Two weeks ago, I ended at the point where I was talking about how what I was most concerned with in my Munich speech in February 2025 was that we would be wrapped up inside what I call a Disinfolklore universe, made up of different discrete galaxies all coalescing. Sadly, the attempt to re-engineer humanity through this is ongoing. We see it every day throughout this so-called peace process.
How it manifests in our minds and in our timelines is exactly what we’re experiencing at the moment: a constant battering of our senses and emotions — our emotions most importantly — with hope and with feelings that maybe, for instance, in the case of one of the main characters at the moment, the war in Ukraine, many people are commenting on it as if peace is going to arrive in a month or two, or is imminent.
I’m not going to go through why I don’t think this is true. I could go through each of the peace agreement’s elements and demonstrate it’s not true. But I probably will get to that later, in a few weeks, when I get to the point about my experience in eastern Ukraine.
US presidents could always archetype at scale. By archetyping, I mean something bigger than branding. It’s not a mere imprinting of ideas in our consciousness. It’s something akin to attaching something in the quotidian, in our timelines, to very deep structures within our cognitive frameworks — on an individual, but also on a micro and macro level.
When President Trump was talking about immigrants eating our dogs, that can be understood on a literal level: immigrants are eating our dogs. Many of us would have spent time fact-checking this. Lo and behold, we discover immigrants aren’t eating our dogs.
But when I heard that, it reminded me of one of my great supervisors, Anna Lo, who was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Sadly she died about a year ago. She was the first ethnic Chinese member of a legislature in Europe. I worked for her in Northern Ireland when I was General Secretary of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, an anti-sectarian political party.
There is a tradition among those supposedly loyal to the British crown of lighting bonfires in July. Some of us might remember seeing lots of bonfires. And I remember seeing “Anna Lo ate my dog” on a sign on one of these bonfires, and wondering what they were talking about.
I thought of that immediately when Donald was talking about migrants eating our dogs. There is this element of an archetypal relationship between dogs and migrants — being eaten, eating our pets — somehow othering. That’s quite conventional in far-right circles. I happened to come across it once by accident in Northern Ireland, and then it popped up in Donald Trump’s speech, and suddenly everyone is going.
That’s also an archetypal structure. But it also sounds so bizarre to us as normal human beings who support Ukraine — it’s like a hidden code, an unhidden code. Somehow it connects with deep psychological fears of people in their inner minds and motivates them to hate migrants. Enough of a set of people that it was worth Donald airing this in his campaign. It was worth these so-called loyalists attaching a poster of Anna Lo to their bonfire and then burning it — the effigy and the sign: “Anna Lo ate my dogs.”
This is the kind of thing I’m talking about with archetypal Disinfolklore literacy. We don’t have to learn all of these tropes, because honestly I think we could end up being brainwashed.
But when we see the Wagner — the Wagner propagandist who was killed by one of the first HIMARS strikes in Popasna in July 2022 — some of us will remember that incident where he was visiting the front line as a tourist. It was in Popasna, a city I know well from when I lived in eastern Ukraine. He was photographed on arrival, it was put up online, there was a label on the building behind him, and HIMARS came to visit, and he was killed.
The person who took over the Grey Zone Telegram channel wrote: “So-and-so has gone to Odin.” This is a very deep archetype in Indo-European history. In ancient Germanic thought, surfaced by Tacitus, recorded first in the first century of the Common Era, and then used by Wagner the composer as part of this project to create a German national consciousness movement — a response to the call by Herder in 1778 to unify the ten German tribes that Tacitus had recorded existed.
Odin became part of that. Wagner the composer played his role, as did Goethe and many other great artists and writers, in forming this culture — which is akin to what MAGA and Russia are trying to do using all these different means.
