Podcast | How Russia's Mental War Against Us Will Persist After Ukraine's Victory

In 2021 Ilnitsky, adviser to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation (2015-2024) stated that the purpose of Russia’s “mental wars” is to destroy self-awareness, change the mental, civilizational basis of the enemy’s society (I’m indebted to Tetiana Boryak of Vilnius University and to InformNapalm for drawing my attention to these quotes by Ilnitsky in https://informnapalm.org/ua/format-c/)

“It is possible to destroy the state and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values and priorities of society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. ...The information space is [already] completely filled with “necessary” content.”

He allocates “10-15 years to rebooting historical self-awareness [in any community], the system of education and upbringing, and therefore, the basic meanings and goals of society, that is, ideology, including the rewriting (resetting) of history, the destruction of traditions, ways, beliefs (religion) and basic values [in any community Russia is operating on].

The operational goals, which are implemented within 3-5 years with the help of “social technologies of manipulation of society”, are “attack on the existing lifestyle, dismantling, vulgarization and displacement of current norms of behaviour, undermining trust in power, splitting society”... Mental wars are fought without declaring.”

However, Russia keeps declaring this war and explaining to those of us who are paying attention precisely what it is doing. Russia cannot help itself.

From a document obtained by world-leading Ukrainian information warfare collective InformNapalm (see Wikipedia) and signed by Putin himself:

The novel character based on ex-deputy prime minister of Russia Surkov, archetyped as a “Magus,” in Giuliano da Empoli’s “Magus of the Kremlin” explains why Russia must communicate its “undeclared” strategies and aims:

Surkov, the theatre studies graduate who designed Putin’s election campaign and his presidency has declared the “mental war” in multiple texts. In early 2025, for example, Surkov set out how Russia invades the minds in whichever country it’s operating:

“Since the 2000s, Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on to an information counteroffensive to the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the “mental matrix” and “archetypes of national consciousness” into the political and information realms.

Hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia directed “fig leafs” (as Surkov describes Russia’s operation through surrogates) 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. Disinfolklore engenders division and disgust in all our communities, and is created and perpetuated by such “provocations.”

In every locality there are variations on the theme (temnik) commensurate with difference in the base “base archetypes of national consciousness.”

The Mana / energy, temnik (themes), tactics, techniques, procedures however are similar and yield the same results: chaos and division, an undermining of authority that begins in the individual consciousnesses of a population.

Never thought about Palestine before, yet now you think of nothing else? Never imagined you would camp out in campuses which have no impact on Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah’s decisions, yet there you are suddenly doing it for weeks on end… That’s Russia’s Mental War operating against you and your community. Even after the Russian so-called federation dissolves (perhaps within the next few months) this Mental War will continue - “Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed.”

We’ll come back to how the Disinfolklore Analytical Method that I invented while working inside Russia’s kinetic and Mental Wars in Russia-occupied Ukraine can help us overcome this terrible moment in human societal development.

How this war ends? I’ve written four pieces since July 2023 on this. The first piece I wrote on 8th of July 2023. First Crimean War ended with the treaty, yet the second Crimean War will end just like the first Gulf War. So this was in the context of all this talk and this troll,this Disinfolklore about how all wars end in negotiations. These Russian talking points at a time when Russia was in as bad a state as it is today. In the First Crimean War, Russia kept pirating ships in the Black Sea and tried to passportize Christians of all nationalities in Judea, Canaan, the Holy Land. Eventually, even Russia’s allies, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire, united into a coalition of the willing against Russia. France, Britain, Türkiye or the Ottoman Empire / Sublime Porte (as it was known then), Sardinia and Italy and Prussia and Austria. Because, of course, there was no Germany then. It was just one German state: Prussia.

