army and the Navy or the Air Force, they couldn’t communicate with each other. They discovered their radios weren’t compatible. So that was always in the back of my mind, and then when I saw this, I thought, this is a good sign for Ukraine but a terrible sign for Russia.

Russia had invaded with insufficient forces and overextended supply lines, just as Napoleon had done in reverse. And then I added the Tolstoy inversion: Russia had become the thing its foundational myth celebrates defeating. The national archetype had been inverted. This is what re-archetyping looks like when history does it for you.

The Economist, 1854

On March 6th, I published a thread that was picked up by the Washington Post about the Crimean War of 1854. It was an article in The Economist from 168 years earlier. I had found this article in The Economist a couple of years earlier to try and understand the history of the first Crimean War. This is The Economist speaking: “We ventured” — this is my 19th-century British accent — “we ventured to hint that it might be worthwhile for Europe to go to war with Russia for the sake of information, in order to ascertain whether her strength was that of the bully or the giant.”

1854, and not much has changed. Paper armies, corrupt officers, indifferent soldiers, stolen boots, rotten food. The Crimean War thread proved that Russia’s weakness is not a 2022 aberration. It’s a structural feature. It’s a deep archetype, documented identically 160 years ago.

The Economist went further. By 1855 their verdict was in: “Till a free press be permitted in Russia and encouraged to unveil and denounce abuses. Till the rights and feelings of annexed territories be habitually respected. We do not think that Russia need henceforth be considered as formidable for aggression. She has been unmasked.” She has been unmasked. 1855, 2022. The same verdict, the same bully pretending to be a giant.

On March 6th 2022, I deployed history as a weapon, proving that Russia was never a giant, always a bully. The archetype of Russian military power was a fraud. And it was a fraud 168 years ago.

Let’s Compare Trolls

On March 30th, five weeks into the war, I published a thread that I now recognise as probably my most important act of re-archetyping — but again, I didn’t have a word for it at that point. “Let’s compare trolls. Putin versus President Zelensky. First, Putin looks like a troll. He got that Nordic-Russian troll look nailed. His every communication is a troll for emotional reaction in others.”

That insight: Putin is a 20th-century troll. His one trick is emotionally resonant communications designed to wound. Zelensky is a 21st-century troll — hyper-modern, self-aware, working at a meta-civilisational level. “President Zelensky’s very” — this is in the tweet — “his very existence as a secular, native Russian-language-speaking, cosmopolitan Ukrainian Jewish cultural engineer makes him uninterpretable to a securocrat like Putin, whose entire troll about Ukraine is that it’s far-right and Nazi.”

President Zelensky does not merely resist the archetype Putin has assigned to Ukraine. His very being shatters it. He is an archetype-breaker by existing.

At the time, I framed this as trolling. I did not yet have the word re-archetyping. Putler archetypes Ukraine as Nazi and far-right, but we can re-archetype. This is the power all of us have. This is the power that Will and everyone in this space is exercising, and all of the brain-dead cartoon dogs are engaging in without necessarily having a word for it. And I didn’t yet have that word, re-archetyping, but that is exactly what I was doing, and what we were all doing. I was re-archetyping avant la lettre.

Bucha and the Archetype of Violence

When Bucha was liberated, when the BND intercepted radio traffic showing troops spoke of atrocities as though they were discussing their everyday lives, I understood something fundamental. Russists treat Ukraine as they think women deserve to be treated — like corpses. Putin himself revealed this logic. He likened Ukraine to a dead woman. Again, another act of archetyping. “Like it or not, take it, my beauty” — a reference to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape by the Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mold, and the song is called Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin. Archetypal. Disinfolklore in the mouth of Putler, and used as evidence of genocidal intent in the New Lines Institute’s first of its two great reports looking into Russia’s genocidal intent in the war in Ukraine.

The Sinking of the Moskva

On April 14th, two Ukrainian Neptune missiles sank the Moskva. Who among us will forget that day? The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the most powerful warship in the Black Sea, destroyed by a country that wasn’t supposed to have a navy.

The missile’s name — Neptune. I traced it: the ancient Ukrainian, Proto-Indo-European word neptio, “brother’s or sister’s son.” Neptune evolved from that meaning into a god. The Neptune missile that sank Russia’s flagship carries a name coined in ancient Ukraine. Proto-Indo-European — ancient Ukrainian — Neptune. Ukraine’s 5,000-year-old language, Proto-Indo-European, or “ancient Ukrainian” as I re-archetype Indo-European now that we know where it emanates from, gave the world the word that became the god, that became the missile, that sunk the Russian war flagship. Mythological full circle. The re-archetyping extends 5,000 years into the deep past and arrives on April 14th 2022 in a ball of fire in the Black Sea.

