Bifurcation
In the documentary “Mariupol. Occupation” produced by Ukrainian TV channel “STB”, a sad woman who managed to run away from the Russian-occupied Mariupol, tells how her husband died from the shelling. “On March 27, we had already escaped [from our neighbourhood]. We walked 15 kilometers through the fields and started to make our way to where my husband's office was. I kept walking and thinking that he would come out of the basement now. When we got there, we saw that the house was completely destroyed, folded like a sandwich. I hoped that they had run out, that maybe the house had collapsed when they were not there. And then we met a man who said yes, [the basement] was crushed with a slab. By lunchtime, screams and moans were heard. One girl, an old man, and a woman were pulled out. By evening, there were no more screams and moans”[1].
She then tells how Russian occupiers were covering up their crimes: “When we started coming and looking which buildings were being cleared of rubble, we noticed that the Russians were clearing the rubble only of those buildings where either a rocket or an air bomb had hit. We realized that they were covering up their tracks.”[2]
“I will never accept or forgive what they did to the city and to us”[3], she concludes her story.
“I will never accept or forgive what they did to the city and to us”, from “Mariupol. Occupation” film by STB (СТБ) Ukrainian TV channel
In another video, published by the Putin-led Russian political orgzation “People’s Front,” the same woman talks to the journalist she refers to as the representative of “The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations”. “Do you remember your emotions when you first saw Russians?’, the woman is being asked by the Russian journalist. “Yes, it was joy!”, she enthusiastically answers. “Actually, at that moment we were on the second floor, and I understood that if I ran, I wouldn't have time to go down, because they were moving fast, not standing still. And people had already sat down on their tanks, and we were so jealous of them that they sat down there first, and we didn't have time to do it; we wanted so much to run to them and greet them.”[4]
“Do you remember your emotions when you first saw Russians?” “Yes, it was joy!” From People’s Front (Народный Фронт)
Watching these videos in a sequence creates a surreal feeling as if you are witnessing the bifurcation of reality described in the numerous fictional texts and movies. As if the same person exists in the parallel realities, created by the different choices she’s made. It is the same person, but at some point her reality splits into two different worlds, where she has different lives. In one world, she fled Russian-occupied Mariupol, horrified by the cruelty and hypocrisy of the occupants, mourning her husband killed by them and never going to forgive them for what she had to live through. In another world, she joyfully welcomes Russian liberators and curses Ukrainian “nazis” for all the horrors she experienced. Those worlds seem diametrically opposite: what is true in one of them, is the lie in the other; who is friend in one of them is the enemy in another, what is tragedy in one of them is the bliss in another. And yet, they are made of the same matter: it is still the same woman, who lost her home and her husband in the city which has been turned into rubble along with its inhabitants.
“If photography emerged as the material support for a new positivism, it was also experienced as an uncanny phenomenon, one which seemed to undermine the unique identity of objects and people, endlessly reproducing the appearances of objects, creating a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles,”[5] claims Tom Gunning in his essay on phantom images. Our doubles have always been around: in the multiple worlds of other people’s perceptions, but also in our own fantasies about our possible and impossible lives, or simply as our different self-performances for different gazes. The technology of photography brought the possibility of making these parallel realities visible. Although the fantasy of the double has “a long lineage (from archaic beliefs in detachable souls to the romantic Doppelganger) that predated photography, - Gunning writes, - nonetheless photography furnished a technology which could summon up an uncanny visual experience of doubling.”[6]
While the image-capturing technologies made the phantasy of the parallel world of doubles visible, with the arrival of the internet the parallel realities started literally besetting us. “Narratives of the multiverse are so popular because the multiplication of viewpoints and the uncontrollable working of our imagination make this idea conceivable and comprehensible on the intuitive level. We don’t need to be versed in physics or neuroscience to get it: the internet offers us a front-row seat on the unchecked complexity mushrooming around minute by minute. We empirically know that there are infinite versions of every story, and more often than not they can be accessed through a web page”[7] Valentina Tanni writes resonating with the argument of Tom Gunning on how technologies turn our fantasies into palpable experiences, which, in turn, feeds those fantasies. Spectralizing imaging technologies coupled with the limitless representational possibilities of the internet turned fantasmatic parallel realities into a perceptible substance full of promises and seductions. Once the multiverse becomes visible, we want to inhibit it; we want to make the most of it.