If anyone gets onto the subject of new countries, interesting always when And when you look at the Treaty of Paris that ended the First Crimean War, to see whose signatures are on it. Turkey’s not there because it wasn’t a country then. Neither was Italy, neither was Germany. Austria is there, but mainly as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

After it was beaten in the 1856 Treaty of Paris, this allowed Russia to continue occupying Crimea, where a continuous genocide of indigenous Ukrainian Tatars ensued. Crimea was to remain a demilitarized zone. Russia also was obliged in perpetuity never to use the Black Sea with military vessels. By 1870, it was clear that Russia was remilitarizing Crimea and began to interfere with Black Sea shipping again.

The end of the Second Crimean War will not be a Treaty of Paris. That ship has sailed. Had Russia retreated from most of Ukraine after losing the battle for Kharkiv or Kherson, it’s possible the Great Powers might have pressured Ukraine to compromise. Now that won’t happen. It’s possible they would have allowed Russia to keep part of Ukraine: Luhansk and Donetsk.

And it’s very interesting in the context of Donald’s latest brainwashing by Putler that Crimea isn’t even in the conversation. And while from the Russian perspective, that is that they’re hoping that models, that they’ll never give up Crimea. But obviously from our perspective and from Ukraine’s perspective, as we’re watching the pressure on Crimea,

that it’s not a part of the conversation is fantastic. And my analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2015 has been that the main reason why Russia escalated in Ukraine Luhansk and Donetsk and in Kharkiv and Zaporozhye and Dnipro and all these other parts of eastern Ukraine where it tried to spark revolutions, but which fizzled out immediately,

including in Odessa, almost immediately as the people came out of the streets and got rid of these Russian patsies from the streets in Dnipro and Zaporozhye and Kriviri. Odessa and other places. But the main reason it escalated was it was surprised by the sanctions from the White House and wanted a bit more leverage,

which is why it then invaded the mainland. And so basically, if Russia was in some dream reality uh allowed to keep uh Crimea then it would be just getting exactly what it had wanted in 2015 and we’ve thankfully seen enough world leaders in the last week saying Russia should get nothing you don’t get anything when you lose

wars so how I thought um the war would end then um in um July 2023 was that it would be like the Gulf War. And the Gulf War ended with a very long, I think, 21-page letter from Iraq, the first Gulf War, from Iraq to the Security Council of the UN, basically complaining full of grievances.

And someone then, off the record, an Iraqi diplomat was asked, Does this amount to your capitulation? And they agreed. But if you read the letter, you wouldn’t think this was a capitulation. They were confused at first. And so that’s how I foresaw and actually still foresee Russia, Muscovy’s capitulation.

There will never be this moment where everyone shakes hands, nor should there, nor will there need to be. President Zelensky said again this week, we will not forgive and we will not forget. So on 5th of August 2023, I wrote again another piece which was about how any time...

It would again just be like the first Iraq war where every time Iraq breached the terms of the UN Security Council resolution, English, French and American fighter jets would bomb Iraq into a submission again. So it’s great to see the signing of the Grippans today, something all of us have dreamed of. happened today.

So I foresee again that that still is on target. Ukraine using its drone when it manages to really get its drone production up and the West manages to get it up to the level that we can see thousands of drones go over Ukraine.

of the Russian border every night, then I think that will precipitate the end of the war. Then in May 2024, I wrote the conditions to end Russia’s war. Ukraine has every capability, 10,000 drones a night to Takums, Taurus, F-16, to hit targets inside the Russian Empire whenever it chooses.

200 km strip inside Russia along the border of Ukraine has turned into a wasteland capable only of supporting all forms of wildlife, excluding humans. And then on the 18th of March 2025, I wrote how this war ends. Ukraine, Poland, maybe Turkey, Baltic states aided by Finland, Scandinavia, Nordics will eject Russia. from 100% of Ukraine.

I don’t see too much of a sign of this. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary at this point. But they are kind of doing it by proxy, by arming Ukraine. So that’s all very positive, unless you’re obviously on the front line and fighting this war.

