Podcast | The Economist Gets Trolled

As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu.

Midnight Tea at the Kremlin

So the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care.

Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of Russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of Russia. He thanked the Russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour.

The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top Russian oligarch breaks the silence.

Why 1843 Matters in My Oeuvre

Some of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding Russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the Russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today.

Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the Russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my