In this week’s podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts), let’s look at Eight aspects of this week’s White House visit which other experts have not focussed on.
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So our topic is Disinfolklore and everything we've been seeing in our information space this week about Disinfolklore. Much of it has been focused on this White House meeting and the Alaska meeting, which we talked about a bit last week and the owner talked about last week. A great take on it. But also, disinfolklore is an analytical method to parse Russian MAGA and other forms of disinformation. So it's a set of lenses through which to perceive, appreciate, analyze and parse disinfolklore.
So I wanted to quickly look at eight different aspects of the White House. Let's aggregate information. the entire system, the entire complex of stories, much of which is Disinfolklore, related to this week's antics as the White House visit.
So first I wanted to Quickly, I think many of us understand this, perhaps people who don't, who aren't, who haven't been focused on the war on a daily basis since February 2022 won't really understand this, the people Randy would refer to as low information people.
But this meeting was a turning point in the context, looking at it from the long durée, as many of us have been doing and as I have certainly since working in eastern Ukraine around the time of the first impeachment and all the events running up to the first impeachment, including the Perfect Phone Call.
And if we remember the perfect phone call that led to Donald's first impeachment, the part of the quo, so the quid, was that President Zelensky announces an investigation into Hunter Biden, who had and has never even been to Ukraine. And the quo was twofold. One was that Donald would stop holding up, I think it was about $270 million in Javelin missile systems, and also would grant President Zelensky a White House visit.
So that is what the entire impeachment was about, and it was about the deal to secure that White House visit.
We all remember the, well, some of us might remember the December 2019 meeting in Paris, where basically Macron and Merkel and Putin put the squeeze on President Zelensky in the Elysee Palace. And Putin had been trolled into visiting Paris, believing that he would convince or that he would walk away from that meeting with the right to hold elections in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, specifically Luhansk and Donetsk.
And there were documents circulated about three weeks, four or five weeks before that meeting, which had been signed by Andre Yermak. And this gives us some idea of the depth of their experience in dealing with all of these issues. And those documents... did suggest that some compromise was going to be made.
And then there was the No to Capitulation movement in Ukraine. Many of the meetings I attended in my capacity as a diplomat monitoring the situation. I was very quickly convinced these were organic, Maiden-like protests. And they made it very clear to me that President Zelenskyy, whatever they were planning, he did not have the power to give Russia any... any capitulation. And that was before the full-scale invasion.
So just the idea that now the Ukraine would capitulate, it's just, it's for the birds. But of course, low information people don't understand that or people who think they can use Disinfolklore to change reality don't understand that.
So then we flash forward to the February 2025 visit, which most of us will remember the trauma and probably remember where we were - I was in an airport when I saw that and my heart sunk when I just saw the photographs coming out of that meeting.
Here we are this week with President Zelensky at the White House carrying himself with customary equipoise,
grace and arriving with the most powerful, some of the most powerful leaders on earth, basically, as his wing people. And so what we're seeing here is what many of us have been working hard towards in our own small ways, which is Ukraine being re-archetyped, not just as an afterthought. or not even an afterthought, as it was in December 19. Macron and Merkel, backed up by Obama and David Cameron in Britain, thought they could just force Ukraine to capitulate because they swallowed all of this Russian propaganda.
Now we flash forward and we see today Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as the essential security guarantor in the world, which many of us understood early on, but now is reaching, this idea is reaching the mainstream. And that for me, seeing all those leaders there is a clear statement by them that Ukraine is the security guarantor for the Western world.
That is why they all dropped everything and got on their airplanes. The second point I wanted to make about it was, and re-archetyping and archetyping, as many of you know, is central to my project now and to my work.
The re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees has been very clearly helping us see that. Ukraine's best case scenario from the very beginning of the Donald presidency was obtaining and maintaining the right to buy US arms.
That's essentially what they've been playing for. And there's a narrow path to doing that. And then all the rest, everything around this, about potentially giving up territory, about this or that, is all, I suspect, Will Thiel is 100% correct. I always did think he was right about this from a strategic point of view, but I suspect this is what Ukraine knows, because we see the FT, Financial Times, reporting yesterday, I think it was a Reuters story, they were reporting that the security guarantees, one of the four key elements in the security guarantees, is that Ukraine has the right, that Ukraine will commit to buying $100 billion in US arms.