And yet still, many people didn’t get the memo. They didn’t understand that Ukraine was re-archetyping as a giant in the minds of humanity.

Genies Released

And on that same day, I issued a warning about the genies that Ukraine would release. Those of us who know Ukraine well knew that Ukrainian innovation would change warfare permanently. “Ukrainians will make their fellow Indo-European Pashtuns look like amateurs. Genies will be released.” And so it goes. The Pashtuns may have had their IEDs, which caused havoc, but they didn’t have drones. And the genies that have been released by Ukraine four years later — Ukraine manufactures over a million drones a month. We’ve seen these attacks. This seems a highly significant attack on the Druzhba pipeline, possibly using the Flamingo missiles the other day. And the genie that was released at Zaporizhzhia, at Kharkiv, at Bakhmut — it will never be rebottled.

Mariupol and May 9th

Between March 1st and May 9th 2022, Russia killed between 25,000 and 100,000 civilians in Mariupol. Up to 100,000 people in a single city in 70 days. And they did this for the date. They wanted to present the archetype of a conquest of Mariupol as a gift to Putler for Victory Day on May 9th. Instead, we had the image which will be forever seared on my brain, and I share it as often as possible, of Blankie Putler sitting with his blanket, afraid of the cold, on the May 9th Victory Day parade.

“Now and in time to be, wherever yellow and blue is worn, are changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.” Russia forges Ukraine’s mythos one dumb bomb at a time. This insight — that Russia is creating the very Ukrainian national mythology it sought to destroy. Each bomb forges the archetype. I wrote about that on May 9th.

Severodonetsk

The fight then moved on to places I knew best. When I see these images of shelled Severodonetsk, where I lived for three years, I think of the stray cats and dogs. Every apartment building’s basement was a warm home to them. I learned that my gentle and kind neighbour in Severodonetsk was simply torn to pieces from a direct hit. And that’s the word of my erstwhile landlady. Russia murdered 10,000 of my former neighbours in that city.

The Conceptual DNA of Disinfolklore

But that summer, something else was happening. The toolkit I was evolving was crystallising. On July 18th, I published a thread that is the conceptual DNA of Disinfolklore: “Rashist disinfo works in bulk. We need to deal with it in bulk. It’s modern mythology. It’s folk wisdom for our era. Analytical tools and comparative mythology are therefore amazingly helpful to unpacking layers of b******t meaning of memes and countering the nonsense.”

On the 21st of July, the Provocation Logic Cycle was systematised by me.

On August 17th, the death of a Wagner propagandist in that strike in Popasna — that again many of us will never forget — was eulogised as having “gone to Odin’s army.” This triggered a thread that mapped the entire Indo-European first function, the sovereignty function, the pantheon, onto modern information warfare. The punchline: all these gods originated in ancient Ukraine, the very territory Wagner was trying to destroy.

Manuland

On the 21st of August, I coined the term Manuland, which is a counter-geography to Dugin’s Eurasianism. Centred on Ukraine, Manuland stretches from Ireland to India.

On the 23rd of August, I wrote one sentence that connects mythology to geography: “Europa mated with Zeus at the Maidan in central Kyiv on November 13th 2013. The thunder resonates still today in the sky above occupied Sevastopol.” Zeus — Zeus Pater in Proto-Indo-European, the Sky Father, the supreme deity of the Indo-European world — Jupiter, the very concept of divine sovereignty, all forged in ancient Ukraine. And when Europe’s protesters gathered at the Maidan in 2013 to demand a European future, they were, in the deepest mythological sense, returning to the source. Europa mated with Zeus. The mythology and the revolution converge at the same coordinates.

Kharkiv Counter-Offensive

And on September 6th, the Kharkiv counter-offensive shattered Russia’s lines. I immediately, as many of us did, forecast Muscovy’s death spiral. Two weeks later, on September 20th, I produced the concept that was one of my more original but sad contributions: stealth genocide. For eight years, under a variety of linguistic fictions, Muscovy has been forcing Ukrainians to kill Ukrainians. Forced mobilisations in occupied Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk have pitched Ukrainians, fictionally termed “separatists,” against Ukrainians.

And then in September, the war turned. The Kharkiv counter-offensive — again, who among us will forget those days? Balaklia, Kupiansk, Izium, liberated in a matter of days. The most dramatic military reversal of the 21st century. “Like failure in Afghanistan, plus Chernobyl, plus the end of the USSR, plus 50% extra trauma, because little brother Ukraine did it to Muscovy.” That’s what I wrote at the time. Russia had spent centuries calling Ukraine “little brother.” The humiliation of being defeated by the entity you deny exists. This was not merely a military setback. It was an identity crisis. Little Brother had re-archetyped the relationship by force.

