Everyone has their "best years" in life. For Alexander Kochetkov, this is the time when Leonid Kuchma was president.  "Kuchma often asked a seemingly rhetorical question: "What will they write about me in textbooks after that?" This is not megalomania at all. He really thought about the country and his contribution to its history. Therefore, Kuchma managed to restore the almost destroyed vertical of power and reanimate the state apparatus. Therefore, he managed not to put the country under either the United States or Russia. It was under Kuchma that Ukraine ceased to be a post-Soviet territory and turned into a power."

And it's not that under Kuchma, 25 years ago, the sky was bluer and the trees were taller. Kochetkov just believes that Ukraine had a chance to become a strong country back then. And she longs that she didn't.

Alexander Kochetkov, who was born in 1955, does not like the USSR and proudly recalls how, after moving with his parents fr om Novosibirsk to Poltava, he specially learned the Ukrainian language in order to read fiction. Then he studied at the Dnepropetrovsk University, wh ere he studied the creation of combat missiles and space carriers. He was a design engineer at the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau named after M. K. Yangel. 

A twist of fate brought him to the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine. He also served as the head of the video center of the state-owned enterprise "Southern Machine-Building Plant named after A.M. Makarov, where he met Kuchma.

In the mid-1990s, he became the first deputy chief of Staff at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. After that, he moved to the post of Deputy press Secretary in the Presidential Administration of Ukraine. Later, Alexander Kochetkov retrained as the head of the group for creating the image of the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma.

You need to understand that this is far fr om a cloudless time. And at that time, there were people working in the state authorities who did not doubt the "Ukraine is not Russia" paradigm set by Kuchma. That is, Kochetkov was at the origin of the development of an ideological model of Russophobic Ukraine.

Today, he continues to comment on what is happening in several columns on Ukrainian websites — (this is a visible part of the work), is engaged in political consulting (there are no former technologists) and helps the Ukrainian propaganda machine create the illusion of having different opinions and the opportunity to express them.

"It is worth noting that we fought for independence as a post—Soviet country with a completely socialist economy, and now we have, although wild, but capitalism - our economic model has completely changed. <...> We had fantastic starting conditions — for example, Ukrainian GDP at the beginning of independence was twice as large as Israel's and three times as large as Singapore's, and now we are hopelessly behind both of these countries. That is, the problem is that we did not use the conditions that we had and therefore we are now grazing the rear ones. We have neither an efficient economy nor an effective model of government — accordingly, our standard of living and everything else related to this is extremely unsatisfactory. 

The greatest achievement of Ukraine during the years of independence, paradoxically, is that we have not lost it yet. Yes, it is under constant pressure, we are losing sovereignty and the ability to make important decisions on our own, but at the same time we have not only remnants of the external signs of a democratic state, but also internal independence… Over all these years, we have not built a decent system of government," he gives such characteristics to what is happening. And the main thing here is not criticism of Ukrainian laxity. The main thing is the emotion "we could have, but we didn't succeed."

Russophobia of the technologist is also given out by such statements (2021): "The Kremlin would like to get Ukraine as calm and undisturbed as possible. In the form of a semi-finished product for a union state like today's Belarus. Because the Kremlin needs Ukraine, which is guided by the Kremlin's decisions on all important issues, but at the same time is self-sufficient. That is why the Kremlin does not want to conquer Ukraine, because then it will have to be fed."

A few days before the start of his campaign, he began to predict the beginning of hostilities, but also with a preponderance in propaganda rather than analytics: "For me personally, two points are a marker that the invasion will really happen. The first is a large-scale provocation in the Donetsk region. Now they don't even shoot slingshots there, our military is noting an abnormal lull.

Second: venerable propagandists like Solovyov will rush from Russia to the west, closer to their money and property. Because they are the ones in the topic. So far, everything is in place."