But this week, I came across this amazing document written by a researcher in Vilnius University called Tatjana Boriak, and it was published on InformNapal’s website, their blog site, and I will probably refer to it again over the coming weeks because it’s a really rich and deep document which is completely complementary to

my work and my work on disin folklore and my findings in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. And she comes to many of the same conclusions. Her analysis is pretty similar. And it’s just we’re going for different markets, really. But so some of what she has There’s these two quotes at the very beginning of the report,

which I’m just going to focus on today. So the title of the document is How Russia Formats Identity and Tries to Conquer the World with the Help of a Mental War. And so I emphasize that I came to this from the ground up. I didn’t start with theory. I was in this situation. I was inside the occupation.

And it was just really weird, as I’ve talked about before. the whole language, the othering of Ukrainians, the turning of Ukrainians and myself as a foreign diplomat there into devils, into demons, the demonization of us, the gradual transition among the people left in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Their identities were stolen from inside their heads, and it’s this which

Now we have MAGA and anyone we know with MAGA as a good example, as something many of us will at least be aware of the idea that this can happen. Your identities can be stolen from you using what I call distant folklore. And that can alter society and that this is not an accidental thing.

This is not an organic process. This is planned and implemented with all the help of modern technology. And while many of us can look at perhaps MAGA, and I’m always picking on them, but just because it’s perhaps an example that we all in this audience from all around the world are aware of, This is happening,

as I talked about in my Munich speech, which frames all of my work, possibly for the rest of my life, but but really certainly for the foreseeable future, where I foresaw the disenvolved folklore galaxy that Russia used inside Russia-occupied Ukraine to change the identities. And I use that language as, indeed, does Tetiana Boryak use this language.

I’m murdering her name, probably. How Russia formats identity. So she’s taking the language from computer discourse and taking formats identity. This is what I saw with my own eyes and felt. It’s what we saw with people with Brexit or with MAGA. But I foresaw that this method, which the Russians then turned on themselves inside Russia,

and that MAGA around the same time started using with Donald’s presidency would then be mainstreamed across the whole of American society and across the globe. Now, within days of my of my speech or my talk at the Pirate Security Conference in Munich in February 2025, a conference none of us will ever forget because of its proximity,

because of Vance’s speech, but also its proximity to that traumatic White House meeting. then the world leaders responded and rallied behind President Zelensky as they have ever since, which is fantastic to see. But there’s still, I see in every country in Europe, there’s the signs that this war is going on.

This is how I framed the discussion by how this war ends when the kinetic stage of the war ends. whenever that is, hopefully relatively soon. And with the collapse of Russia, we see these signs this week. We talked about this two weeks ago. We’re already seeing these early warning indicators where certain federal units are

appealing to Moscow for money, food and heat and resources. And this is precisely the dynamic of which I spoke about and identified as the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed, the immediate reason why the Soviet Union collapsed, because the USSR, the Central Soviet under Gorbachev,

was trying to strong arm Belarus into signing a gas deal that Belarus couldn’t afford. And winter was already upon them and they hadn’t signed it and they weren’t getting any gas. And the only means Belarus had of getting gas was along with the Russian Soviet

Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian was to declare the end of the Soviet Union. and declare themselves as independent sovereign states who could enter into legal relations with each other and solve this problem. And so the Russian SSR under Yeltsin and the Ukrainian and the Belarus entered into the, they declared independence,

they became sovereigns and they could enter into contracts and Belarusians did not freeze. And so that same dynamic, I think, is what will precipitate the end of the Russian Federation and it could be imminent. So that’s wonderful. So that’s, I don’t think I really foresaw that in 2023, the mechanics of it,

because we didn’t see Ukraine’s attacks on Russia in that way. And I don’t think many of us foresaw it and we mustn’t, mustn’t lose sight of that. Even with all this tomahawk talk, which probably most of us aren’t that disappointed about because we never thought it was going to happen. We’ve been to this rodeo before,

we’ve seen this trolling going on constantly, and so we weren’t going to fall for it. But essentially, They’re arguing over which assets in Russia to bomb. And we saw that strike today in Bryansk, allegedly using a whole universe of different weaponry, including the Storm Shadow missile system. from the Anglo-French one. So this is quite an advance.

