In today's #vatnik soup, I'll introduce a man who loves both genocide and corruption: the "Butcher of Syria", Sergey Surovikin.
Surovikin is the current commander of all Russian forces in the war in Ukraine.
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Sergey is a military man through and through - he's a spetsnaz and already fought in the Soviet-Afghan War in the 80's. During the Chechen War, he declared that he'd "destroy three Chechen fighters for every Russian soldier killed."
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He showed his yearning for killing civilians already in '91, when he ordered his battalion to kill three civilian demonstrators during the coup d'état attempt in Moscow. He was of course pardoned by Yeltsin for this crime.
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In 2004, one Viktor Chibizov accused Surovikin for beating him up. A month later, Chibizov shot himself in front of Surovikin.
In March, 2017 he got his first big boy job as he was introduced as the Commander of the Russian armed forces in Syria.
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Surovikin managed to turn the tide of the war for the dictator al-Assad by killing civilians ruthlessly. Human Right Watch reported that Sergey's actions in Idlib "showed callous disregard for the lives of the roughly 3 million civilians in the area".
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According to White Helmets, an NGO helping civilians in war-ridden Syria, Russia used a barbaric strategy in Idlib and other areas: while bombing civilian targets, Surovikin's forces applied so called "double-tap strikes": After hitting civilian targets once, they did ...
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...another round to kill the fleeing civilians and the humanitarian workers, such as the White Helmets, helping them.
He also bombed Aleppo to ruins, following the Russian tradition of destroying everything. For these heroic deeds, he gained the nickname, "Butcher of Syria".
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Massacring civilians is hard work, and Sergey needs some kind of payment for this. Maria Pevchikh's team exposed Surovikin's shady phosphate businesses in Syria for which he got 1.4 million USD:
In October, 2022 it was announced that Surovikin has been promoted as the commander of the Russian forces in Ukraine. After this, the attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure has ramped up drastically - it has actually become a Russian war tactic again.
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Several Kremlin sources have stated that he is in
favor of these genocidal atrocities: meduza.io/en/feature/202…
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.
Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:
Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.
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Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.
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Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.
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NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”. 2/7
To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.
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War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.
But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:
Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.
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In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:
The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered… 1/5
…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse. 2/5
Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare. 3/5