When they use archetypes, like in this case Odin — “he’s gone to Odin” — these are very deep structures. They attach not just into our culture but into, for instance, “Wednesday.” Every time you say Wednesday, you’re unknowingly perhaps making a dedication to Odin. Wōdanaz is the Germanic way of calling Woden the god, but Odin is another name for it. The Wagner military guys — it was part of their lore, their inner lore, and it is still part of their lore.
When you pick these up, they’re not mere tropes. They’re not accidental. There’s something more about them. That’s what I mean about archetypes. It’s bigger than branding. It’s more than representation. It’s something much deeper. And that’s what I’m most concerned about.
This week we saw — well, two weeks ago, and we talked about it last week — the new national security strategy. What I noticed from my previous work, which I’ve talked about before, is how Putler archetypes Ukraine as a woman — a woman from the perspective of the masculinist. From the perspective of Hegseth, who also — or the head of the FBI, who incidentally when he talks about Valhalla, that’s tapping into those white supremacist Germanic lore archetypes. So it’s not just the Wagner military.
What I noticed they’re also trying to do in the national security strategy is archetype Europe in the same way they’re archetyping Ukraine — turning the concept of Europe away from its power, its economic power, and into a character in Disinfolklore with the characteristics of a weak woman. A weak woman is an archetype from the perspective of masculinists like Putler, like Hegseth, like Donald, like all of these palaeo-male, palaeo-conservatives. They’re trying to create a sense of disgust about it.
One friend of mine wrote to me from the United States: “How is Europe these days? It sounds very sick to me, everything going on there. You’re just ailing.” This is the mood which has been spread.
I talk about how Disinfolklore works on our mana, our energy, from which all our motivations come, our attitudes, our moods emanate. This is the secret sauce. We’re looking at the meme, the peace talks, the so-called peace talks, and our mood is being affected. Mood is a much longer-term mechanism to brainwash us and demotivate us. “What’s the point in voting? They’re all the same.” That’s the way they use memes, and that can be effected by archetypes.
When we’ve had previous US presidents who’ve seen value in trying to inspire us, for good or for ill — this is not what we have at the moment. There are similarities, but US presidents could always archetype at scale. That doesn’t mean what we’re experiencing today in our minds and in the mind war is a facsimile version of the past.
Because now they have the capacity to re-encode our minds into their Disinfolklore universe. If the media repeats your trolls, then people truly will believe migrants are eating your pet dog. If you own X or Facebook, you can convince at scale that we are not living in a Disinfolklore universe. But we are. The signs are everywhere once you get your eye in.
That is my job: to try to help us get our eyes in, and to remind myself of the real purpose of all this peace-talk Disinfolklore, quite apart from the daily quotidian ebb and flow of “will they, won’t they.”
Most of us listening right now — that’s one particular Disinfolklore galaxy which isn’t wrapping us up inside. But I see it even in the Kyiv Independent: “As we move closer to a peace process.” Then you see other journalists, European leaders talking about how we’re as close as we’ve ever been to a peace process. But I think most of us are pretty clear we’re not.
So what is the purpose? What is the effect of all this trolling with Witkoff and Kushner? It’s to wrap us up inside my premonition of a Disinfolklore universe. And of course, it’s only one of thousands of different Disinfolklore galaxies or sub-galaxies going on at the moment. We’ve got the Epstein thing, the Susan Wiles thing, and in each of our individual countries any number of stories — maybe a conservative television channel in Poland reported as wanting to establish a MAGA TV station there, or a movement based around Palestine, animus towards Israel, or migrants, or both, or Ukraine, or any number of issues.
This is what I talked about a few weeks ago, with the great insight from this amazing article by the Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak in InformNapalm, where she talks about the mental war the Russians have declared against us, and how Surkov himself — Vladislav Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of the Russian Federation, who was in charge of Ukraine from I think 2012 to February 2020 — I kind of laugh because I remember his nemesis.
