Fighting Putin, one meme at a time

How can cartoon dogs help fight Russian disinformation? This week, hybrid warfare expert Robert van der Noordaa gives us a crash course on the #NAFOfellas movement and why Ukraine has been so good at using internet humour since last year's invasion. We're also talking about France's riots and the Dutch king's apology for the Netherlands' role in slavery.

Robert is an analyst at Trollrensics and tweets here. You can watch the heartwarming video of Jolien Boumkwo running the 100m hurdles here.

This week's Isolation Inspiration: R.M.N., rugelach and sfogliatelle. Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at ⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠ (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by ⁠leaving us a review⁠ or giving us five stars on Spotify. 

00:22 A big announcement!

04:07 Bad Week: France's riots

17:32 Good Week: The Dutch king's slavery apology

27:13 Interview: Robert van der Noordaa on Ukraine's meme-armed internet warriors

37:41 Isolation Inspiration: RMN, rugelach and sfogliatelle

41:40 Happy Ending: Jolien Boumkwo, champion of our hearts

Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak

Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

Twitter | Instagram | hello@europeanspodcast.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION - 00’22”

KATY: Welcome back to The Europeans, a podcast that normally prides itself on being recorded across the continent, between Paris and Amsterdam and Warsaw. Except this week, our little team got to meet in real life for the first time in more than a year! Yay.

DOMINIC: It was very lovely. But we are still recording this apart.

K: It's true. I left yesterday and I was very sorry to see you go, Dominic.

D: I was sorry to see you go too.

K: I always forget, when I see the rest of our team in real life, how tall the rest of you are, because I only ever see your heads on the screen. So it's quite disorienting to see you all physically and be reminded that you're all giants. 

D: We're not even that tall. 

K: Are you calling me a short-arse?! 

D: Sorry. 

K: But it was really nice. We got to hang out and eat lots of vegetables that had been dug up by our producer Katz on a farm in Amsterdam. 

D: It's true. Katz, at one point, when we were in the middle of meeting just was like, ‘Oh, I've gotta go pick up my vegetables.’ And she was like, ‘I'll be back in a bit.’ Two and a half hours later, she came back with like half a farm in her bag that she'd cut off with her secateurs. 

K: We did enjoy eating it. Although I believe you've been left with quite a lot of cabbage to dispose of.

D: I have, and quite a lot of slugs in that cabbage. 

K: What a lovely gift. 

D: Yes. No, it was really lovely. 

K: It was. And we got to do lots of planning for the months ahead. Which is probably a good time, listeners, to tell you some rather big news. You ready? 

D: Go on. 

K: We're having a baby!

D: We’re not!

K: I should clarify, not Dominic and me, me and my husband. Although it would be interesting for you and me to raise a cross-border child via the Thalys, we could make a great podcast about it. 

D: Oh, it sounds like really hard work. 

K: Yeah, let's not do that. But yeah, I'm really happy to tell you all that I will be giving birth to a human child, a little boy, in September, in theory. 

D: Yippee!

K: But that does mean I'm going to be around a little bit less in the autumn, although I'm not going to be disappearing completely. We're going to be pre-recording some stuff over the summer, and I will hopefully be popping in from time to time to say hi on the weekly show when I'm not too exhausted and covered in baby vomit. But yeah, you can expect to hear a little bit more from our producers Katz and Wojciech while I am getting to grips with the parenting journey in the autumn. A bit like last week, for example, when we got to hear that excellent whale news from Katz. I think we'll be doing more of that kind of thing. But it's very exciting. I think it's really cool that people are going to hear a little bit more from our wonderful colleagues on the show.

D: It's very exciting for you and your husband, Alex. But it's also exciting for us. I think we're gonna have fun here.

K: So that's the big news in our little team. But let's turn outwards now and look at the rest of the continent. What are we talking about this week?

D: Well, this week, we're going to be looking at a very important international summit taking place in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, but maybe not the one you've heard about on the news. That is the NATO summit. We're going to be talking about the NAFO summit.

K: Who are NAFO? 

D: NATO is the North Atlantic Fellas Organizatio,n and they are coming together to work out how to defeat Vladimir Putin using the power of memes. This army of Twitter users has been working hard since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So we decided it was about time to invite an expert onto the show to work out whether this is just a bit of fun distraction, or if there is actually a serious goal to this online group of so-called Fellas. So we will be joined by investigative journalist Robert von der Noordaa later on in the show. But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

BAD WEEK - 04’07”

D: Who's had a bad week, Katy?