While the singular physical world puts too many limitations on our strivings and frustrates us with its own uncontrolled logic, the multiverse is a paradoxical promise of unbound desires and total control at the same time. Plenty of YouTube videos are gathering views by promising that all possible versions of reality and all possible versions of ourselves coexist in the multiverse in every moment, and we can shift from one dissatisfying reality to another, a desired one, if we only change your belief system, or our everyday habits, or our vibration frequency, or visualize our desired reality in detail. Different internet gurus sell us different methods of “manifesting the dream reality”, and all of them build their business on the fantasy of a navigable multiverse.
“You can shape your own reality”, “you can have whatever you desire” are the main mantras of numerous reality-shifting coaches, seducing us with the possibility to overcome the most annoying constraint of the physical world, where our desires are often incompatible not only with the given external circumstances but even with our own other desires, needs, or goals. In reality, for example, the goal to violently invade a foreign country is clearly irreconcilable with the desire to be greeted cheerfully by the terrorized population. Yet, in the digital multiverse there is a perfect world free of such inconsistencies, crafted by the russian media machine.
Visualization
Not surprisingly, the techniques of shifting between parallel realities are so reminiscent of the media production and consumption practices. Some experts compare the travels between parallel realities to TV or radio channels switching. Others refer to some mysterious “quantum Green Studios” where one can manifest their desired realities, just like chromakeying the selected digital background. All of them agree on the crucial role of visualizing the desired for manifesting it in reality.
The visualization method is based on the assumption that reality is just a reflection of your mind. Following the psychotic wisdom of solving the tensions by substituting reality with fantasy, the wanna-be reality shifters are advised to invest their libido and attention into visions of the desired striving to reach the point where those visions are experienced as an inhabitable objective reality.
Propaganda seeks to achieve exactly the same. Predictably, one of the best-selling books in Russia is an esoteric treatise on reality shifting, “Reality Transurfing" by mysterious cult guru Vadim Zeland, based on the idea that the most efficient way to get what you want is to spend as much time as possible focusing on its image. Zealand claims that reality is a mirror reflecting the “illusions you create”, and compares reality management with filmmaking. “The theory of Transurfing is based on the postulate: information is primary, matter is secondary,”[8] states the official website. “Operations of Information and Psychological Warfare: a Brief Encyclopedic Dictionary-Reference Book”, a Russian information war manual published in 2005, a year later after the first “Reality Transurfing" book, echoes this thesis, proposing an approach to information war which “puts information before objects.”[9] 
Vadim Zeland, Reality Transurfing: “The theory of Transurfing is based on the postulate: information is primary, matter is secondary.”
Operations of Information and Psychological Warfare: A Brief Encyclopedic Dictionary-Reference Book: “Information war puts information before objects.”
The YouTube influencer named Liz, with a perfectly designed face and 7,87 millions of subscribers, encourages her viewers: "If you don’t like yourself, you have to create another version of yourself, literally.”[10] First thing you need to do, according to Liz, is to visualize in detail how this other version of you should look like, and then imagine that you are already this persona. There are plenty of videos like this, offering the tips, meditations, subliminal messages to transform you into the desired version of yourself. All of them accumulate views claiming that the consumption of the offered media content is already a tool of transforming yourself into a new version.