Surkov’s nemesis was the moment in December 2019 when President Zelensky refused to surrender Donetsk and Luhansk to Putler, despite Macron and Putin and then-Chancellor Merkel and Surkov promising that this newly minted president would give Russia control, enable them to hold elections. It was reported that Yermak almost came to blows with Surkov at that Paris meeting. Then Surkov left.
The really insightful thing from Tetiana Boriak’s piece in InformNapalm, which helped me a lot, was Surkov’s statement in his writings about how Russia uses the archetypes of national consciousness as fig leaves to disguise their mental imperialism. In the context of Russia and Russkiy Mir — which as an idea has been around for centuries probably — he realised he could use this as a fig leaf to disguise Russia’s naked imperial ambition and to brainwash so many people into thinking there’s a problem with Russian-language speakers in Ukraine — just Russian-speaking places and all these mad excuses, convenient fictions trotted out.
Surkov himself talks about archetypes in a different way than I do — in one sense quite narrowly, but in another it helps us understand how in Britain during Brexit, they were able to attach the political campaign to the archetype of England alone, Ireland alone, independence — a very deep sense of being different from Europe — and over six months brainwash people.
I do note, and this could be amazing: the British Prime Minister and ruling party have announced an immediate inquiry into foreign interference in elections on the island of Britain. Many of us may have signed the petition calling for this. We’ve been calling for it since basically the results of Brexit came out. The whole thing seemed a bit mad, a bit weird. Then when we learned about Cambridge Analytica and various other things. So now it’s possible some of this will come out, and the motivation to make a military intervention in Ukraine is perhaps growing.
We saw this in Kosovo in 1999: when France, the United States and Britain decided they would go to war, they made sure the information space created a motivation for that. I’ve been calling for this since about April 2022 — trying to get the troops in there.
That’s what I mean by the use of archetypes. Once you get your eye in, you can find them all over the place. You know then that this is what MAGA is trying to do with Europe — make Europe seem weak. By understanding what I call the Disinfolklore universe, we can engage in conscious memetic warfare. We can consciously counter Disinfolklore. We won’t necessarily get caught on the facts of matters, but will understand what they’re doing, what’s the effect.
I’m not saying the people in MAGA who wrote the national security strategy — Vance and the people around him — sat around and used the word “archetypes”: “We’re going to archetype Ukraine as a woman, and we’re going to talk about how all this equality in Europe, its laws against discrimination, its laws against brainwashing because of the Holocaust — because of all that, we’re going to archetype Europe as weak, promote this trope inside Europe, divide people so they’ll submit to America.” Well, actually, that probably is kind of what they’re doing. It’s the same trick Putler did with Ukraine and still does.
But it has its limits, as we see with Ukraine. I’m 99.9% confident Ukraine’s not going to lay down arms, for a large number of reasons most of which we in this community understand.
The Disinfolklore universe is a place where up has been archetyped as down. Peace means war. The person — Donald Trump — whose entire career is characterised by creating conflict and benefiting from chaos is apparently looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. An urge to force Ukraine to capitulate is archetyped as “peace,” a “peace process.”
Most of our friends who don’t spend all day thinking about Ukraine — normal people say, “Do you think there’s going to be peace soon?” I always have to judge: do you have 10 hours? Because I’ll tell you. But the bottom line is no, because America doesn’t have the leverage. Russia doesn’t occupy the territory it thinks it occupies. The ceasefire is not — there were thousands of ceasefire violations in the summer of 2016 when I was monitoring it, which I certified. Minsk, which was signed by my boss, gathered dust. The ceasefire was violated every day, thousands of times by the Russians, and no one did anything.
We see today this mad stuff about security guarantees — America is now offering Ukraine Article 4 or Article 5 security guarantees, cast iron, but Ukraine has to agree in the next few days. You’re like, how cast iron are they? I’m not buying a t-shirt in a shop. You want me to surrender my territory and my people in return for cast-iron security guarantees which are presumably supposed to last 100 years. And yet if I don’t agree in the next two weeks, they’re not cast iron. It’s insane.