And I heard Lavrov a couple of weeks ago talk about the tomahawk because America shouldn’t give the tomahawk because they couldn’t be trusted with it. As if there is some legitimate target in Russia which Lavrov would approve them hitting. So I don’t lose sight of that. And it’s great to see that this is the discussion.

The discussion is about which weapons systems Ukraine should have to target Russia. But as far as we can see, no one is pressuring, not even the White House is pressuring, seems to be able to pressure Ukraine into relenting. And so that’s That’s fantastic. So how does war end? But unfortunately, when this happens,

the dynamics which the mental wars which Russia set off inside Russia occupied Ukraine, then expanded across the across the whole of Russia, and now into all of our countries, those dynamics won’t suddenly end. And that’s what’s been on my mind as I began to think through it. So, Tatiana Boryak quotes two

two brilliant quotes at the beginning of her paper, which kind of set out what the mental war is in the words of senior Russian advisors. And the first is from a 2021 quote, and it’s from an advisor to the minister of

who was in power from 2015 to 2024, a guy called Lenitsky, who was born in Lviv, as it goes. And so according to Lenitsky, humanity in the 21st century has entered a new stage of wars, mental wars. The purpose of which is to destroy, and this is a direct quote from him, is to destroy self-awareness,

change the mental civilizational basis of the enemy’s society. It is possible to destroy the state and the have in mind the image of the White House being annihilated by that guy for yesterday. It is possible to change the mental civilizational basis of the enemy society. It’s possible to destroy the state.

and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values, and priorities of society. So it’s possible to destroy the state, the country, by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values, priorities of a society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the armed forces and infrastructure can be restored,

then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. The information space is completely filled with necessary content and mental wars are fought without declaring. So here’s what he’s saying is, I think most of us believe Russia will be destroyed and will be turned into six or seven sovereign states, which hopefully can develop a long more... civilized lines.

But what he is talking about, this bit which really got me, which was if the infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. This is the de-brainwashing process which Germans and Japanese successfully went through after the World War II. But he basically,

what he is proclaiming is that Russia has set off a mental bomb inside all of our communities, which is independent of the force which put it into development or into being. And I can identify evidence that this might be the case. Now, when I say look at Georgia, I was listening recently,

I don’t very often listen to him, but Dennis Davidoff, who does a really great daily battle, what’s going on in the battlefront. And he was talking about this, the fact that Russia is apparently now using a newly built Georgian refinery to refine its oil. And Denis Davidoff,

who I’ve really enjoyed watching his evolution from he was really supportive of Trump, then he didn’t want to get involved in American politics, then he really turned off Trump. And so it’s wonderful. You see in real time a real human kind of being confused and being rolled and roiled.

And he’s so aware of so many things, but he does a slight blind spot when it comes to telegram. He really falls for, what’s his name, trolls about being countercultural and racist. not being part of the Russian establishment. But here he’s mystified as to why Georgia would allow Russia to use its refineries

when Russia invaded two parts of Georgia. And for me, it’s quite simple that Russia is in charge of Georgia. It is occupying Georgia, but it did so through this brilliantly designed troll that integrated all of Russia’s learnings from its failures in Ukraine and was called the Georgian Dream, which is constructed on the pillars of Georgian identity.