By this point, Ukraine had taken over the meme space entirely. Russia, the country that pioneered internet trolling, that built troll factories in St Petersburg, had lost control of the narrative to a nation of 42 million people armed with smartphones and a devastatingly dark sense of humour.

The Founding of Disinfolklore

And then in the final days of Year One, in February 2023, in a 10-day outburst of 11 Substack posts, I published the foundational texts of Disinfolklore: the bridge origin story, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, the working definition, the mana metaphysics, the folkloric parsing of Russian intelligence operations.

And on the 18th of February, five days before the first anniversary, I published a tweet that reached 800,000 people: “I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on that bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. For several years, I negotiated daily with armed Russian bridge trolls, guarding their rebel troll kingdom from Ukrainian armed forces.” That was the most viral moment of my online career, such as it is.

The year that began with Slava Ukraini ended with the founding of Disinfolklore. Throughout Year One, I had been re-archetyping Russia, Ukraine, the entire war instinctively. The Crimean War thread re-archetyped Russia from giant to bully. “Let’s compare trolls” re-archetyped Putler from strongman to frightened old man with a blankie. “Ukraine is not a supplicant” re-archetyped Ukraine from victim to superpower. Stealth genocide re-archetyped the entire 2014–2022 period from frozen conflict to active extermination.

But I did not yet have a word. The word was archetype. I was still encountering people — friends, nice people, humanists, pro-human rights — they hadn’t been watching as closely as I had, and yet they still had the same archetypal perception of Ukraine that they had had at the beginning of the war: helpless victim, a damsel in distress. “We’d love to help you, but honestly, we can’t.” That kind of attitude also led me to this. I was reshaping archetypes without calling them that. I was doing it the way a musician plays before learning to read notation — by feel, by instinct, by accumulated pressure — as all of us have been doing.

Year Two: Building the Theory

So at the start of Year Two, Disinfolklore was just a word, a clever portmanteau with a powerful origin story about a bridge. By the end of Year Two, it was a complete analytical framework. In Year Two, I published 3,496 original tweets and 141 Substack posts and launched the podcast series and maintained an output of one Substack post a day for three months on Disinfolklore. But the numbers missed the point. Year Two was also the year that I became a bit of a theorist, where I was trying to get into the underpinnings of what the Russians were doing.

The Incursions of May 2023

On the 31st of May 2023, the most extraordinary counter-Disinfolklore operation unfolded. Ukraine unleashed a series of incursions into Russian territory that left the Kremlin’s information apparatus paralysed. Who among us will forget those days? Who among us will forget how we believed once again? This would change everything.

Instantly, the archetypes in people’s minds — nice people, people like foreign correspondents in newspapers — would see this and go, “Wow, Ukraine is a giant. We need to help Ukraine.” I wrote at the time: “Let’s appreciate the scale and beauty of the operation Ukraine has unleashed inside Muscovy. This is art.” So the very people in Russia who designed the awe-inspiring active measures of Brexit, Trump, and the Hunter Biden troll are now themselves entrapped by Ukraine.

Ukraine as the ultimate counter-intelligence artist. The country that Russia had archetyped as a passive victim was now running operations inside Russia that made Russia’s own intelligence services look amateurish. The re-archetyping was no longer just theoretical or rhetorical — it was operational.

Putin’s Chef Problem

Now, let me tell you about May 2023 as well. Prigozhin — the Chef, archetyped as Chef, a folkloric motif. We now know Prigozhin himself wrote a book of fairy tales. And in May 2023, Prigozhin was openly feuding with Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Most Russia experts saw this as a management dispute. I saw an archetype.

On the 26th of May 2023, I published “Putin’s Chef Problem”: “How can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the Sorcerer. It is featured in Indo-European stories for millennia.” Within two months — and ironically, it’s one of the main plot points in The Ring, in Wagner’s Ring — within two months of the march on Moscow, the Chef was allegedly dead. I believe he’s truly dead when we find out what happened to the second officer Wagner private jet that flew on to Baku that night, and when we read or watch the Chef’s final testimony.

The joke, of course, is on the Russians. They destroyed their state for a troll. “Mummy, what was the end of the Russian Federation like?” “At first slow, then sudden. You see, its army was in Ukraine.” “Why?” “No one knew. Its army rushed back to Russia to stop a coup. No one knew what to do or where to go. That was it.” I wrote that on May 27th — a month before the coup. Twenty-seven days before the actual march on Moscow. Sometimes the archetype tells you everything.