K: Well, we're doing something quite unusual this week in that we are both bringing you news from our own countries, France and the Netherlands. So I am giving Bad Week to France, which will probably come as no surprise. I think pretty much everyone listening to this will have seen the chaotic images from the past week. We've seen several nights of rioting here in France, after a young man was shot dead by a police officer after he got stopped while driving in Nanterre, which is a suburb just to the west of Paris. The young man was called Nahel, and he was 17-years-old. So it's been a pretty depressing week for France. A young man from an immigrant family has been killed by a police officer who might have been justified in pulling him over, but had absolutely no justification for shooting him dead. And this has been followed by a lot of violence and destruction, a lot of it hurting people who have nothing to do with the actions of the police or the state, like, you know, the small business owners who have their shops burned, low-paid workers who've been unable to take the bus because of curfews, or kids whose schools have been set on fire. It's just been a really grim week. And it's not just up here in the Paris region. It's been all over France and spilling over the borders to Belgium and Switzerland too. We're recording this on Tuesday morning, and at the time of recording it has been a lot calmer for two nights. Fingers crossed that it holds. 

D: Why do you think it is that things end up on the street so often in France, like this with rioting? It seems to happen more often than in like any other country.

K: There's like, an entire branch of academia studying that. I mean, we have an extremely long tradition of it, right? Stretching back to the French Revolution, in fact. But yeah, things do absolutely end up on the streets quicker, the burning of things on the street, and street protests – calm ones, sometimes – certainly a lot quicker than it does in our home country, it's true.

D: And France also seems to have a pretty bad reputation for police violence. Like what happened to this young guy Nahel is part of a pattern, right?

K: Yeah, absolutely. My heart really sank on the morning that the news broke that this young man, a French guy from an Algerian family, had lost his life in this way. Because France has a really long history of police brutality that hugely disproportionately targets young men from black African and North African backgrounds. There was this investigation by the civil liberties watchdog back in 2017, that found that young men perceived to be black or Arab were 20 times as likely to be stopped by police as the rest of the population. And there are many notorious cases of men from this demographic being abused in custody, or dying. So that is a really important part of the context. The other part of the context is this sense that police often get away with brutality. In Nahel’s case, there's a lot of anger over the fact that we only really know what happened because the shooting happened to be caught on camera. The original version of events, that was circulating on police internal messaging forums, said that Nahel and his friends in the car had tried to ram the officers, so this was very much a self-defence thing, that the cop shot him. And then when the video emerged, it became really clear that the cops were talking to Nahel through the window of the car. And then he started driving off to the side, and the cop shot him through the window. So there was no real danger of him being, like, rammed head-on by this car. So there's very much been this sense of like, well just how often are French police justifying violence like this saying it's self-defence when it isn't, and getting away with it because it's their word against someone else's? There's also been kind of general rising concern over the past few years about French policing getting more and more over-the-top and heavy-handed. When you look at things like how they policed the gilet jaune protests a few years ago, for example, like a bunch of people lost eyes in those protests because they got hit by these like flash-ball things lobbed by the police. And when it comes to gun use, that has really become a problem. There was this really jaw-dropping statistic that's come out in the media coverage over the past week, that one person a month has been shot dead by French police in the last 18 months in these kinds of situations where they've been asked to stop their car. One person a month, and those people have again mostly been young men from non-white immigrant families.

D: And so the people that have taken to the streets, are they protesting just about police violence? Or is it kind of about something else or a bigger societal disquiet?

K: Yeah, again I think, you know, there'll be whole PhDs written specifically about why this happened in the years to come, let alone why the French take to the streets so easily. But certainly when you read the French press, there is a lot of speculation that this isn't just about Nahel’s death. And for the more rightwing commentators that assertion comes with an accusation of, you know, ‘this is a lot of greedy young hooligans who are using this young man's death as a pretext for violence and looting when they really don't care about police brutality or racism at all, they just want to, like, raid the Nike shop. There have been all kinds of potential explanations floated: everything from ‘People are angry because France is as horribly unequal as it's always been, and immigrant kids in poor suburbs still don't have any opportunities’, to, you know, ‘This is about young people being frustrated because they've had a particularly shitty few years during the pandemic’. When you look at the things that have been attacked in recent days, some of the rioters have set fire to symbols of the state, things like police stations and town halls. Some of the targets make less sense as a response to the killing – like, what does a small shopkeeper have to do with a police kidding? Why have they had their windows smashed in and their stuff stolen? It's not a rational movement, obviously. And a lot of people in poorer suburbs have been the first to point out, ‘We are the first people to suffer as a result of this looting. Like, how does you burning the car that your neighbour uses to get to work, how does that help to bring about justice in any way?’ And in fact, Nahel’s own family have come out and said, ‘Stop this. We don't want this. This is not honouring his memory.’ And I suspect that that has been one of the big factors driving the fact that things have calmed down over the last couple of nights. 