So the entire... structure is on what Georgians feel about themselves as being different and not anything else. And so that message of the anti-European message or how outsiders, foreigners were subverting their Georgian-ness was ironically broadcast by the outsiders who were the Russians. And that pattern we see with MAGA and American nationalism and the flag and this

whole thing this week, we see where the GOP leadership is trying to archetype the No Kings demonstrators as being somehow un-American when it couldn’t We couldn’t be more American than to protest and demonstrate our opposition to tyranny and autocracy and authoritarianism, but they are trying to subvert the very pillars of the identity as Americans of

Americans and confuse everyone, turn everything upside down. We see a similar process in Britain and in Ireland as well, where pillars of national identity, this whole campaign about Ireland for the Irish, which is based on a really jaundiced view, a really bogus view of what it means to be Irish and didn’t exist a few years ago,

but it’s suddenly arisen and now is involved in this. There’s an election campaign going on there. We see it in England with the painting of the Georgian flag, the English flag on roundabouts and councils are complaining that they have to spend two million pounds to remove these paintings of flags.

And this is something that I encountered a lot in Northern Ireland when I worked there for an anti-sectarian political party. So we see this pattern around the place. And Surkov, Vladislav Surkov, who is the former deputy prime minister of Russia, until he was slightly blamed for the mess after Putin’s election, after Medvedev.

stepped down and we had all of those demonstrations and protests. And Surkov was supposed to, he created this NASHI movement, which was basically a Hitler youth movement who were supposed to just crack heads. And NASHI didn’t really work because the demonstrators embarrassed. So he lost favor. But he then, he was sent to Ukraine and he became,

he was in charge of Ukraine, Georgia, the Russian occupation of Georgia. And he was the so-called curator of Ukraine. So he was in charge of all of the stuff in Eastern Ukraine, where I was, and inform NAPAM, which is this brilliant Ukrainian information warfare collective, managed to get Surkov’s inbox from his email, which was a brilliant moment,

2015, 2016. And in it, you read the details of how the minutiae of how Surkov, from his office in the Kremlin, was involved in determining whether you could get babushkas at your protest, the demonstration in front of the American embassy in Kyiv, or if you can give us $2,000 more,

we’ll get some younger people and we can get this group of people. And Sorkov was involved in approving even the effigies of... of Poroshenko, President Poroshenko at the time, which were going to be burned and all of this really minutiae of how you create fake demonstrations and fake stories, which then are spun around the world.

in as real, you know, pure the creation of distant folklore. And of course, Surkov was a theatre studies graduate. So this is what Surkov wrote in 2025. And my eyes when I read this originally, popped up at the time, and it’s quite a complicated text, but this was after my Munich speech. And so Surkov was taught,

but I was reminded when I was reading Tetiana Boryak’s piece of this, because she quotes it at the beginning of it. So Surkov transfers the concept of the mental matrix archetypes of our national consciousness. He says that work is being done with mental spaces that are influenced by the mythical environment and the relief of collective historical memory.

And only then politics is used as a means of achieving his goals. And then Sorkov in this piece, which I had read before, a very short piece written this year, he then goes on to say he was looking for a fig leaf to disguise Russian imperialism. And so he came up with Ruski Mir,

which was obviously already there, but he is the one who decided, okay, this is how I’m going to cover up what I’m doing. So this is the equivalent of MAGA, the equivalent of Georgian Dream, the equivalent of Ireland for the Irish, the equivalent of Britain for the British or Brexit. these fake expressions of patriotism, the archetypal,

archetyped patriotism, which cover up something which is much darker and more malign. And so when he uses the term mental matrix, the archetypes of our national consciousness, he’s revealing this pattern which we can see in many different countries. And it’s of this the mental war that Russia is fighting consists.

So while it’s easy for us to explain to someone who isn’t MAGA, I can use the example of Maggie to say to you, look, this can happen to people. You can be brainwashed. You lose your identity. We’ve seen it with some parts of the people who freed Palestine and any other cause. But what’s underneath it,

what’s imminent in it, is this attempt, conscious, purposeful attempt to change the archetypes of our national consciousness. And it’s quite hard. So for us to see it being done to ourselves, but for others as well to see it, because you have to explain so much to people to say that, look, this can be done.

You can be brainwashed. Russia has said these things. These people have said these things. They said, we are doing this. And then people like me and people like us, all of us listening, and people like Titiana Boryak and the amazing work that InformNAPALM does, we see the evidence of this on the ground.