And exactly one month later, June 23rd, Prigozhin marched on Moscow.

Why Russia Experts Missed It

Why did Russia experts miss this? Russia experts are fed vast amounts of Disinfolklore by the Russist state apparatus. Kremlinology is an industry which is fed raw materials that are constructed inside the Russian power vertical to bamboozle, fool, confuse, and distract Western so-called experts. And one of the wonderful things about Volia and NAFOs and many of us is watching how much we’ve learned and how our intuition about Russia and Russian disinformation has evolved way beyond the power of most Russia experts attached to think tanks and the like.

They saw what Russia’s Disinfolklore factories wanted them to see. I saw the archetype — the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who had grown too powerful. And I saw it because I’d spent seven years learning to read the mythological structures beneath the surface of events. Within two months of the march on Moscow, he was dead.

Bakhmut

And then we get to Bakhmut, which was partly the reason why I suddenly realised that actually Prigozhin was the Apprentice. He had been given all the plum jobs in the invasion. The Wagnerites had been given the job of scaring President Zelensky away from Kyiv, of then trying to kill him. They were the ones who killed many of the 1,700 people they murdered in the Kyiv region. He was then given Popasna, which he only won after an extraordinary, tricky fight. And then he was given Bakhmut, which was supposed to be occupied by the end of July 2022. And then I believe he would have come out as Putler’s successor, and the whole thing would have gone on.

But of course, it didn’t work out that way. They lost whatever it was — 75,000 to 100,000 dead — to take 0.0069% of Ukraine. Russia would need 50 times more humans than ever existed to conquer the whole country at that rate. A terrible beauty has been born there. And as we see now in the last couple of days, Chasiv Yar — which of course they never conquered — but many of those filled with the archetype of Russia as an unstoppable force assumed they would take Chasiv Yar immediately after that.

Manufactured Tiredness

Then this manufactured tiredness that we see in our information space. Our information space is filled with memes conveying an emotion of tiredness directly into our minds. We who are unaffected by the daily missile strikes become occupied via these linguistic memes by tiredness. We then adopt the proposed bogus solution: Ukraine surrenders to genocide. This is how Disinfolklore works inside our minds to depress our spirits.

And the single most successful Disinfolklore operation that Russia ever deployed was “Don’t poke the bear.” Using reflexive control, Russia convinces its enemies, whether states or individuals, to act of their own volition, voluntarily, in ways which benefit Russia. “Don’t poke the bear” is the geopolitical equivalent of “don’t wear a short skirt.” It places the burden of self-restraint on the victim. It pre-emptively excuses the aggressor. Ukraine now pokes the bear nightly. And Russia, without any mana left, cannot stop it.

Year Three: The Word Arrives

So then we go to Act Three, to Year Three. I suppose what I really want to say is that this is all the product of a real-time analysis, not an academic work. It’s conducted by someone who lived, as many of us did, in the places being destroyed, who knew the people being killed and people adjacent to them being killed, and who spent, in my case, years on the actual zero line between the armies. So every analytical tweet was written with the knowledge that friends and former colleagues were under fire. And every concept was tested against the reality of the people — people that I liked — there.

And really, what I did not yet have at that point was a single mechanism that explained why all of this worked — why Disinfolklore lodges so deeply in our minds, why it resists data, why the “Russia is strong” narrative survives contact with the mathematics of Avdiivka or Bakhmut. And the answer was archetype, and the path to that answer ran through the rubble of a city and across the border of a nuclear state.

Avdiivka

Again, we have Year Three beginning on February 17th 2024. Avdiivka fell after eight years. “Russia’s failures in Ukraine, anniversary edition. Took 50,000 Russian deaths to capture Avdiivka, 0.02% of Ukraine. That means trillions of Russian soldiers needed to capture the whole of Ukraine. Trillions. Do the math. 50,000 dead. Let that number dissolve every ‘Russia is winning’ headline you ever read.”

Macron Wakes Up

And then something unexpected happened. Macron, the man I had spent two years criticising for his reflexive-control capture, the man who had been trolled by Putler in pre-invasion phone calls — Macron woke up. And I wrote: “My favourite part is where President Macron likens the soothsaying songs of ‘peace, peace’ to nursery rhymes. ‘They’re not for peace, they’re against Ukraine,’ said President Macron.” Macron, speaking in English, directly called out the peace lobby as anti-Ukrainian. From Normandy Format chairman trying to pressure Ukraine to capitulate in 2019, it was the most dramatic instance of what I was beginning to recognise as the central phenomenon: a leader breaking free from a data-resistant archetype. Macron had been trapped inside the archetype of dialogue with Russia. He shattered it.