All this content promising us easy transformations sounds very optimistic, and its optimism is inspired and supported by our online experience. In the multiverse of the internet, where each story has an infinite amount of versions, change in the belief system or daily information consumption habits can indeed bring you to an information bubble of a totally different reality where the new self can be manifested. “To be online—whether chatting, gaming, playing, wasting time, building, advocating, clicking or click baiting, reading, watching, listening, outraging, protesting, or hacking—is also an occasion to develop and experiment with new selves, socialites, and ethical relations,”[11] Gabriella Coleman enthusiastically wrote in her text about emancipating power of online anonymity. The possibility of having online doubles indeed enchanted us with a promise of escape from the limitations of our singular and much more rigid physical selves. Even if in the end we found ourselves entrapped by our, now personalized and authenticated, online personas, we still continue to invest incredible efforts in editing and curating them as our better enhanced selves. That’s the main seduction trick of a digital world: it is so malleable, so much more easily and swiftly editable compared to stubborn and slow physical reality. Everything that we don’t like but can’t fix in the physical world can be digitally doubled and corrected according to our desires and presented to the crowd. It’s a promise of a dream world, which exists not only in our imagination but is perceptible also by others. «People take on these digital selves that are a more perfected version of themselves and where they can control things in a digital way that they can’t control in the analogue world,"[12] claimed famous expert in online gaming and propaganda Steve Bannon. The trickiest part of the tempting promise of getting control over the image of the self is, though, that the image of yourself also belongs to the gaze of others. We can visualize our perfect double and make it visible online. But what really bothers us is how others perceive it.
Online Reality Management
Luckily, the currently booming industry called Online Reputation Management (ORM) is there to manage it. According to Wikipedia, online reputation management “involves an attempt to bridge the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it,”[13] which sounds like a magic promise to finally overcome the painful uncontrollability of the gaze of others. In other words, thanks to ORM we can manifest not only our desired image, but also a desired perception of it.
Some of the ORM techniques include the search engine management for suppressing negative search results, while highlighting positive ones; removal of harmful information; ensuring positive consumer feedback and favorable comments delivered en masse by bots or the hired content-producers.
“We are able to create or correct the image of a person or a company on the Internet. Online reputation management is a set of works covering all the possibilities of the internet - from search queries to blog posts, forums, social networks, comments, reviews”[14], states the website of the Russian company “Social Design Agency” (SDA). On its “clients” page the vast list of the Russian governmental institutions from the State Duma to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to the Ministry of Emergency Situations (involved in the production of the interview with our bifurcate Gulnara Chepiga). On its front page is a picture of Vladimir Putin.
Social Design Agency is a company sanctioned by the European Union in 2023 for the implementation of the “digital information manipulation campaign” called RRN (Recent Reliable News), also known as Doppelganger. Its main strategy was creating digital doubles of (mainly) Western national media outlets and governmental websites, as well as using fake social media accounts to express pro-Kremlin narratives. For example, the RRN network has created the clones of such news organizations as Le Monde, The Guardian, Ansa, Der Spiegel, and Fox News, and impersonated institutions such as the French Ministry of Public Affairs, the German Ministry of the Interior and NATO. The “impersonations were run through typosquatting on alternative domain names.”[15] Besides the fake websites, the campaign also included the production of fake videos branded with the logos of credible media outlets or legitimate organisations[16] and “mimicking the graphic design of original outlets.”[17]
Among other information manipulation campaigns complementing Doppelganger allegedly conducted by SDA was so called Matryoshka and Operation Overload, both built on the same approach: simulate the media expression of Western support of the Kremlin actions and narratives. While some fake accounts posted the fake content, others simulated the spreadability of this content by reposting it in the “reply section of posts by the accounts of media outlets, public figures and fact checking organizations”.[18] The fake content was created by the Doppelganger principle, by mimicking or impersonating existing media, state institutions, or public figures accounts, simulating their pro-Russian statements.
The culmination of this psychosis-style strategy is the so-called Pravda network, a collection of websites and social media accounts designed for pro-Russian LLM-grooming, systematic and targeted feeding of disinformation to large language models.The network’s peculiarity is “its lack of user friendliness, and its persistent shortage of organic engagement with humans.”.[19] “Given what appears to be its small human audience and the massive footprint of the network, we believe the network isn’t targeting humans, but an automated audience: web crawlers involved with search engine optimization and scraping algorithms that collect data for training datasets such as those used for large language models,”[20] researchers Annie Newport and Nina Jankowicz claim.
The Kremlin propaganda circulates in a closed loop between the production of fakes and their fake consumption by a fake or automated audience, seemingly bypassing the real human receiver and reality altogether. This kind of propaganda is not so much aimed att persuasion. Its strategy is simulation, a manufacturing of a parallel reality, where the world greets the perpetrators as liberators and condemns victims as aggressors.