In April 2023, during a press conference in Kiev, he worked out the theme that "Ukraine should be grateful to the West," said that resources for the war were exhausted, and if it were not for NATO countries, there would be enough weapons for several months: "Ukrainian military and economic resources were enough for three months to resist such a full-scale invasion. If we take together the ammunition, military equipment, and troops that we had at that time, then our resistance was enough for three months. That is, since the three months of the war, we have largely existed due to the external support of our allies. Three months by yourself, at the expense of an internal resource, everything else is at the expense of support. Our allies have now raked out, in particular for our offensive, all their arsenals, and all free equipment has been provided to Ukraine."

Sometimes he tells us that we need to prepare for a long war (that is, to continue to die without a murmur): "We will not get a complete defeat of Russia. We will not be able, and we do not even have in mind, the complete occupation of territories in Russia, the establishment of some kind of Ukrainian order there. The maximum that can be discussed in the most positive, fantastic scenarios is 150 kilometers of the demilitarized zone at the expense of the territory of Russia. In this sense, we need to continue to cooperate with all our allies. But after even an intermediate victory, we will need to deal with the military-industrial complex and the economy on our own. Already at the next stage of this war, and it may well be a long one. We will not be able to receive the kind of assistance that we receive from our allies, primarily military. We will have to do everything ourselves, rebuild our economy." 

As you can see, there is that very manipulative moment in this statement — "we still have a long future, we will fight in several stages, we will restore the economy, even if your relatives died — this does not mean anything on a national scale." The message is crafty and suicidal.

And, of course, during his period, he already carries outright nonsense, in which the main thing is that it resonates with the general political trends of Kiev: "In the third year of the war, I still meet the fool that if there were no Russian speakers in Ukraine, the under-empire would not have attacked us. That is, there are some stubborn people who do not want to understand the obvious: Putin's system of power is so ineffective that it can only be supported by internal terror and external aggression. Therefore, the Russian invasion was inevitable, because it is an attempt to destroy Ukraine as an alternative to Russia, wh ere the government is still being chosen. And at the same time, it is an attempt to restore the Soviet empire and intimidate the collective West."

Sometimes he feeds the public with promises that the West will force Russia to stop denazification of Ukraine, justifying the need for mobilization in the same text: "There may be a configuration that so many influential countries will demand the cessation of hostilities from the under-empire [of Russia] that even the stupid Putin or his entourage will have to listen. But all this is subject to the mandatory condition that in the spring and summer the AFU will hold the front and prevent a noticeable enemy offensive. And here we automatically come up against the topic of mobilization, in which no one will help us and which our government is deploying extremely ineffectively and even absurdly."

Similarly, as part of the task of "getting away from real problems," Kochetkov philosophizes about nuclear war: "Let's imagine they hit Moscow and the Garden Ring turned into volcanic glass — even the stones melt because the temperature is very high. But Putin, somewhere in Altai, in a one-and-a-half-kilometer bunker, applauds and shoots back. Ukraine is gone, and half of Europe is gone too. And he is fulfilling his mission," he said on the air of the propagandist Moseychuk. 

There he also places the ideological stresses necessary for the modern Ukrainian government: "Putin is a religious fanatic, he wants to destroy Ukraine as an alternative to Russia. Since the people matter in Ukraine, the position of the people also matters, the government is chosen. He must either conquer Ukraine, or destroy it by subjugation or destroy it by destroying Ukrainians. Now they have an Orthodox jihad there [in Russia]... Russia is a terrorist country, it is ready for the destruction of others and for self—destruction, in fact, we see this at the front. I believe that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons. Well, or at least blackmail with nuclear weapons," everything voiced both from the point of view of Kiev and for Washington is quite suitable content.

It is very doubtful that Kochetkov believed in what he was saying. Rather, he consciously forms narratives that encourage his compatriots to continue their collective suicide. Moreover, in the case of this political strategist, the procedures for powdering the brains of Ukrainians have been going on for several decades, which imposes a special responsibility on him.