And that, again, is why our German colleague rightly should be proud, because although Scholz never broke out of this archetype, certainly Chancellor Merz was probably never captured by it, and he has never failed me.

Tripillia and Mythicide

And while the media was talking about a stalemate — another archetype — I was reaching into deep time. Ukraine’s Trypillia power station was destroyed by Russian missiles. And I wrote: “Trypillia power station is not merely Ukrainian. It’s the mana of our entire civilisation Russia is picking off.” Ukraine’s national symbol, the Trident, is a living reflex of the oldest Indo-European myth — the Trito myth, the dragon-slayer narrative attested from India to Ireland. Russia was not merely committing war crimes. Russia was committing mythicide.

In May 2024, I stated my broader mission explicitly: “My task is to promote understanding Ukraine as the original source of all Indo-European culture.” Timothy Snyder is brilliant, but the modern discipline of history looks only at written sources. So Snyder’s brilliant history of Ukraine begins with the Greek colonists along the Azov Sea coast, circa 800 BCE. My history of Ukraine begins before 2500 BCE, with the ancestors of those Greeks, who were ancient Ukrainians. And I’m very happy to note that a year later, Timothy Snyder followed this path — obviously he never read my work, but other people convinced him and showed him the ancient DNA studies published in Nature and peer-reviewed journals that demonstrate that all living Indo-European languages emanate particularly from Mykhailivka on the right bank, just below Zaporizhzhia. And now Timothy Snyder is a great adherent of what I talk about here. And I introduced the term “ancient Ukraine” and “ancient Ukrainians” into our lexicon.

And so this is the re-archetyping project at its most ambitious — not just countering Russian propaganda about the current war, but rewriting the mental model of Ukraine across 5,000 years of human history. Ancient Ukraine is the source of all living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, the patriarchal mode of family — sadly, I’m very disappointed by that — and modes of social organisation. This is what Finding Manuland, which is my second research programme under the disinfolklore.com website, at disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu — the mythological foundation beneath the Disinfolklore framework — is designed to achieve.

Kursk: The Supreme Re-Archetyping

So I re-archetyped Ukraine’s invasion of Russia as the Fourth Reverse Napoleon invasion. And on the 6th of August 2024, Ukraine did what nobody expected and invaded Russia again — but of course, for most of humanity, they hadn’t even noticed the first time.

And let me tell you what this meant. For 80 years, a single archetype had governed international relations: Russia’s territory is inviolable. Touch it and the world ends. Nuclear Armageddon. Escalation to extinction. World War III. This archetype was embedded so deeply in the minds of Western policymakers that it functioned as a law of physics. Unquestionable. Unchallengeable. Absolute. Ukraine shattered that.

“Innovation and geopolitics since World War II,” I wrote. “Anyone can occupy part of Russia with impunity. Decades of earnest game theory and escalation management IR textbooks aren’t worth more than toilet paper.” I called it the Fourth Reverse Napoleon, but it was something more than military innovation. It was a supreme act of archetyping — the destruction of a data-resistant mental archetype through action. Eighty years of Russian Disinfolklore saying an invasion of Russia is both impossible and a red line. Now Russians are told that villages in Ukraine are “more Russian” than 1,500 square kilometres of Russia’s Kursk region that Ukraine now holds. The nuclear bluff was called. For over a week after the incursion, Medvedev was silent about threatening the West with nuclear Armageddon. The silence told you everything, you see.

I wrote: “Ukraine is an empire now. And when Ukraine acts, Ukraine creates its own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously as you will, Ukraine will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.” Ukraine used Russia’s own weapon — reflexive control — against it. The student had surpassed the master.

Contrast Putin’s desultory response to the invasion with 80 years of scare stories about nuclear Armageddon if anyone had the temerity to invade Russia. The invasion is surely one of the world’s epic trolls and one of President Zelensky’s greatest pieces of performance art, because you cannot defeat a country that has already re-archetyped itself as unconquerable.

The War of Archetypes Is Permanent

On the 28th of July 2024, I wrote what might be one of my more forward-looking statements: “Victory on the battlefield will not mean the end of this war. After Ukraine wins this war, we need to continue fighting to recentre contemporary and ancient Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.” The war of archetypes is permanent, and it requires permanent counter-archetyping.