D: I’ve seen that a lot of people have been comparing these riots with the big riots that happened in France in 2005. Is there a sense that like, nothing's changed in the meantime?

K: Yes and no. So the riots back in 2005 were also sparked by the death of young people from immigrant families in the Paris suburbs who'd had a run-in with police. In that case, it was two teenagers who got electrocuted while running away from the cops. And there is a sense that we have made no progress on ending the unfair targeting of young black and Arab men and police brutality against that demographic. A lot of the problems in the poorest suburbs or French cities, some of those problems don't really seem to have changed that much in like 30 years, there is still really high unemployment, there still aren't enough opportunities for young people, loads of prejudice against people from those neighbourhoods when they're trying to apply for good jobs. And that is despite the fact that since 2005, successive governments have poured about 4 billion euros into trying to make life better in the banlieues. Macron’s government likes to point out how they've brought in reforms to try and make school class sizes smaller in poor neighbourhoods, so that kids get more attention, and trying to make the public transport better so that these places feel less isolated. So it's not like nothing has changed. But it clearly isn't enough. There are some ways in which the riots themselves have felt really different from 2005. There wasn't really much of a looting element in 2005, and there's been a lot of soul-searching already about why that has been a feature this time around, without any real answers yet. And a lot of sociologists have suggested that the riots have been shorter but more brutal this time around. There was this awful incident that you probably saw, with some rioters ramming a car into the home of a local mayor in the Paris suburbs. And his wife and their two little kids had to flee out the back of the house, it was really terrifying for them.

D: She broke her leg while fleeing, right? 

K: It's just an awful thing. So out of control and scary. There obviously wasn't much social media back in 2005. And this time, it was possible for people to instantly know where things were kicking off and then go and join in, which I think contributed to some of the more intense confrontations between the rioters and the police this time around. Plenty of the balaclava-wearing black bloc people, who are supposedly anarchists, they came out to lob Molotov cocktails at the police and smash things. And in general, it felt like both sides came to this more like they were preparing for a battle than they might have done 20 years ago. There does seem to have been this longer-term change in France in the relationship between police and protesters, whereby there is an assumption now that things are inevitably going to blow up and get extremely violent. Like, outside the context of these riots, it has become perfectly normal for me to walk into central Paris on a Saturday afternoon and see huge lines of riot vans full of cops with like, full battle armour on, because there's some kind of protest planned. And I don't want to ascribe 100% of the blame to the cops, because I really hate these black bloc idiots. A lot of the things that they smash up make very little sense as anti-capitalist targets, like newspaper kiosks and traffic lights.  They are complete idiots. So I really don't want to make it sound like I'm blaming the police entirely for the way that things tend to escalate in France these days. But I don’t know – like, as somebody who has moved here and become French after growing up in a country with a much more light-touch kind of policing culture, it doesn't strike me as helpful that French police routinely come to protests armed to the teeth with like a ton of tear gas at the ready. And that really does feel like something that has got worse over recent years.

D: Well, I think it's getting worse in the UK too.

K: That's true. Less tear gas in the UK, though, for now. The other thing that I think has changed is the political environment. So both the hard left and the hard right have a bigger platform than they did 20 years ago. And so we saw some prominent leftwing politicians here, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, refusing to call for calm during the riots, which a lot of people including many of his own party colleagues think was irresponsible. And on the right, we've seen really, really ugly language linking the riots to immigration and painting the rioters as essentially foreigners who don't have a place in France, when of course most of these kids were born in France, and in many cases, their parents were also born in France. They are French. But they feel like there's a big chunk of France that doesn't accept them as French. And that kind of language, portraying them as foreigners, that kind of proves the point.

D: Well, it's been quite a week. What are the French government doing in response to all these riots?

K: Well, so far their focus has just been on trying to stop the violence in the immediate-term and get the rioters to go home. So there's been massive police deployments of tens of thousands of police every night, curfews, stopping public transport, that kind of thing. When things do calm down, and I really hope they have calmed down, now, the government are going to have to come up with some kind of deeper response to this. And I think that's going to be hard given that, one, Macron doesn't have a majority, and two, there's this really fractured political landscape where the diagnosis of what has gone wrong really differs depending on which side you're talking to, right? So for the left, the problems that we need to fix are police brutality and the entrenched inequality of the suburbs versus rich city centres, and other problems around racism and poverty. For the right, the diagnosis is like, ‘Society has become savage and we need to stop immigration and return to a France of solid values’, or whatever. Macron has already signalled that he wants to take a long, hard look at the root causes of what just happened and address them. Whether he has either the time or the political capital to do that, before his term is up in 2027, is another question. Um, one concrete thing that a lot of people are calling for is for politicians to look again at this law that was passed in 2017 when we were in the midst of all of these terrible terrorist attacks. That law gave French police a lot more licence to shoot drivers that were trying to escape from them. So there might be some kind of review of that, potentially. But more broadly, I hate to be pessimistic, but famously every time there's a racial element to something happening in France, it becomes very hard to talk about because of this really strong insistence, in a lot of France, that this is a country where individual racists might exist, but systemic or institutional racism absolutely doesn't. So the idea that there will be a big reckoning in policing about why young Arab and black men keep getting killed by police – I'm not very, very hopeful that anything like that will happen. Sorry to give you such a grim Bad Week, but I thought it was important that we talk about it.

