The Bridge: Where Coercive Control Becomes Visible

Nobody would voluntarily cross that infernal bridge. “Coercive control” describes Russia’s main governance technique perfectly. Like an ultraviolent spouse or the evilest monarch imaginable, Russia conjured up a state of desperation inside its victims’ minds, usually through physical, economic, psychological, or sexual violence (and often all four). Then, Russia would offer conditional access to a sub-standard escape route from the terror its own actions had wrought.

Source: Bridge to the House of Lies

The bridge on the line of contact in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine is the author’s foundational experience — three years of daily exposure to coercive control as governance technique. Russia held Ukrainians to ransom: conform to our diktats or we will exile, torture, detain, starve, or kill you.

Russia, like an evil monarch in a faery tale, had trapped over one million Ukrainians inside a ten-thousand-square-kilometre prison in the parts of Ukraine that it occupied after its February 2014 invasion. Enclosed in this giant concentration camp, with walls concealed by Disinfolklore, Russia exercised the full panoply of coercive control strategies which I now recognize as preparatory acts to genocide.

Source: Disinfolklore Inculcates Rules

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