For all these reasons, this so-called peace process isn’t a peace process. The substance of it isn’t. But once we realise that the word “peace” is being used to archetype something in our minds, to connect with something — the Russians use this word “peace” all the time. It’s in mir — Russkiy Mir. Interestingly, in Ukrainian, mir translates to “measure.” The hotel I lived in in Severodonetsk was called the Mir Hotel. The rocket is called Mir. Mir is everywhere all over Russia. Meanwhile they were always threatening us with nuclear annihilation.
Once you see that, it’s pretty easy to see: every time Donald talks about peace, or the apparatchiks around him — this is the same mind game the Soviets used. Trying to archetype the opposite as peace.
What I saw in eastern Ukraine was that it took Russian Disinfolklore seven years to change the identities through brainwashing of the population of Russia-occupied Ukraine — using Disinfolklore, thousands of stories every day, with this energy of confusion, archetyping, inner-outer realm switching, and with a conscious and purposeful objective of turning Ukrainians into thinking they were Russians and to prepare them to participate in what we now know as meat assaults.
The process began around the same time in America, around 2015, turning normal right-wing Americans into MAGA cult members — a subset of them.
What I feared, and what I spoke of in February 2025 at the Pirate Party security event held at the same time as the Munich Security Conference, is that this process, which was unleashed inside three provinces of Ukraine — Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk — and at the same time on people with certain personality inventory characteristics (low conscientiousness, high neuroticism on the OCEAN scale: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) — these were the two dimensions which Cambridge Analytica used to identify their recruits, whom they then indoctrinated into MAGA using the same techniques every cult has ever used — unleashing all of this on us is what I feared most.
When I was writing this and setting it out from November to February 2024–25, and actually as I was delivering this paper at the Pirate Party Security Conference, Vance — the couch guy — was at that time giving us the first draft of the national security strategy. He was in a German city criticising Germany for its post-World War II legal mechanisms to ensure “never again” means never again in Germany.
Then the White House visit happened about a week later. When it happened, I remember reading it — most of us will probably all remember the moment we saw it and the feeling, the mood, the disappointment. It wasn’t clear which way European leaders would go. Would they follow blindly the United States’ approach to Ukraine as they’d done basically during the Biden presidency? Or would they strike a pose, reject it, and support President Zelensky?
What we saw was, happily, they all, one by one, that very day, supported President Zelensky. We’ve seen this again and again. It’s very consistent. And why wouldn’t it be when Ukraine is the most powerful army on the continent and upon whose good offices all of our security now depends?
After seven years in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the Ukrainians there were not only convinced their fellow Ukrainians across the river were outer-realm, dehumanised bogeymen — like Europeans are to MAGA, weak, other, like the migrants who eat dogs. Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed them to such an extent — and this I didn’t see at the time, why they were doing it — but after the full-scale invasion, I saw: the practical outcome is that they will participate in meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians.
Some of us will have seen some of these attacks last week — those two attacks on Pokrovsk where Ukraine turned everyone into ghosts in the vaunted VDV. And another one today, or yesterday, where Russian soldiers just suddenly stop because they think they’re in Russia-occupied territory but they’re not, because the maps they’re given are lies. Then they’re all annihilated.
This kind of brainwashing is what I saw happening in eastern Ukraine. I didn’t understand it was brainwashing at the time and didn’t know the objective. That’s why when we hear these warnings from Chancellor Merz and Pistorius and in Britain from the head of MI6 and the Admiralty about war and that we are very close to it — this process of brainwashing many of our friends into thinking peace is really close, “if Ukraine would just surrender the territory” — you’re like, no, it’s the exact opposite. Because they will then turn those Ukrainians into warriors, into meat, and they will invade Poland. The whole thing is so predictable and was predicted and forecast by many of us from almost the first moment Crimea was occupied in 2014.