And this is such a clever re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees Obviously, my heart sunk as most of our hearts sunk when we were seeing a lot of Disinfolklore even today about security guarantees and Lavrov and all this.
You know, it is just nonsense. It's in the category of nonsense.
But what Ukraine is doing, and it seems backed up by the European leaders, is taking the concept of security guarantees and putting into them a new content. And this particular component, this particular module...
That Ukraine will commit to buying 100 billion in US arms is a fantastic rhetorical way of persuading America that it's getting a great deal by letting Ukraine buy these Patriot missile systems, which no one else can make, and whatever else they can get out of Ukraine.
So I just think that's a very clever way of re-archetyping the meaning of security guarantees. And then we see this is being done also by the leaders, it seems, in sync with Ukraine where they're talking about the best security guarantee is, you know, one million soldier army for Ukraine, basically.
As we all know, and as these European leaders know, Ukraine is our security guarantee. America is not, sadly, anymore our security guarantee. A third point I wanted to make is that when President Zelensky says he's willing to talk about giving up territory along the lines where the battle lines are today, but only speaking directly to Putin, he is willing 99.9% sure he's trolling Putin on this because A, he doesn't have a mandate to give up any territory and B, he's provoking in Putin and all the people around Putin this disastrous meeting from their perspective in December 2019.
It led to, there was reports that Yermak and Surkov, who was Russia's curator for Ukraine and the former deputy prime minister of Russia, and was with Putin from the very beginning. He created the Putin mythos, the Putin character, half Chechen. half-breed, as he himself writes about Russians being half-breeds. But he is, in fact, as a Chechen, he sold his paternal people down the river so that they could create this character of Putin, the mythical strongman Putin.
So he was there at the beginning of Putin and he got the can after that Paris meeting and was replaced by a Ukrainian whose, whose name has recently popped up in, in, into our info space of late, uh, Dima, um, Kosac, who's, who's being, um, archetyped by the Russians as a more reasonable, uh, negotiator.
So that is what President Zelensky is doing. He is in, he's saying this in public that most people just think he's just saying, oh, territorial concessions. Um, And I'll speak about them directly to Putin.
That's what Donald Trump hears and some of the idiots around him hears. But what he's actually doing is provoking this traumatic memory of this neophyte comedian, as the Russians saw him making fun of the great man Putin in front of everyone in this press conference. He laughed at Putin when Putin suggested giving up territories.
The fourth point I wanted to make is Ursula von der Leyen focusing on the children issue.
And this children issue, the missing children, obviously, from all of our perspective, is the most horrific, the most horrific thing of the entire war. And it's almost equally horrifying. It hasn't really caught fire in the popular imagination, but it is now being used as it properly to... really undermine any efforts by Donald and his crew to negotiate a peace between the oligarchs and Putin at the cost of Ukraine. I don't know anything about where this letter from Melania came from.
She is being dressed by a Ukrainian haute couture fashion designer's dress ex from Los Angeles. They're the ones responsible for her archetyping herself as Alphonse Capone's mole with the hat and all of that. So maybe in sittings or it's part of some play. I mean, some people say it was written by AI and it doesn't really mention the children very much.
But anyway, Ursula von der Leyen and others in the rest of the world are really running with this morsel of a plot line, a subplot line, whatever its origins, whoever came up with it to introduce this character Melania into this plot.
One minute she doesn't like Putin, the next she does. But Ursula von der Leyen, as probably one of the most powerful women on the planet, if not the most powerful woman on the planet, Trump doesn't like her or didn't like her, it is rumored. And now she goes to Washington with President Zelensky and she focuses laser focus on this because, of course, as we know, Donald would see her merely as a woman. And so it makes sense that she would be talking about children. And we had that beautiful exchange of tweets between Donald, who talks about the missing children. But Ursula von der Leyen, of course, is talking rightly about the abducted children.
So I think that is, again, a brilliant response by Western leaders to the entire mess we see ourselves in.
A fifth point I wanted to make is, overall, the Russian side believe they can control Donald. But a week like this is when they feel they can't control him anymore.