D: Thank you for talking about it, Katy, I appreciate your perspective.

K: Are you gonna cheer me up with Good Week?

D: Umm… Let's see. 

GOOD WEEK - 17’32”

K: Who has had a good week? 

D: It's been a good week for healing, reconciliation and restoration in the Netherlands after King Willem-Alexander made a statement apologising for the Dutch history of slavery, apologies he made with, quote, ‘heart and soul;. And actually he went further, and he asked for forgiveness for the fact that his ancestors in the royal family did not intervene against the system at the time; forgiveness for the, quote, ‘obvious lack of action against this crime against humanity’. It was a very emotional speech, both for the king himself while reading it, and for the people who were watching. The crowd actually started spontaneously cheering and clapping when he came to the apology. An apology that was hoped for, but when he said it, it was clearly a big relief for many people watching this historic speech live in a park. And he's been, like, pretty widely praised for the speech, for how he's listened to people who are descendants of enslaved people, and listened to anti-racism activists. His speech reflected much of what anti-racism campaigners have been saying for decades. For example, he acknowledged that the consequences of this horrific history of slavery can still be felt in society today, that the racism of today's society is connected to the history of slavery.

K: I can't get over how different that is from what you might hear from a French official speaking about this and this part of our history. But I know about this, because I happened to be in town visiting you last weekend, but this speech happened on the day every year that the Netherlands commemorates the end of slavery, right? 

D: Yeah, it happened last Saturday, on July 1st, a day known as Keti Koti, which means in Sranantongo, which is language spoken in Suriname, ‘The chain is cut’ or ‘The chain is broken’. Keti Koti marks Emancipation Day in Suriname and the Dutch Antilles, and each year there are meals and festivals held around the Netherlands in commemoration of the end of slavery. The biggest Keti Koti festival takes place in Amsterdam in a park in the east, and it was there that the king gave his speech this weekend. And it was a special year for this commemoration because this year marks 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies. The Netherlands was shamefully one of the last Western nations to abolish slavery. It was formally abolished in 1863, which mathematically-minded listeners will realise is 160 years ago. But many people remained enslaved for a further 10 years because slave owners were given an extra 10 years where they were allowed to continue forcing people to work on plantations in order to limit their own financial losses. So it wasn't until 1873 that slavery actually ended in the Dutch colonies. So this apology was better late than never, and it was expected, following an apology from Mark Rutte, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, who gave a speech in December last year apologising on behalf of the government for the Netherlands’ 250 year long involvement in the slave trade.

K: Apologies are a good step. But is this gonna be backed by any money?

D: Yeah, well absolutely, that's the question. Activists have been fighting for decades to even reach this point, that the prime minister and the king would acknowledge the absolutely horrific crimes of the Dutch state. And I'm sure many will feel relieved that these crimes are finally being acknowledged and apologised for, but for many people, words are not enough. If the king really wants forgiveness, then there will have to be more than just an apology and a request for forgiveness, before justice is actually felt. The king himself acknowledged in his speech that there is no blueprint for the process of healing, reconciliation and restoration. And this word restoration or which is ‘herstel’ in Dutch, he used it twice in the speech. And it's quite an interesting choice of word because it's being interpreted by some anti-racism campaigners as a nod towards the idea of opening the conversation about reparations for the descendants of victims of slavery. Mark Rutter, the prime minister, has also acknowledged that more needs to be done, that these apologies are just the beginning. However, he has previously said that the government will not pay reparations to the descendants of victims of slavery, despite the fact that reparations were advised by a panel in 2021. 

K: That's convenient. 

D: Yeah. But is the king’s speech and his use of this word, ‘herstel’ or restoration, a sign that the government might also be moving towards some kind of reparations? It's really difficult to tell, but it's certainly what activists are hoping for and aiming for. There are other things that they want as well, there are calls to make Keti Koti a national holiday, and in general to make the terrible history of slavery as present in towns and cities and in our schools as the Second World War is. And more and more monuments are cropping up in commemoration of the crimes of slavery. And there are some things that the Dutch government has done already – they have already made 200 million euros available for the commemoration and increasing the awareness about slavery.