The Witch Switch

I must give you one more tool that I developed in Year Three before we cross into darker territory: the Witch Switch. The Witch Switch is the mechanism by which a Disinfolklorist redirects the public sphere’s fear and anger from a real threat to a manufactured one. The word “witch” is not accidental. In every European witch-hunting period, the pattern is the same: genuine social anxieties about crop failure, disease, economic collapse are redirected onto an innocent target. The innocent target is switched for the real cause of the anxiety.

Donald switched the real causes of American anxiety — economic stagnation, healthcare costs, wars, infrastructure decay — onto trans people, immigrants, “the woke.” The anxiety is real, the target is manufactured, the switch is the Disinfolklore.

Russia does the same thing. Real Russian anxiety about depopulation, about having a rubbish country, about economic stagnation, about the failure of the Russian state to provide basic services — is switched onto Ukraine. Ukraine becomes the witch. The war becomes the witch-burning.

Year Four: Dark Territory

Then on the 5th of November 2024, Donald won the US presidency. The same techniques that had conquered eastern Ukraine, the same archetypal manipulation, the same hacking of national archetypes, of national consciousness, had now conquered America. “Ukraine then remains our last hope to hold back the tide of Rushism,” I wrote on the 6th of November 2024. And I still believe this, as many of us probably do.

Coercive Control

In November 2024, after the election, the unifying thread became clear. What unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putler? Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. Coercive control — the energy signature of all Disinfolklore. Not just a metaphor for domestic abuse applied to geopolitics. It’s the identical mechanism. The isolation of the victim — whether it’s Greenland or Ukraine or Venezuela or wherever. The gaslighting, the manufactured dependency, the normalisation of hyperviolence, the blame transfer. Putler does this to Ukraine. Donald does this to America. They are not strongmen. They are abusers. And the distinction matters, because you treat a strongman — another archetype — with deference, but you treat an abuser by leaving.

Romania: Capturing a NATO State

On December 5th 2024: “How Russia just tried to capture a NATO state.” Romania’s president had just declassified documents detailing how Russia used China’s TikTok to capture Romania’s presidency. A NATO member state, captured through Disinfolklore — delivered through TikTok, not through tanks. Through TikTok. Through the same archetypal manipulation that conquered Luhansk, that conquered MAGA, that is conquering every society that fails to understand the Disinfolklore universe which is descending upon us. And this is why the framework matters beyond Ukraine. This is a civilisational problem, as Latyn was alluding to in the Canada example.

Data-Resistant Mental Archetypes

And then December 1st 2024 — the word arrived. As Syria’s Assad regime collapsed overnight, exposing the fraudulence, I wrote at the time, of every Western expert who had assured us that Russian-backed regimes were permanent. I wrote: “Experts’ data-resistant mental archetype of a Potemkin state. Some experts who didn’t predict the Syrian regime’s collapse trolled Ukraine into conceding territory to Russia. A mental archetype of an unbeatable Russia occupies the minds of those attempting to troll us into surrender.”

Data-resistant mental archetypes. There it was. The word, the expression I’d been searching for since February 28th 2022, since I had written “RF’s mythos is done” — Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done.

The mechanism that explained why the “Russia is strong” narrative persisted despite all the data, all the evidence. The mechanism that explained why Ukraine fatigue could be manufactured. The mechanism that explained how “don’t poke the bear” could paralyse entire governments. An archetype: a mental model so deeply embedded that it resists data. You can show people the mathematics — 50,000 dead for 0.002% of Ukraine. You can show them the economics — Russia printing money at Weimar velocity (thank you for all your amazing posts, Beefeater). You can show them the military reality — 1.2, 1.3 million Russist casualties. And still, still, they believe Russia is winning. Because the archetype is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. The archetype precedes evidence. It’s the lens through which evidence is interpreted.

Everything Accelerates

And once I had that word, everything accelerated. December 11th: “Archetype of Ukraine as weak, helpless, small is not consistent with the data. It’s seeded relentlessly and imminent in linguistic and visual memes.” And I named the three characters who embodied it — three Odinic shapeshifters. Druidy Don Trump, named for the Druids, the magico-religious caste in Celtic Indo-European culture. Duncy Putin, the folkloric dunce who sets off each morning having learned nothing from the previous day’s failures. The Comedian Zelensky, the 21st-century troll who masters both the juridical and the magical dimensions of sovereignty — the majesty of sovereignty. He’s a master, a magister, a magus, and who, unlike the other two, uses his power, his mana, for good.

The power to archetype at will belongs to all of us, but if you own the means of distribution — the main means through which archetyping outside our minds occurs — then you can archetype at scale and re-engineer humanity’s minds.