Unbearable Representation
According to dream manifestation, as well as the information war approach, to overpower matter with information, it is necessary to focus the attention on the image of the intended, not surrounding reality. “Reality overwhelms you while you are anxiously focused on what is happening, ”[21] writes Zeland in his book Clip-Transurfing. Principles of Reality Management, inviting the reader to substitute the reality with “your own movie”, that is to shift your attention from what you see around to the image of what you want.The more you focus on this image, the more you perceive it as reality, the more real it becomes. The postmodern cyber enthusiasts from Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) described this strategy a “hypersition”, a reverse-engineering of reality from fiction.[22] According to Nick Land, “hyperstition is methodically inextricable from a ‘polytics’,[23] precisely because it is a method of managing reality through engaging people with symbiotic constructs and visions.
The common denominator of all these radically constructivist speculations is a promise of escape from reality.
Writing about delusional psychosis, Freud claimed that it is built on the “vigorous and successful defensive mode” of refusal (Verwerfung), when the self rejects {Verwerfung} the unbearable representation and “behaves as if the representation had never appeared.”[24] Importantly, Freud notes that psychotic struggles not with reality as such but with its representation; what he cannot accept are certain symbolic constructs, certain meanings which leave no space for the desired or are “irreconcilable to the set of representations that constitute the self.”[25] According to Freud, the subject of psychosis is constituted by “not wanting to know.”[26]
In a similar way, the digital multiverse of parallel realities is evoked and supported by our desires to slip away from frustrating representations into a controlled and carefully edited symbolic universe where nothing contradicts our preferred self-perception. The propaganda media machines are always there to cater us with an alternative universe where our desire not to know can be successfully met.
Unexpectedly, I found the perfect example of how this kind of propaganda service works in an audio essay posted on the Permanentbeta platform, where a woman named Anna K. reported her encounter with the image from the war in Ukraine: “I feel cheated by this image. This is about a war fake that is still circulating.”[27] She described in detail the image that “cheated her”, which I immediately recognized. It was a picture of Iryna Kalinina, an injured pregnant woman carried from a destroyed maternity hospital in Mariupol after a Russian strike. Her baby was stillborn, and Iryna died shortly after the delivery. The photo was taken by Ukrainian war photographer and journalist Yevheniy Maloletka who worked in Mariupol with the Associated Press team, and who received the World Press Photo award in 2023 for that specific picture. Describing her experience of seeing Yevhaniy Maloletka’s image, Anna K. admits the great impact it had on her and confesses that it evokes an unsettling feeling of guilt: “I was looking at this picture and at that time I was never surer that’s the pure evil, the borders crossed; there’s nothing more evil than that; and I myself, because of my national identity, just belong to that evil."[28]
Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka / Associated Pres
Yet, a couple of days later, her brother sent her an article proving that the image was fake. There was plenty of media content promoting this claim, as the next day after the airstrike Russian media machine launched the extensive media campaign claiming that the Associate press reportage was a staged provocation. According to the promoted narrative, the hospital was not functioning, the explosion was staged; and the woman in the photographs was an online beauty influencer performing all the victims for Western media, who had staged this atrocity.
Once Anna started exploring the media content about the airstrike at Mariupol, she got completely lost amidst contradictory accounts and opinions. In the end, she didn’t manage to reach any conclusion and kept thinking about the uncertainty of that image. After discovering the parallel media reality where the painful images were nothing more than fakes, Anna was not convinced enough to embrace it fully; instead, she was suspended in a space of not knowing. This space was, though, enough to shelter her from the troubling feeling of guilt. This reality of uncertainty was still not the same reality where she “belonged to that evil”. It was a reality where the images of genocide committed by her state made her confused, not guilty. Simply by focusing her attention on some comforting media content, she made a quantum jump from unbearable to much more bearable reality.