Today, Russia uses Telegram to create communities characterised by division, anti-immigrant, far-right and far-left militancy that spill onto our streets and politics to wreak havoc. Now we see new techniques where children — when we listen to Zdena and JTS’s great SBU snooping and pooping once a week, the Ukrainian internal security service’s latest unmasking of Russian attempts to recruit agents inside Ukraine to sow chaos. Insider did that great piece last year in Lithuania where they’re doing likewise.
I suspect at least some of the Palestine-action-related events and spectacles have a family resemblance to the things I saw in Ukraine. We know as a matter of fact that Surkov himself — because we have his email inbox, obtained by InformNapalm and published in 2017 — that these are the kinds of events organised to cause problems and division. Now they’ve got Telegram, X, and various other instruments which weren’t even available at that time.
I’ll leave it at that on that part for today. That’s episode two, and we’ll keep going on it in the future.
But I wanted to talk about a couple of things I’d written this week. Probably the most important: I talked a bit before about cultural psychology and this law of opposites — these mental laws that anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss and scholars like Marcel Mauss and great thinkers had discerned within what they thought were universals in humans. As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t think we have to say they’re universals, but they may be necessary in particular Indo-European thought systems: the law of association, the law of similarity, and the law of opposites.
I had this intuition that something is going on with opposites. Donald is the opposite of peace. He has always been the opposite of peace — there’s a lot of shame in it. But he’d be the first to admit when he was lucid that he loves to cause a bit of chaos, a bit of conflict. For him to then go for the exact opposite — a peace prize — there’s a pattern there.
For instance, the way the Russians in Russia-occupied Ukraine talk about “liberating” territories. This was all over the dataset I collected from 2015 onwards. My eyes would roll. I couldn’t get through any article from Russia-occupied Ukraine without my eyes rolling three million times. Every single article — more eye-rolling than Mokrushyna manages of a morning.
This is also what I mean by re-archetyping, rebranding reality, but doing it in a way that connects to the Second World War. When we talk about them “liberating” Pokrovsk, we roll our eyes and use air quotes. It’s a bit of a joke because we know. But the Russians use it — and this is why I try to be careful with terms like that — they use it to describe annihilation.
The standard against which liberation or occupation is measured, in terms of the Geneva Conventions, is international law — the post-World War II legal and social order, which we know Donald and Putler are committed to overcoming and destroying. They want no constraint on their power.
These opposites: hybrid war versus conventional war, inner-outer realm switching. I had this intuition about opposites. “It’s the vaccine which causes the harm, not the virus.” They’re basically selling paradoxes. The Russians take paradoxes like “Western politicians are all hypocrites, therefore it doesn’t matter if Putler is also corrupt.”
These accusations of hypocrisy, I believe, are a gateway drug to Russia’s fake-paradox brainwashing trolls. Liberation is occupation. Your mind begins to get used to paradoxes. Then when you come across entirely false paradoxes — that the destruction of a Ukrainian city is a “liberation” — you can fall for these trolls, or certain personalities can.
“Hybrid war isn’t conventional war” — it’s something less than it is. Yet psychological warfare has always been part of war. We’ve just taken on this phrase. Russian information warfare memes familiarise their consumers with paradoxical structures. These, I believe, are one of the mechanisms used to brainwash people and brainwash us in particular areas of our lives.
It’s an element in coercive control, which is one of the key energies in Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore. Coercive control, now illegal in English law, is exerting power over someone. The classic archetypal situation is where a man is controlling his spouse or girlfriend — checking her phone messages, not letting her have friends. There’s a whole list I’ve written about, taken from English law. It’s this sense of controlling someone through brainwashing. “I love you, I hate you” — which Donald actually does in his fundraising requests.