Munich 2025

Then, on February 15th 2025, Munich — Pirate Party Security Conference event — my Munich speech: “Our Disinfolklore Universe: Battling Archetypes.” Five parts: declaration — our Disinfolklore universe; definition — “Was ist Disinfolklore?” riffing off Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; mana in the meme — examples of mental models and archetypes and memes; the Odinic framework — Druidy Don, Duncy Putin, the Comedian; and the conclusion, which is going to be the last episode of my Battling Archetypes mini-series which we’ve been doing in our Decoding Disinfolklore podcast — consciously disrupting archetypal identities, which is what I’m talking about here really, and it’s what Volia does, it’s what NAFOs does. We consciously disrupt archetypal identities.

From a bridge in a forest in eastern Ukraine in 2015 to the podium in Munich in 2025. Ten years. The framework was complete. The method was teachable. The war was named: a battle of archetypes. The battleground is the human mind. By understanding the Disinfolklore universe, we can engage in conscious memetic warfare, conscious counter-Disinfolklore.

I’d found the word. Then I had to build the institution. The war demands it. When the enemy operates at a civilisational scale, when the same techniques are used to brainwash Ukrainians in occupied Luhansk and Americans in occupied Washington, the response must also operate at a civilisational scale.

Trumpski Mir

On the 8th of March 2025, I published the tweet that received more engagement than anything I’d written last year: “I’m one of the few Westerners ever to live and work inside Russia’s occupation. Luhansk, 2015–2018, inside Russkiy Mir. I’ve spent years interpreting the collection of Disinfolklore I amassed while living inside pure Russkiy Mir territory.”

And I named what was happening in America in that tweet: Trumpski Mir — the fusion of Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore into a single global reality-distortion field. Russkiy Mir went to Washington. America is under Russian occupation, but because they’re operating through Americans — like they’re operating through Georgians in Georgian Dream, or through some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine — it’s hard for Americans to understand.

The Foundational Essay

And in March, I published a foundational essay that traced this genealogy from fieldwork in Luhansk through an independent discovery of Jung’s archetype concept to the Munich speech. In it, I define the method: “By archetyping in this context, I’m speaking of an aspect of cognition. We model the world, our context. Our mental models help us navigate it.” And I named the counter-move: re-archetyping — the conscious disruption and reconstruction of mental models.

“Ukraine’s next battle: re-archetyping humanity’s mental models of Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal had just reported that ancient Ukraine’s Yamnaya community spread its genes into more than half of living humans today. And I wrote: “Along with the genes, however, also came all today’s living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, patriarchal modes of social organisation, tripartite castes — sovereignty, security, fertility/prosperity — farmers, and the divinely inspired praise poetry.”

Ukraine is not merely defending its territory. Ukraine is the source civilisation. This is the strategic depth of the re-archetyping project. When Russia archetypes Ukraine as weak, helpless, small, the counter is not merely to show Ukraine’s current military strength. The counter is to show that Ukraine is the foundation of Western civilisation itself. When people we know opine that, “well, I’m really sad what’s going on in Ukraine, but it actually doesn’t really matter” — and yet they’re banging on about ancient Greece and these other places which played a great role in our development as a civilisation — they ignore the fact that, as we now know, Ukraine is the foundation of it.

The Systematic Method

So in the entire Disinfolklore framework — then in June, I’ll flash forward a bit more quickly. In June, I published the systematic method that anyone can use.

Step one: scan for the mana in the meme. Every piece of Disinfolklore carries an emotional charge — mana — designed to hack your feelings before your rational mind can intervene.

Step two (this is all on disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu): identify the archetype being deployed. What mental model is this communication trying to embed or enforce?

Step three: characterise the Disinfolklore tool being used. Is it Provocation Logic? Accusation in a Mirror? The Witch Switch?

Step four: evaluate the source and chain. Where did this narrative originate? How has it been laundered?

Step five: make the call. Is this Disinfolklore? If it is, what is its operational intent?

Step six: intervene. Deploy a counter-archetype. Found Volia. Contribute to Volia. Donate to the causes that Volia supports. Engage in memetic warfare. Become a cartoon dog. Re-archetype.

This is the method I’ve been practising instinctively since 2016 — well, really since I went on Twitter in June 2021 — since 2016, and systematically since 2023. And it’s the method I’m now passing on.

Russification of America

Those of us who’ve lived under Russia’s modes of governance now see the stunning parallels since Donald and his apparatchiks assumed office: the Russification of America. The chain — Manafort, who we see Zelensky saying the other day approached him last year to try and run his campaign. Manafort, whose daughters accused him of stimulating the murder of the Heavenly Hundred on the Maidan. According to Manafort — the chutzpah of these people is just beyond, off the scale.