And he even steps out of the meeting to phone Putler and to take his orders. And this enables Ukraine and the rest of us to inject doubt into the Russians' mind, because as we know, they may think they control Donald, but they're paranoid. And every time he's with Europeans, they get worried.
And the metagame here for Donald is, as far as I see it, is to get the Russians off his back. They're like the monkey hanging off his back. He knows they hold the proof that they delivered the 2016, probably the 2024 election to Donald. And obviously a lot of it is in the open sphere, but some of it is still bubbling away there and
. an Irish-American journalist, is very clever and brilliant on this and how Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard's latest, they keep on lying about things which the Russians know are lies and could be easily... So this is the live issue.That's the Kompromat, I believe, which is basically a 2016 election. Donald just wants to get the Russians off his back. He thinks if he can deliver Ukraine to the Russians, then he will get... russia off his back the deal the quid pro quo will have been um extinguished and neutralized um but annoyingly for him and this is what the first impeachment was about ukraine just won't lie down and um and die. And now Ukraine, which it didn't have in the first impeachment, now Ukraine has Chancellor Merz, Maloney, and all of the crew we saw in the White House.
So this is a nightmare of complexity for the Russians. And it's a very difficult situation for them.
The sixth thing is obviously the battlefield issues. Russia's put everything it could It's taken Pokrovsk lately, and as we seem to see, that finger that they managed to get has been extinguished. We're watching all of the oil shortages.
Let's see how that goes. We saw the Druzbha pipeline go up, and now mysteriously, the Hungarian, Hungary's foreign minister is able to say, well, the oil is flowing again, and Ukraine won't do this again.
So I'm expecting to see the pressure to decouple Ukraine and Moldova from the EU accession process to, for some reason, mysterious reason, no one will know why. It's just going to dissipate because the Ukrainians are great negotiators. And that was their leverage over Hungary and Slovakia. I think it was Hungary who was mainly holding that up. So I think that's really interesting development.
On the seventh point is about ceasefire. So we see the removal of the demand for the ceasefire. Personally, not that it really matters. I was always against the ceasefire because of Ukraine's capabilities. And the last thing we needed was them to hold back as they were with the oil refinery strikes from March.
So Donald dropping the need for the ceasefire that may have originated from the Russians before we talk. But I see that as a great positive for Ukraine. We'll see if these strikes continue and if we see any vibrations from any secret deals done with the Americans. But it strikes me as obvious.
Unlikely now that no one is talking about a ceasefire before talks begins, that hopefully Ukraine now has carte blanche to
continue destroying the Russian state.
And then the final point I just wanted to make on that is that... Yeah, I think the Nobel Peace Prize story, that just provides a motive, a public motive.
It's a nice little Disinfolklore vector that provides an easy, easily understandable and communicated motive for what the main game is, which is Donald trying to get the Russians off his back. and trying to negotiate this ceasefire between the oligarchs and Putin's people. And the Nobel Peace Prize kind of turns it into this cartoonish kind of struggle for this egotistical man. And so I think the Nobel Peace Prize story is a prime example of dissent folklore and how it can be used to distract.
⚡️Russia trolls towards its doom.
Like @ZaluzhnyiUA, I never imagined Russia was dumb enough to continue its invasion past its first disastrous two weeks in March 2022.
Nevertheless, Ukraine’s dominant strategy since the first few days has been to troll Russia further and further in.
Remember: the goal here is the absolute destruction of the Russian state and permanent destruction of its white supremacist leaders capability to wage war.
This is the best chance in three centuries to rid the world of Ruschism.
So, though, Donald thinks he’s helping Russia, actually he is serving our strategic goal:
Don sprinkles just enough hope inside Ruschist leadership that it will prevail.
Meanwhile Ukraine builds irreversible capacity to utterly destroy the Ruschist state.
European leaders now get this. Global security depends now on Ukraine.
You’re either with Ukraine, against Ukraine or, as is the case with Donald, a mere instrument in Ukraine’s complex operation to troll Ruschia towards its complete annihilation as a State.
Many thanks, as ever, to @Volya4UA radio on X and to this week’s guest presenter @ioanaV_, and regular weekly Decoding Disinfolklore show hosts @WendyNCALI and @healyjforUC on X. Show is broadcast live at 19:00 Kyiv time every Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter spaces) and afterwards available on Spotify.
as well as to presenters
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