K: And as for the royals themselves, were they super involved in the slave trade in a sort of Belgian way? Or – what was the relationship like there, was a bit different? 

D: Well, there's still a lot to be discovered. But there was some research that came out a few weeks ago from the ministry for the interior, and it concludes that between 1675 and 1770, the House of Orange, the current reigning Dutch royal family, they earned more than half a billion euros in today's values from colonialism and slavery. And this report has been described by the organisation of slavery commemoration as merely the tip of the iceberg. The royal family were directly involved in the slave trade in the Atlantic and the royal family enriched itself with slavery. But there is more research necessary and more is coming. The Dutch king himself has commissioned research that will report in much more detail in 2026 about his family's own involvement in the slave trade.

K: And have other European royals actually apologised over slavery?

D: Well it's pretty unusual for a sitting European monarch to apologise like this. King Charles of the United Kingdom has condemned slavery, but he never expressed regret or apologised for the role of the British royal family. He did, however, announce in April that Buckingham Palace are cooperating with a study looking into royal links to the slave trade. King Philippe of Belgium, whose royal family have a really terrible history with the slave trade, has expressed his deepest regret, but he also hasn't apologised. It's also worth mentioning that King Willem-Alexander didn't refer to all the countries that were affected by the Dutch slavery system. In his speech he talked about the Caribbean, about Suriname and also about Indonesia. But there is some hope that some more specific apologies might come soon, including a recognition of the relatively under-exposed history of slavery set up by the Dutch government in South Africa. So yeah, there's a lot more that needs to be done both in the Netherlands and in many other European countries. And but I think this is a good week for, as the king said, the process of healing, reconciliation and restoration.

* * * 

K: We spent a lot of this weekend brainstorming things that we can do to grow the podcast and make it better. And just as I was walking out of the door to catch my train back to Paris, Dominic suggested that we can make a new category on our Patreon page, whereby in exchange with a generous donation to our production costs, people can watch a live stream of me giving birth. How much do people need to donate for this, Dominic?

D: 600,000 euros.

K: I mean, I do think it would be great to integrate this newest team member as early as possible. So like, why not start with his entry to the world, you know? 

D: Great, I'll set it up, then. 

K: Maybe it's not such a great idea. But there are lots of other benefits attached to donating to the show to keep it alive. We have a really nice Facebook group where people share interesting things that we might have missed from across Europe. And depending on how much you're able to donate, you might get a personalised voice message from us, which feels like a mini podcast just for you. And we also have some postcards and some beautiful Fair Trade tote bags.

D: We do. Head to Patreon.com/europeanspodcast and you can find out more about how to sign up and join a few lovely people who have joined us in the past week that I wanted to give a shout out to. Thank you to Doug, Erika, Daniel, Christoph, Ashli, and Samuel.

K: A big danke schön to all of you. 

D: Thank you all. We couldn't do this without you.

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT VAN DER NOORDAA - 27’13”

K: How much do you know about the NAFO Fellas, Dominic?

D: Well, I read up on them in preparation for this interview like a good podcaster. But I have to say I didn't know so much about them before that.

K: They've been kind of on my radar for about a year now. I would say I think the moment when I became quite fascinated by this strange online movement was when Kaja Kallas, the Estonian prime minister, she joined it in September last year. And when I say that she joined it, I mean that activists from the movement made a little online avatar that she could use, that was basically a Shiba Inu dog – you know, those very cute Japanese dogs that look like foxes? It was one of those, but it had, like, blonde hair, and a little suit in blue and yellow like the Ukrainian flag. And Kaja Kallas was like, ‘So happy to be part of the NAFO movement! I salute the work that you're doing to fight Russian disinformation!’ And it was this really weird but very 2022 moment, I think, this strange intersection between this terrible war in Ukraine and bizarre internet humour. So I've been wanting to interview someone about this on the show for a while, about what this movement is. And this week felt like a great time because there is in fact a meet-up on Thursday and Friday, of members of this rather strange movement, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. At the invitation of the government, no less. Who is our guest? His name is Robert van der Noordaa. Robert is a Dutch investigative journalist. He used to live in both Russia and Ukraine. And these days he is an analyst at Trollrensics, where he analyses Russian disinformation tactics. He also happens to be a proud member of NAFO himself. So we thought we'd ring him up for a beginner's guide on why and how people are fighting information wars around Ukraine with the help of cute cartoon dogs.

D: Could you start by giving us a beginner's guide to these NAFO Fellas? Who are they? Where did this movement come from?