We see these strange protests which come out of nowhere. And the Palestine thing, I had never in my life seen any tents in the university I went to in Dublin, Trinity College originally. And we have this very nice, very old campus with this beautiful square. And when I went back there, during the height of the Palestine,

Free Palestine protests, the students were camping out there in a way they never camped out for Iraq 1 or Iraq 2 or Ukraine. It was just unusual. And we saw that across the American campuses. We have friends and acquaintances who have been radicalized by different stories and different stories. memes, whether it’s anti-vax or all sorts of things.

But the one thing most people aren’t getting radicalized over is Ukraine and helping Ukraine. Thankfully, enough people, enough powerful people are, but we don’t see that kind of strength of passion to radicalize Ukraine. That’s also a bit of a bit of a clue. So this is when Surkov is talking about archetypes of national consciousness,

he’s talking about archetypes in the same sense I am, which is different from Carl Jung’s, because Carl Jung believed in these universally applicable primordial archetypes. Now, I do believe there are primordial archetypes, and I believe there’s archetype, certain archetypal structures which work on Indo-European intellects. So that’s slightly different from Surkov.

But I am with Surkov in this thing that you can, and he uses the term archetypes, you can change the meaning So this is why he says, Russia began to produce meanings. So you produce new meanings for the archetypes. And in this sense, since 2009 in Russia, Ruski Mir was the meaning. Russia’s borders end nowhere.

All these wars are justified. We can put up with any suffering as long as Ruski Mir is expanded. And suddenly, all of these quite reasonable, the Russians who went out to protest in 2009 and demonstrate, they all now march instead, as do many of the MAGA people or in all of our... other countries where these meanings,

the meaning of national identity becomes subverted in a quite conscious way. And so what is to be done about this? And this is my work is where I’ve spoken before about the mana in the meme is part of it looking for the mana in the meme is part of it

because it’s not good enough to say to someone uh oh look if you if you start reading this maga stuff you’re going to become maga and brainwashed and we’re going to lose you to the cult you’re going to become like a moony or um uh in the cult you you um

What we need is a tool that we can look at in real time and try to see what’s imminent in the memes and in this, what are the patterns, what are the things that are common to it. And this pattern, which I described before here today with Georgian Dream, Ireland for the Irish,

MAGA, Americanism, any movement which attempts to subvert or even use in a negative way as othering the archetypes of our national consciousness, that immediately, that when we spot that energy in Georgian dream, in different movements in any countries or in any texts or memes, then... that should be a warning to us.

And if we’re scanning for that energy, that anything affecting the archetypes of our national consciousness, But just demolishing that whole wing, or I don’t know what you’d call it, old stables or something in the White House, you could not get a more clear demolition of the archetypes of our national consciousness than that.

And that image is a perfect example of... of an actual literal and metaphorical demolition of an archetype of our national consciousness, which is the White House, the sacred place, which the British bombed. And here this interloper, this usurper is having it demolished.

So what I see in that is this same energy and this mental war, which has been set off. And the dynamics in all of our societies are such that even when Russia collapses, mainly because most people can’t trace this back. They can’t see the Russian energy in a lot of these movements.

Even when Russia collapses, that won’t undermine these movements for themselves. And so our fight will go on, I think, after the war ends. while Ukraine is turning itself, becoming like Poland and the rest of the European Union and trying to heal from this pain and suffering.

But we have this other, this mental war, which we will still be fighting. So that’s what’s been on my mind this week. And I talked a lot, so I’ll leave it at that. And then next week we can... I have a few other things to say about magical thinking and contagion.

Yeah, I can give you a direct answer. And this is from a document that informed NAPAM. They managed to get the contents of the email box of... the secretary to this organization, which is very important. It’s the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of the Sciences. And as mentioned before,

Putin himself is chair of the board of the Russian Academy of Science in E.ON. And it’s a very short document and it has Putin’s signature on it. I’ll point it. Is there a purple space? There isn’t. I don’t know how to do it. But anyway. You can share it directly to the NIST decoding. Oh, can I?

