Episode Details

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter

This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read.

Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolklore.eu, and also disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net, which are three interwoven projects, but my main body of work is on disinfolklore.eu — I spend most of my time pulling apart the dark folklore the Kremlin pumps into the world. Tonight I want to do something I don’t do that often: I want to hold a piece of Infolklore up to the light. This letter is a near-perfect specimen of Infolklore, and it teaches us more about how the Code of Positive Trolls actually works than a month of theory. Let’s get our eyes in.

The Mocker Takes the Podium

I reference M’ockers on purpose here, because Mockers, like me, decided on her moniker before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and through all of her work each day on Volya Radio she mainstreams the act of the mocker. As I am programming my neural network algorithm, the Mocker and the mocking tone has become actually very engineering-relevant — because if you can detect the mocking tone, which frontier models can do, then you can distinguish Infolklore, from Disinfolklore which is never humorous but does mock, on the basis of the rightness of what it’s mocking. M’ockers on X, for instance, will always be mocking aspects of Russian society which are not right.

President Zelensky — as a lawyer, and as a comedian, and as an actor, as an honest actor. He is the most honest acting head of state there is in the world today, whereas Putler pretends he acts as sovereign on behalf of the siloviki and doesn’t admit that he is an actor — but he is an actor. President Zelensky, as all public figures do — they do act in a dramatic sense, but also in the sense of fulfilling their functions — there’s no hiding the fact that he is at heart an actor, an artist, and a true artist, and a great artist, perhaps one of the greatest artists ever, as we see with his career spanning Servant of the People and now taking care of global security.

The first thing the letter does is mock. Listen to the register. Ukraine’s long-range drones, he said, “paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St Petersburg.” “Paid a visit” — over a thousand kilometres, to crash the showpiece economic forum — and he calls it a social call.

Longtime listeners know the figure I mean: the Mocker, the positive troll who reads the enemy’s spell aloud, names it, and turns it inside out. The Russian propaganda machine spends fortunes staging a forum to project a serene, prosperous, unbothered Russia. One ironic sentence and a drone, and the stage set is punctured — by the artist, by the Comedian.

Mockery Welded to Verifiable Fact

Here’s the discipline, and this is the whole game. Mockery on its own is cheap. Grievance dressed up as wit is exactly what the other side does — that ressentiment-soaked sneering we decoded in Putin’s Astana press conference last week.

What makes this mockery Infolklore and not just noise is that it is welded to a verifiable fact. “We have video confirmation of every one of your losses,” he writes. These are not empty claims. The Mocker who earns his place doesn’t vent. He surfaces, frames, and outflanks — with the receipts.

“This War Is Your Personal Choice”

Then comes the move which I want you, and all of us, to tattoo on our brains. “Whatever you may say about NATO, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice. A war without a real cause.”

Stop. That is the Counter Disinfolkl