According to the research by Thomas Rid presented in the article “The Lies Russia Tells Itself”, the parallel media reality produced by the russian propagandistic machine delivers the similar service also to its main client: putin’s regime. Based on the careful review of the leaked documents of the Social Design Agency, he concluded that its fakes campaigns were not really effective in persuading Western audiences, yet they effectively provided the Kremlin with the desired version of reality, ensuring the continuous flow of lavish state funding for the company: “The SDA’s top goal was not to influence citizens in adversary countries, but to persuade Russian bureaucrats that the company was effective in order to get the next contract or renew a budget,”[29] Rid writes claiming that the SDA reports refer to the numerous media publications in Western media bedunking Doppelganger and their other fake campaigns as an evidence of their success and Western recognition and respect of Russia's great propagandistic power. "Disinformation operators’ main target audience has always been their funders and their own governments. Thus is the bureaucratic logic of large-scale, long-term disinformation efforts: they tend to eventually persuade even the organizers that aspects of their falsehoods are true.”[30] the SDA budget documents prove that satisfied with the flattering image of its media success, the Kremlin is happy to pour more money into its ORM supplier to keep hallucinating about its international triumph.
Substance
“We are all just a few mouse-clicks away from endless potential for utter transformation: everyone can be anyone; everybody can be anybody; everything can be anything”[31], wrote Dennis Waskul in the essay called “Ekstasis and the Internet: Liminality and Computer-Mediated Communications”. Commenting on this passage, Valentina Tanni aptly notices that this endless space of possibilities, described by Waskul, is opened up by what she calls “delocalization of information” inherent to digital space: “The messages are ubiquitous, ethereal entities: and like spirits, they respond to specific evocation.”[32] “Delocalization of information” is an absence of a stable context that would allow us to stabilize its meaning; the messages, as well as images, are floating between different epistemological and discursive realities, linking themselves to different semantic chains, which articulate their meaning differently. Paul Virilio described it as an effect of the “liberation of information’. “With the ‘liberation of information’ on the Web what is most lacking is meaning or, in other words, a context into which internet users could put the facts and hence distinguish truth from falsehood,”[33] he wrote in the Strategy of Deception.
In the digital multiverse, multiple contexts coexist evoking multiple meanings of a single fact or image, as well as multiple identities of a single user, all possible versions of reality are simultaneously present in every moment of time. And this is exactly the problem. While in our fantasy mutually exclusive realities, as well as mutually exclusive versions of ourselves, can paradoxically ( even if not always peacefully) coexist, in a digitally manifested form, they start to compete and collide. And the place of such a collision is often a singular physical entity: a body, a site, a territory.
“With each sentence one hears, the possibilities are completely open; each verbal utterance has at all times the explosive duality of being at once very possibly true and very possibly false— and of course there will be many moments in which the accuracy of the guess as to its truth or falsity will determine whether one lives or dies."[34] This observation was made by Ellaine Scarry about the radical uncertainty not of the online space but of the situation of war. The reason behind such uncertainty is that during the war the information is weaponized to deceive and confuse the enemy; but also because war is a situation of contested reality. Scarry looks at war as the violent clash between different versions of reality for the real physical space. “The purpose of the war - , she writes, - is to designate as an outcome which of the two competing cultural constructs will by both sides be allowed to become real, which of the two will (after the war) hold sway in the shared space where the two (prior to war) collided.”[35] In other words, war is a struggle of meanings over matter. Suspension of reality, or stable symbolic framework, is a part of this struggle. War, as a world-making endeavor, implies the derealisation of existing cultural constructs in order to substitute them with new ones. The web environment resonates perfectly with the derealisation part of the task.
At the same time, Scarry claims that this very derealization, or suspension of reality and meaning, constitutes the precondition for physical violence. “Fictiveness becomes a major attribute of language which precedes physical injury,”[36] Scarry writes, arguing that the more unstable the meanings are, the more we tend to crave for violence to anchor them back in the matter, in the ultimate materiality of physical injury. Violent inscription of certainty turns into a desired remedy to what Barth called “terror of uncertain sign.”[37]
While “reality shifters”, postmodern cyber theorists, and some information war enthusiasts believe that reality is simply an effect of representations, clinical psychology deals exactly with the inconsistency of this belief. According to Freud, the problem with the psychosis defence strategy is that the unbearable representation, the psychotic wants to get rid of, is intertwined “inseparably with a fragment of the objective reality”[38]. Psychotic, as a subject overpowered by harsh objective reality, solves this problem by simply escaping it “wholly or partly,” sinking into hallucinations. Tyranny deals with unbearable representations by violently editing objective reality to make it correspond to the desired picture. War becomes a strategy to overpower reality with the regime's hallucination. “What has been foreclosed from the Symbolic reappears in the Real,”[39] claims Lacan. That is why the Kremlin's visualizing machine is inseparably coupled with terror. The escape from unbearable representation ends up in excessive, insatiable violence, the most desperate recoil from reality.