Ben Meiselas, a journalist at MeidasTouch, often reads these out so we don’t have to receive them. They tell his supporters he loves them. It’s coercive control: “I love you, I hate you. I’m only hitting you because I love you.” Just like Putler says, “We love Ukraine, this is why we’re doing it. Surrender and you’ll get peace.” But we know they’ll get slaughtered. “Elect a billionaire to make things affordable” — it makes no sense. Yet so many people have fallen for it. “Brexit will make England’s economy stronger by erecting obstacles between it and 55% of its export-import market.” Lo and behold, it hasn’t happened that way.
It’s in homeopathic medicine: a tiniest smidgen, an essence, can have the same impact a proper dose can have. The vaccine, not the virus, causes the harm. If we see this structure in memes, it takes advantage of the element of surprise — one of the key motivators that gets people’s interest in plots, whether in art, movies, or Disinfolklore. When we see these paradoxes in memes, that’s an interesting dataset. Someone may be trying to manipulate us. When we see accusations of hypocrisy, especially from Russians — Simonyan, for instance, is always doing that — this is a pattern. “Europeans say they believe in justice, but they’re going to take our 200 billion dollars. Such hypocrites.”
I think it’s a gateway drug to getting used to paradoxes. “Russia may be invading Ukraine and killing all these people, but it doesn’t mean us any harm — it’s just going to do it to the Ukrainians.” This is a powerful pattern which I’m getting closer to setting out.
We’ve seen more this week: the campaign against Ukraine’s chief negotiator. We saw the podcasters in charge of the FBI — Kash Patel, who won Donald’s heart by co-producing the January 6th anthem with convicted seditionists and insurrectionists, which Donald played instead of the national anthem at his rallies. A brainwashing device.
Then the Pizzagate troll, which managed to connect in many people’s brains the idea of Hillary Clinton with disgust and child exploitation. It was attached to a pizza because cultural psychologists believe the strong emotion of disgust was originally generated through food as a means of stopping us from poisoning ourselves.
When we see these campaigns — I believe there’s one going on against Ursula von der Leyen. There’s one certainly in Britain against Keir Starmer, which is quite successful. The Pizzagate conspiracy guy, Dan Bongino — he’s deputy director of the FBI. They were both shaking down Rustem Umerov, and let it be known to the Washington Post.
Many people saw this as a straight article, rather than — as I interpreted it — these two podcast guys in charge of the FBI using the leverage the FBI has over Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies, because of cooperation during the Biden presidency, to put the squeeze on Rustem Umerov. That disgusts me.
Then this bizarre idea that apparently Ukraine is willing to give up Enerhodar nuclear power plant. I just think: no, it’s not. People who don’t know anything about Ukraine, or the fact that this is a nuclear fort — the US wants to gift it to Russia. A space on the planet in Europe, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, from which Russia has fired thousands of missiles and drones, mostly at Nikopol across the water — a city I know well. I know Enerhodar well. Thousands of people killed using this as an impregnable fort.
According to the draft peace agreement, America and Russia are proposing that Ukraine would give it away. That will never happen in this universe. It may happen in a Disinfolklore universe. And that’s exactly where it is happening — in these articles written by people who don’t know anything about it.
Will Thiel was brilliant on this. He was like: so they’re going to get the nuclear power plant and have some data centres? Why don’t they build the data centres now? They can do that in Ukraine. They’ve got loads of funding. They don’t need this elaborate, crazy plan.
The thing about ceasefires — we always think it’s black and white. Someone shoots and then the F-35s come in and carpet-bomb them. But the lived reality of people like me — and thankfully people like Macron, because he went through all of this — is that Russia will constantly provoke reactions from the other side. Then you have to decide: is this going to tip us over the edge?
To the normal person listening to the news, it seems completely doable to have a ceasefire, and that if breached, we’ll do X, Y and Z. But if you’re not that motivated to do X, Y and Z anyway, you’ll find excuses not to react. The original 28-point peace plan — it was up to Donald to certify the breach of the ceasefire. Much like under the justification for the second Iraq war, where the British Prime Minister reserved the right to determine whether the 1991 ceasefire — the UN Security Council resolution ending the first Gulf War — was violated. The PM took it upon himself to certify it, and that justified, legally speaking from their perspective, the war. Many international lawyers didn’t think that legal advice was right.