Do I have that power? Yes, you do. Wow, amazing. Gosh. Volia Radio, is that on? Yes, that’s it. God, that’s amazing. What a power. Okay, so basically, so this is an excerpt from that document, which I think answers your question in the immediate sense, Wendy. Accordingly, to solve the problem of social, so the document itself is entitled,

this is the de-Westernization of Russia. Okay. And so there’s loads, as you can imagine, loads of waffle, but it’s only four pages, actually. But anyway, accordingly, to solve the problem of social entropy in such a system of social relationships, the most obvious solution... would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad.

That is, diffusing internal tension through external expansion. In the historical, you know, I talk about mana and energy, this is all the energy of absurd Russian people. policy documents, but signed by Putin himself. And we see that you wouldn’t believe this if you didn’t see the evidence in Ukraine and the, you know,

the blowing up of our armaments, depots and all sorts of things that we’re all aware of, but perhaps normal people aren’t that aware of. So it’s hard to convince them that these documents actually are they set out the policy which we then see the evidence of being implemented. So the most obvious solution,

this is to the Russian nomenclature, would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. That is diffusing internal tension through external expansion. So that’s the tight answer to your question, I think, Wendy, from their perspective. Through chaos, they can diffuse internal tensions. And how does that benefit them? Why would they do it?

Yeah, I mean, I think all of us are astonished. Like, why do any of this? Yeah, because it clearly doesn’t benefit them. And the more it doesn’t benefit them, like a normal country might have made the error of invading Ukraine. But a normal country would have left after two weeks and declared victory and just gone home.

But we see them still doubling down. And the close-up tonight, their brains are just rotten with... And I’m a great admirer of Marxist dialectics and Adorno and the like of it, but I hope my mind hasn’t been rotted by learning this stuff. But it’s in this sentence, Wendy, like the problem with social entropy, the most obvious solution.

would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. And you’re like, that is not the most obvious solution. The most obvious solution is to try and do what Poland does, what France, what Ireland, what all these, every other country in the world tries to do,

which is create a more secure environment for their own people rather than exporting chaos abroad. So... But then it gathers its own dynamic, as we see with this war, this trope at the moment, which I think is probably true, that Putin can’t stop the war because the whole thing would just fall down. I mean,

I’m happy that people talk about that being true, Putin can’t stop the war, but without then saying, oh, Ukraine must surrender, because that was the case for the first year or two, we had to fight that. So then these things gather their own momentum and as we see with MAGA and elsewhere, these movements begin and they’re uncontrollable,

they’re uncontrolled. and no one can control them. And that’s why I fear, why I identify that when the kinetic war ends and when Russia collapses and when these people are in hiding or in war crimes tribunals or being hunted by the gore for the rest of their lives,

that we’re still going to be living with the consequences of this mental war that has been set off by the oligarchic elite for all of their individual reasons, I guess, since 2015, really, as far as we can see in the aftermath of the world financial crisis as a

counterbalance to what they thought would be the rise of the left and what have you. And then it just becomes intoxicating. But yeah, it doesn’t benefit them. And I’ve written before about how if you were to do a cost-benefit analysis of Russia’s propaganda, which they’ve never done. They’re on genocide autopilot. Like if they worked out, okay,

so the cost is we’ve brainwashed ourselves into believing this stuff. We’ve created all this chaos everywhere. We’ve lost a million and a half people. And we’ve destroyed our country and we’ve destroyed the future of however many people there are in Russia, 80 million, 90 million left. You’d never engage in it, but it doesn’t seem to be rational.

They don’t seem to be in control of themselves. Yeah, that’s the best answer I can give, but I’ll certainly see if I can go up with a better one. But basically diffuse internal tensions through

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