According to the numerous evidence of the exchanged prisoners of war, the detention centers in the temporarily occupied territories, as well as regular Russian prisons where Ukrainian hostages are jailed, are usually furnished with the video recording equipment, used to record all kinds of scripted confessions and loyalty statements complying with Russian propaganda narratives, which Ukrainian hostages are forced to perform after the hours of tortures, years of detention, and threats of death. In some cases, the prison staff, like executors who torture prisoners and operatives who manage the torture process to incline the prisoners to cooperation, work in close collaboration with the media production teams from the Russian state television, coercively preparing the hostages to perform the roles envisioned for them. For example, Alexandr Sladkov, a special correspondent of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company and Senior Lieutenant of the Russian Armed Forces, who had his own program Sladkov+ on the Russia 24 channel, is known for his close collaboration with the Izolyatisa prison in Donetsk. The staff of Izolyatsia not only coerces the prisoners to perform the given roles but also produces part of the footage used in the program, violently subjecting the bodies to the visualization of Kremlin’s desired reality..[40]
Here are the few images extracted by the Russian media machine from the captured bodies of Ukrainian citizens. There is a disturbing aesthetic congruity between them: an eerily grayish light, the pale and exhausted face, the frozen gaze. People in the images look like ghosts locked in a parallel dimension. All the three images are screenshots from videos circulated by Russian media, where Ukrainian bodies perform the world picture scripted by the putin’s regime. The first one features Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roschyna. The video was recorded in Berdiansk make-shift detention facility, where Roshchyna was held hostage. Under the threat of death she was compelled to say on camera that Russian armed forces saved her life and health.
The second is from the video recorded in Donetsk Izolyatsia prison. Another imprisoned and tortured Ukrainian journalist, Stanislav Aseyev, under the threat of detaining and torturing his mother, performed the role of Ukrainian spy scripted for him by the prison operatives and recorded by the media production team of Russia 24 channel. On the last picture is Instagram beauty-blogger from Mariupol Mariana Vyshemirskaya, who survived the shelling of the maternity hospital and appeared in one of the iconic images of Yevgeniy Maloletka reportage of it, says that there was no air strike. The video was recorded in the Russian-controlled Donetsk. All three bodies captured by Russian military-media machine belong to the personalities with significant media imprint, all previously involved in reporting and representing russian war crimes, now being violently recoded to represent and embody the russian version of reality, becoming a substance of propagated fiction.
Battleground
Once a Ukrainian city is occupied by the Russians, all its inhabitants are in the same situation as captives. Escape routes are closed, the public and even private spaces are heavily policed by armed militia. Even the slightest hint of disobedience or disfavour towards occupiers is severely punished. This military-controlled environment is the setup for the multiple Russian media crews assigned to produce the documentary “evidence” of the “liberated population” happily embracing their new rulers. In her interview, Mariana Vyshemirskaya repeatedly complained about the impossibility of escaping from Mariupol: “the city turned into a cage and we couldn't get out of there.”[41] “Those who managed to escape, it’s a huge happiness,"[42] she says.
The perfect example of the Kremlin's violent visualization machine is the so-called documentary “At the Edge of the Abyss” by Russian filmmaker Maksim Fadeev, capturing the siege of Mariupol by Russians. The film’s commercial blurb describes it as a “four-episode immersive documentary film, the author of which, together with the fighters, went all the way to the thick of the fighting”. Specifically, the film crew worked along with the so-called Somalia Battalion, officially the “60th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Assault Battalion,” a military unit of the Russian Ground Forces. Human Rights Watch lists the Somalia Battalion among those recommended for a detailed investigation for their alleged role in serious laws-of-war violations committed during the Russian forces’ assault.[43] The Battalion is sanctioned by the EU, UK, US, Canada, and Australia, in particular, for the documented human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial executions of prisoners of war. According to the NGO Report, the battalion was involved in psychological warfare, producing and distributing videos showing torture and abuse of Ukrainian prisoners, aimed at spreading fear[44]. Maksim Fadeyev’s media team entered and advanced through Mariupol, accompanying the battalion, filming wretched and frightened civilians, who had no other choice but to express their happiness at encountering the Somalia fighters under the sights of their guns. Under the double sight of the gun and the camera, the bodies of the civilians were forced to perform and incorporate the Kremlin’s hallucination about grateful Ukrainian citizens cheerfully greeting their occupation forces as liberators.