It’s a highly complicated process. Where Russia is occupying these territories, a ceasefire violation may involve violence against a member of the population. Is it a bullet going off? Was it an accident?
If you don’t have the will to enforce the ceasefire absolutely, the other side — particularly Russia, as a matter of fact — will always breach it. Every night there were ceasefire violations where I was in Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. Some nights up to 10,000 ceasefire violations.
You would assess: was that the Russians? Was that the Ukrainians reacting? Were they trying to hit each other? Were they just marking territory? And absolutely nothing happened. We had a formal procedure where I would certify them. I’d have to stay up all night and count them and decide: is that artillery? Bullets? Small arms? Which direction? Russians? Ukrainians?
Some days I would go to places where the Ukrainian positions would be built. I’d come back the next morning and they’d be like an Aero — that chocolate with holes in it — because all night the Russians were firing heavy machine guns to pepper them.
Each morning I would speak to the Ukrainian army defenders, who’d tell me their stories from the night before. Then I’d cross the river and speak to the occupiers, and they’d tell their stories. Both sides would always talk about “provocations.” This is the origin of my understanding of what I call provocation logic, where every act has a pretext. For Putler: NATO expansion. Ukraine was wearing a short skirt. Ukraine said this, the West said that. There’s always a pretext.
Many days it was impossible to discern who started it. But I never lost sight of the fact that Russians were occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory. Not everyone was able to keep that focus.
When they talk about a demilitarised zone inside Ukraine — if I thought there was a remote chance of it happening, I’d be very annoyed. This is Ukrainian sovereign territory and the Russians should just leave. If we’re talking about a demilitarised zone 15 miles or 100 miles on each side of the Russian border, that’s a parity of esteem, that’s dignity. But a so-called demilitarised zone inside Ukraine is exactly what we went through. And it didn’t work, because as a matter of military strategy and mental warfare, Russia will constantly breach any ceasefire in myriad ways — imprisoning someone inside the occupation, hitting them, beating them, firing off a heavy machine gun. Then you have to decide: we’re not going to react, like Obama in Syria with chemical weapons.
This is the reality of so-called ceasefires. Ukraine often would have responded to gunfire and artillery strikes, but very often didn’t because they had very strict orders not to rise to the provocations. But Russia was mostly responsible. These were reported in the OSCE’s public reports, published every day, but it was never allocated to one side or the other. It would say something like “three kilometres northeast of Stanytsia Luhanska, a gun was heard firing” — or actually southwest where the Russians were.
You had to know where the line of contact was and where the various forces were. Very few people apart from those of us on the ground knew this. I’d spoken to NATO people in Vienna who used to read our daily reports and found them gobbledygook. At my level, I could attribute who it was, but that would be cleaned out later. It was all part of this idea of the Minsk thing: keep it on tense, Ukraine should pipe down, everything will be fine, the Russians won’t invade.
When they say no Minsk Three — President Zelensky has said it about 94 times over the last four years — Ukrainians who understand Minsk know: this whole thing we’re going through at the moment, even the Europeans’ response, is exactly what we went through with Minsk.
I happen to believe, without any secret knowledge, that the Europeans — Macron and others — understand this and are just playing along because they know the Russians will refuse it anyway. So I’m 99.9% confident, and I don’t get exercised by it.
But this was before the era of drones. There were drones in our area, but my job would be impossible now because of these 50-square-kilometre areas on the contact line. When I hear the Americans saying they’ll give geospatial or remote sensing — “we’ll do this remote” — we went through this from 2014 onwards. At the end of the day, if there’s no political will to eject the Russians from Ukraine, then they’re not going to do anything about a ceasefire violation.