ROBERT: Pretty much at the beginning of the war, I think it was April last year. The first NAFO account was the one who thought like it should resemble like NATO – so, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but the T is replaced by an F. And the F stands for ‘fella’. The first people who started it all have the – well, they still do – all of them have the profile picture, mostly with dogs. And the dog is always a Japanese Shiba Inu dog. 

D: Is the dog completely random? Like, how did they choose this Shiba Inu dog, do you know?

R: No, I don't know. Interesting question, indeed. I don't know. There is a cat division, so some people have cats. 

K: Aha! 

D: Okay! 

R: I think there's a raccoon and some other stuff, but most of them are dogs.

K: And the members of the Fella movement also usually set their location on their Twitter accounts to Langley, Virginia. What's the deal with that? Why are they doing that?

R: Welll the whole idea is to say this is like some sort of secret CIA operation. So the Langley, Virginia is the head office of the CIA. But it works like a charm. If you look on social media – it's mostly done on Twitter – but if you look at it, there are seriously people who think it's a CIA operation.

K: Which I guess is one of the many layers of jokes here. 

R: Yeah. 

K: But what's the point behind the movement? What are they trying to achieve?

R: If you see a troll or somebody sharing Russian propaganda, the slogan was always ‘Don't feed the trolls’, right? This is the opposite. This is like, ‘Over-feed the trolls’. But in order to do that you would need preferably hundreds or even thousands of accounts. So what happens now is that these fellas, they see somebody sharing, I don't know, propaganda, hate speech, whatever. They will react with memes, but a lot of it. So sometimes you see hundreds of these accounts, and then the effect is fantastic, what happens then.

D: It can sometimes feel a bit jarring having these light-hearted jokes next to this deadly war that they're opposing. But do you see humour as an important weapon?

R: Yeah, I think the Ukrainians are probably king in this because you even see a lot of Twitter accounts with some really weird jokes sometimes. I remember this Ministry of Defence, that they just freed this Kharkiv region. And then the Ministry of Defence said, ‘We have a lot of weapons the Russians left behind. Of course, we can't accept any gifts from murderers and rapists. So we'll gladly return all of it.’ Meaning that they will shoot or whatever, missiles they found, back at Russia. They have a lot of these brilliant jokes. The brilliant thing why this works is because the normal Twitter user, just a normal regular person reading Ukrainian or Russian news or whatever about the war, at least, would also see all these memes. So they would understand like, ‘Hey, why would hundreds of people who like democracy attack this?’ So it really helps in showing that it's Russian propaganda or hate speech. It's a seriously brilliant counter-propaganda campaign, basically.

K: But having said that, the language that they use – I mean, there's all of these in-jokes, these kind of deeply internetty cultural references that would be lost on a lot of people who don't consider themselves to be Very Online people, right? Does it have any impact on the real world, do you think?

R: Yeah, definitely. Because I talk to people who don't specifically follow this war, but everybody's heard of this and seen this NAFO. So it's quite wide, how it impacts society worldwide. But you have to understand that I don't know the exact number of accounts, but we're talking about thousands and thousands of these accounts. So it’s massive.

D: And I believe they've also raised quite a lot of money for Ukraine, right? That was part of how they started.

R: Yeah, because what you do is, there is a large group of different artists. Forgers, they call them. You tell them like. ‘I want to have a NAFO fella from the movie The Punisher.’ You can also tell, ‘I want a Star Trek, The Borg NAFO, or I want a Dutch with wooden shoes. Doesn't matter. You can tell what kind of Fella you want, the picture for your –  

D: Is that the one you've got, have you got one with clogs?

R: No, I have one with The Punisher. And then the forger will make it, but you have to prove first that you sent money – I don't know, 30, 40 50, whatever. 60. Whatever you want. There is a list on the NAFO website of different charities that will help people who have nothing to eat or with supplies, a lot of different good causes that you can donate to. The moment that you show that you donated, then they'll make your profile picture and they make a banner and you can put it on your Twitter account.

K: Now, you are someone who studies Russian online propaganda. How does the way that the NAFO Fellas are going about their work compare to that of the Kremlin's own trolls? Do they use similar tactics, or really, really different tactics?

R: Partly different. You also have Russian trolls that would react to certain posts. We've seen that years ago already with this Internet Research Agency troll farm in St. Petersburg. But here it's very clear that it's NAFO. I mean, you see that it's this Japanese Shiba Inu dog. So the Russian trolls want to be seen as real people. NAFO is real people, but because they all have this dog, it's definitely that they're sort of part of one group which does the same thing. 

D: How do you think it is that Ukraine is so good at being online and making all these slick and funny memes that you were talking about earlier? Is it something that the Ukrainian government has prioritised in their fightback efforts?