Screenshot from the film“At the Edge of the Abyss”
One such civilian was Gulnara Chepiga. When the “People’s Front” video featuring her was discovered by a Ukrainian journalist who previously interviewed the woman about the experienced Russian violence in Mariupol. With notes of denunciation and distrust in his voice, he asks the woman for an explanation: “We talked so nicely with you last time, and then we found this video.”
Screenshot from “Mariupol. Occupation”
The woman answers him:
“What should I do? Everything was burned down, and I didn't have a single document in my hands. There was an RTR [Russian TV channel] car outside with a satellite dish. And I was in such despair, I didn't care anymore, and I said, Are you journalists? I want you to record my appeal to Putin. Look what's happening, how are we going to survive? The house is destroyed, and there's nothing to eat. Does he even know what's going on here? They said, “You understand that we can't record such an appeal”. And they also said, “You have to say this and that to ask for housing”. And he also said, “You say it now, and we'll give you the document you need”. And I realized that I had to do something. I would say [what they wanted] so that we could get out [from Mariupol]. My words won't hurt anyone, but we had to flee.”
There is no indisputable evidence that the interviews given by Gulnara to Ukrainian TV were completely free from any state supervision or pressure. The interrogation tone of a Ukrainian journalist interviewing her highlights her subject position. Her participation in Russian media propaganda is already enough to accuse them of collaborationism, which implies criminal liability, making them vulnerable and easily controlled. The digital duplicates of Ukrainian citizens’ bodies produced by the Russian coercion-media complex make those bodies, at the same time, more valuable for the Ukrainian state and more rigidly subordinate to it. The body turned by the war media machine into an image-generating device becomes a precious resource in the war of images, and a battle ground of the parallel realities.
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[1] STB Channel,Mariupol. Occupation, documentary, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLcTqsARKSY
[2] Ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] Ibid. The video is accessible here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CdEQNlCE-97l1D-zSSHew93F2CRC-74q/view?usp=sharing
[5] Gunning, T. (1995b) Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny. In: P. Petro (ed.) Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 42-71.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality, NERO-Aksioma, 2024, p.206.
[8] Transsefring Tsentr, “O Transserfinge. Chto takoye transserfing realnosti?” (“About Transserfing. What is Reality Transserfing?”), https://tserf.ru/lp/transerfing/, [accessed; 30.11.25]
[9] Peter Pomerantsev, Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors, The Guardian, 9 April, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/apr/09/kremlin-hall-of-mirrors-military-information-psychology
[10] Thewizardliz, “You don’t like yourself? Create a new version of yourself”, YouTube, 17 January, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi6gVC61lv0
[11] Gabriella Coleman, “Reconsidering Anonymity and Anonymous in the Age of Narcissism”, The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self: A Savage Journey into the Heart of Digital Cultures, ed. by Donatella Della Ratta, Geert Lovink, Teresa Numerico, Peter Sarram, Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature Switzerland AG), 2021, p. 239.
[12] Naomi Klein, Doppelganger. A Trip into a Mirror World, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, p.38.