And those of us who’ve lived in Russkiy Mir recognise these patterns: the control of media, the purging of institutions, the elevation of loyalty over competence, the weaponisation of the courts, the manufacturing of enemies, the normalisation of lying. And I saw all of this in Luhansk, 2015 to 2018. And we all see it in Washington in 2025 and 2026. And thankfully, we don’t see it in Europe — or maybe in one or two places in Europe.

Ukraine Re-Archetypes as Giant

In September 2025, I identified the moment that I’d been waiting for since March 2022. Ukraine re-archetypes as a giant inside Donald’s mind. For the first time, the target of archetypal manipulation had successfully reversed the manipulation. Ukraine, which Trump and his handlers had been archetyping as weak, helpless, small, a drain on American resources — as the speaker before me was just saying when she was speaking with such pathos about her children and not being able to get them interested in Ukraine or in the war and the lessons of war — we see that this MAGA re-archetyping of Ukraine as not worthy of being helped was so powerful and happened to so many people that we know, under the radar. It goes against everything that America said about itself for many decades, and yet it was able to work through Disinfolklore.

But now Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as strong, as indispensable. And I wrote: “What I’ve been looking for since March 2022” — and it’s taken a while to get this vocabulary.

Drawing the Arc

So anyway, I’ll move towards the end now. I started the speech with a promise that the arc would be the arc of a word. Let me now draw that arc explicitly — the deeper pattern. There is something deeper here, and that’s what I want us all to carry with us.

The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. It’s umbilically tied to Volia and all of the stories I’ve heard from all of you and that you’ve surfaced and that you’ve tweeted and talked about. When I’m in situations I can’t read, every day the data is pouring into my mind and working against these frameworks and helping provoke thoughts and ideas. So that’s why it’s appropriate perhaps to talk about this here.

The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. Ukraine, too, started instinctively. On day one, President Zelensky said, “I need ammo, not a ride.” He did not have a theory of re-archetyping. He was the re-archetyping, as I think it was Dan who was talking about just before I spoke. He was the re-archetyping — his existence. A secular, Russian-language-speaking, Jewish comedian president shattered the archetype Russia had constructed. He did not plan to be an archetype-breaker inside politics, but he was an archetype-breaker inside art. He simply was one. Perhaps he did plan to be one, but he didn’t realise he became it.

Then Ukraine built the theory — the battlefield theory: drone warfare, asymmetric innovation, the art of making the impossible possible with insufficient resources. The Kharkiv offensive, the liberation of Kherson, the sinking of the Moskva — a missile named after a god whose very name was coined in ancient Ukraine.

Then Ukraine named it. Kursk — the supreme re-archetyping move, the invasion of the invader, the comedian ordering his army across the border of a country that claims to be a nuclear superpower. The moment the archetype of Russian inviolability was shattered — not by argument, but by action.

And now, Year Four, Ukraine deploys the system. A million drones a month. Air superiority over Russian territory-ish. A defence industry that makes NATO’s look artisanal. A country that, after four years of the most brutal conventional war in Europe since 1945, is stronger than when it started.

And Ukraine and I and all of us have been on this journey. We’re both re-archetypers. We’re both re-archetyped by this journey. The difference is that Ukraine uses missiles and drones. I use words and archetypes. The target is the same: the data-resistant mental model that says Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak.

That model is a lie. It was always a lie. It was a lie in 1854 when The Economist asked whether Russia was a bully or a giant. It was a lie in 2022 when Western leaders told Ukraine it only had a few hours. It’s a lie tonight.

Hacking Archetypes of National Consciousness

When anyone tells us this war is a stalemate — hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia-directed fig leaves like Georgian Dream, Brexit, MAGA, “Ireland for the Irish,” “Free Palestine,” and a bunch of flag-waving paleo-conservative misogynistic anti-immigrant riot-creating movements globally.

Surkov — Putin’s great cardinal — toasted Putin’s election celebration in 1999 thus: “To the deification of power, of mana.” Surkov understood what most Western analysts still have not grasped. Russia does not just spread disinformation. Russia hacks archetypes. It identifies deep mythological structures of national consciousness and mutates them. This is not disinformation. This is deeper. This is the weaponisation of storytelling itself. Not understanding how these sounds and stories operate to hack our intentions means those who don’t get Disinfolklore are bringing knives to artillery fights.

So I’ll finish off by just saying that. I’m going to leave it at that. Thank you for listening — if you were listening. Thank you for not listening if you weren’t listening. Out.

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