R: If somebody would have told me like 20 years ago, if a war would start, would they be very good at using jokes? I would have already said yes. Because they have this very specific, really weird kind of humour which I have always liked. I started in 2004 in Ukraine, so I've known the country for years before anything really bad happened. The first horrible thing was, of course, this grim annexation and then the war in Donbass and Lugansk. So I think it's something culturally definitely, but it's used in a brilliant way in this war.

K: There's a real life gathering of members of NATO in Vilnius this week, they've been invited to the Lithuanian capital by the foreign minister, no less – 

R: President, the official first announcement was an invitation by the Lithuanian president.

K: Okay! Even bigger. So what's the idea behind this IRL, In Real Life gathering? Like, what are the Fellas hoping to achieve with this?

R: Well, we had different similar In Real Life meetings with NAFO in the Netherlands, a lot of those people that I know, NAFO members from the Netherlands, will travel to Lithuania. Tickets will be quite popular. I think all tickets were taken, so that I don't think you could even attend anymore if you wanted to.

D: What kind of things will they talk about there? Will it be like a fun event? Or is it going to be like, really serious strategy? Like how do we maximise our results?

R: No, it's a combination of both. And we'll talk about why it's so impressive what what's been has been done. But I haven't seen the full programme. 

K: Presumably, there'll be lots of meme-making.

R: Yeah, that's one of the things that I know that they will put some attention to, brilliant memes that were created. I think that's one of the aspects of this meeting.

D: Well, maybe Joe Biden will decide to swing into Vilnius a few days early before his NATO trip and see what's happening. 

R: That will be nice. 

D: I'm not sure Joe Biden would be very good at memes, though. The US government haven't really got the comedy nouse of the Ukrainian government.

K: Definitely not.

* * * 

K: Thank you so much to Robert for joining us. You can find him on Twitter at an internetty-looking handle with some zeros in it, that I wouldn't know how to say out loud, so I'll just put the link in the show notes.

D: What’re NAFO gonna do now that Twitter's falling apart even more than normal?

K: Maybe their next job is to save Twitter.

D: Save Twitter, or pivot to Tik Tok.

K: That would be so messy. Videos of little cartoon dogs. No, I could make space for that in my life. Why not?

ISOLATION INSPIRATION - 37’41”

D: What have you been enjoying this week, other than Producer Katz’s wonderful cooking inventions?

K: I am so rich in iron right now thanks to Katz. Thank you Katz. Yeah, other than that, I watched a really great Romanian film this week called R.M.N. It came out last year, I think via the Cannes Film Festival initially. And I'm going to categorise it under ‘hard to watch but really important’. Not a cheery one from me this week, I'm afraid. But I do think it's a really, really good film. It's about a village in Transylvania in Romania, in a very ethnically and linguistically mixed area. And something that's quite cool if you watch this film with subtitles is that the subtitles are in different colours, depending on what languages the characters are speaking. So sometimes it's Romanian, sometimes it's Hungarian or German. So you get a really good sense of like, just how linguistically and ethnically mixed this place is. And it is a portrait of an area where a lot of people have left to go and work in richer bits of Europe, especially Germany. And so the local bakery is really struggling to find people to work there. So they bring in these two Sri Lankan bakers, who then start receiving horrible racist abuse. It's a story, I guess, about how quickly people start to other outsiders and how poisonous that can be. But it's also about how hypocritical people can be around migration. You know, this area is itself an area where lots of people have left to go somewhere else in search of a better life. And then these perfectly nice, hardworking foreigners turn up trying to do exactly the same thing, and then they have to deal with all of this shit. I also think it's quite an eye-opening film in terms of portraying the attitudes that you hear people communicating about Europe, in terms of it being an area that might receive EU money, but that doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with super sunshiny, grateful views about the EU project and what Brussels is doing. As I say, not especially cheery, but very much worth your time, I think. Here in France it was available to rent via many different internet platforms, which I hope will be the case in your countries too.

D: I have to brace myself for that one, but it sounds like a good watch.

K: It is, I promise. What have you been enjoying?

D: I've got actually another food product as isolation inspiration. I had a friend visiting me from London recently and she brought me the most delicious European baked good I have eaten in quite some time. It was a box full of rugelach. 

K: Ooh, what's that? 

D: It's a product that originates from Jewish communities in Poland. They are miniature crescent rolled pastries that you get with various fillings. I had chocolate in my rugelach. And it was just so delicious, I'm obsessed. And I need to find a Jewish bakery in Amsterdam where I can buy it. I know there are loads in London, and I'm sure they're all over Europe, but I don't know of one in Amsterdam. So if anyone knows of a good Jewish bakery in Amsterdam, please let me know because I need to find my rugelach.

K: I'm just looking at them, they're like little baby croissants.