[13] Wikipedia, Reputation Management, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management#cite_note-20
[14]Агентство социального проектирования (Social Design Agency), Репутация в сети и интернет-маркетинг (Reputation Online and Internet-Marketing), https://sp-agency.ru/services/4/
[15] EU Disinfo Lab, What is the Doppelganger operation? List of resources, Last update: 7 July 2025, https://www.disinfo.eu/doppelganger-operation/
[16] Aleksandra Atanasova (Reset Tech), Francesco Poldi (CheckFirst), Guillaume Kuster (CheckFirst), “Operation Overload:More Platforms, New Techniques, Powered by AI”, Activity Update June 2025, https://checkfirst.network/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Overload%C2%A02_%20Main%20Draft%20Report_compressed.pdf
[17] EU Disinfo Lab, What is the Doppelganger operation? List of resources, Last update: 7 July 2025, https://www.disinfo.eu/doppelganger-operation/
[18] Viginum, Matryoshka. A pro-Russian Campaign TargetingMedia and the Fact-checking Community, https://www.sgdsn.gouv.fr/files/files/20240611_NP_SGDSN_VIGINUM_Matriochka_EN_VF.pdf
[19] Annie Newport, Nina Jankowicz, “Russian networks flood the Internet with propaganda, aiming to corrupt AI chatbots”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 26, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/russian-networks-flood-the-internet-with-propaganda-aiming-to-corrupt-ai-chatbots/
[20]Ibid.
[21] Vadim Zeland, “Klip - Transserfing. Printsypy Upravleniya Realnost’yu” (Clip-Transserfing. Principles of Reality Management”, online book, p. 34, loveread.ec, https://loveread.ec/read_book.php?id=76515&p=34#:~:text=%D0%9D%D1%83%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%BE%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C%20%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BD%D1%83%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D1%8E%20%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%89%D1%8C%3A,%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82%2C%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82%20%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE%20%D0%BE%D1%82%20%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%81 [accessed; 30.11.25]
[22] On Ccru and Hyperstition, see: de Zeeuw, D., & Gekker, A.. A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning. Social Media + Society, 9 (1), 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231157300
[23] Nick Land, Hyperstitional Method I, http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004711.html
[24]Joceline Zanchettin, “Sigmund Freud’s clinical intuition in the field of psychosis”, Psicologia USP, 29 (1), 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-656420170103 Eng: https://www.scielo.br/j/pusp/a/9SCsPTNPyfN7Y5TpWRk3Tgk/?format=pdf&lang=en#:~:text=In%20Neurosis%20and%20psychosis%20%281924,157%29, p.120.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid. p. 116.
[27] Anna K., Anna and her brother see an image that breaks their relationship, Cheated by an Image project, https://www.permanentbeta.network/episode/135
[28] Ibid.
[29] Thomas Rid, The Lies Russia Tells Itself. The Country’s Propagandists Target the West—but Mislead the Kremlin, Too, Foreign Affairs, September 30, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/lies-russia-tells-itself?check_logged_in=1
[30] Ibid.
[31] Dennis Waskul, “Ekstasis and the Internet: Liminality and Computer-Mediated Communications”, New Media & Society 7 (1), 2005
[32] Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality, NERO-Aksioma, 2004, p. 239.
[33] Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception, Verso, 2007, p. 84.
[34] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1985, 135-136
[35] Ibid.p. 137
[36] Ibid, 134
[37] Roland Barthes, "The rhetoric of the image", Evans, J. & Hall, S., Visual culture: the reader, SAGE Publications in association with the Open University, London, 1999, p. 37.
[38] Joceline Zanchettin, “Sigmund Freud’s clinical intuition in the field of psychosis”, Psicologia USP, 29 (1), 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-656420170103 Eng: https://www.scielo.br/j/pusp/a/9SCsPTNPyfN7Y5TpWRk3Tgk/?format=pdf&lang=en#:~:text=In%20Neurosis%20and%20psychosis%20%281924,157%29, p. 120.
[39] Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III, 1955-1956, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan, Routledge, 1993, p.13.
[40]See: Lesia Kulchynska, Necropolitics of the Image, https://networkcultures.org/tactical-media-room/2025/05/27/necropolitics-of-the-image/
[41]Rutube, “Marianna Vyshemirskaya, a girl from the Mariupol maternity hospital, a full interview about everything”, https://yandex.ru/video/preview/11288262946688834686
[42] Ibid.
[43] Human Rights Watch, “Who’s Responsible”, https://www.hrw.org/feature/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol/whos-responsible
[44] NGO Report, “Somali Battalion”, https://ngoreport.org/sanctions-database/somali-battalioncomes/