D: They do look a bit like little baby croissants, and there was apparently a theory that they shared some heritage with croissants, but apparently that's been totally disproven.

K: Can I offer a rival pastry to balance out my depressing Isolation Inspiration offer? 

D: Yeah, go for it. 

K: I know you're sick of me talking about that amazing holiday that I went on in Italy. But when I was in Naples, I filled myself to the neck with sfogliatelle, which are these little stuffed pastries. A rival to your stuffed pastry, I think, in terms of the best stuffed pastries in Europe. They're so so good. They've got this sort of orangey cinnamony cream in them and they're all sort of layery and puffy and covered in sugar and just a great thing to put in your mouth.

D: Sounds great. I bet you and baby were very happy.

K: They obviously have extremely good nutritional value for my child, yes. Responsible eating.

D: It's all about that Italian diet.

HAPPY ENDING - 41’40” 

D: Happy endings don't always need to include victory. Sometimes it's just the taking part that counts. And that truism has never been truer than during the European Team Athletics Championships that took place in Poland recently. It's a championship in which countries compete as teams, as the name would suggest. And Belgium were in a bit of a pickle in the run-up to one of the races, in the run up to the 100 metre hurdles. Both of their hurdlers were injured, and not fielding anyone would put Belgium at risk of demotion from their division. 

K: Oh no!

D: But in an amazing show of team spirit, an unlikely person stepped forward to volunteer for the race. Jolien Boumkwo, a very talented athlete, but from a very different area of athletics, the strength disciplines, hammer throw and shot put. She actually holds the Belgian national records in both. She offered to run in the hurdles, even though it was not something she would ever do. And she was about a head taller than everyone else running the race. And she very much didn't win, she came a very comfortable last. 

K: Yes!

D: But it wasn't her goal to win! It was merely her goal to reach the finish line without injuring herself or making a fool of herself, ad get those two points for her team simply by finishing.

K: That is so good! 

D: It's amazing, isn't it? And she achieved all of those things. In fact, she did the opposite of making a fool of herself. She won the hearts of everyone who has seen this video with her beaming smile and careful but steady progression down the track, taking each hurdle, one at a time, quite cautiously. 

K: Because hurdles are quite hard! 

D: Yeah, they are. And if you haven't seen the video of her running the hurdles, I really recommend you do, so I'll put a link in the show notes. It's really heartwarming, and she just seems like a very lovely person stepping over each hurdle. And after watching, I think you'll understand why she's become a bit of an international superstar since she stepped up to the hurdles. Everyone has been trying to secure an interview with her, and I read a few of them. One quote that was lovely was on CNN, and she said, ‘In my head it looks a bit more elegant than what I've seen on the video.’ But it could’ve been worse.

K: I love this story so much. Good for you, Jolien. This is wonderful.

D: It's really one of those rare news stories where sudden public attention seems to lead to a positive experience for the individual involved. She said to journalists that it's crazy how famous she suddenly is, and that she's receiving an unbelievable amount of nice messages from people. The Internet can be nice.

K: Who knew. 

D: In the end, Belgium did get demoted from the first division, anyway.

K: Oh no! 

D: The two points she won just weren't enough because yeah, they were 6.5 points behind Greece by the end. But Jolien came away very happy anyway, she says it was still probably her best ever European Championships. So yeah, I found it a very cheering story. And thank you to Anthony on our Patreon group for bringing this story to my attention.

* * * 

K: We have been busy feeding our Instagram account over the last few days. If you would like to see some pictures of us hanging out in Amsterdam together, including a miserable Katy in the Amsterdam rain – which I told you would happen, Dominic, because Amsterdam is wet – check it out, we're @europeanspodcast.

D: It was sunny on the second day. 

K: It was, I should admit that.

D: And at least you didn't have to use your rag.

K: Oh, you can also see a picture of my heat rag on Instagram. Listen back to last week's episode if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's a very flattering picture. We're also on Twitter @european pod and, on email if you would like to send us longer communications – poems, rants, that kind of thing. Hello at europeanspodcast.com.

D: One thing we didn't get any footage of, which I'm very sad about, is the moment when apparently my cat Sadie decided to sleep with Katy on the first night, and she curled up against Katy's pregnant belly purring when the baby was kicking!

K: They were talking to each other! It was the cutest thing that's ever happened.

D: Isn't that magic? 

K: Almost as heartwarming as your Happy Ending. We were produced this week by me and Wojciech Oleksiak. Our other the producer Katz Laszlo is busy eating her way through a lot of cabbages, for which we wish her luck.

D: We'll be back next week with more chatter from across this amorphous geographic area that we call Europe. Until then, have a good week everyone.

K: À la prochaine. 

D: Dag!