In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce a 🇷🇺 TV star and a propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov. He has his own TV show called "Evening with Vladimir Solovyov".
Vladimir is first and foremost a Kremlin-mouthpiece and a master propagandist, who speaks mostly to the 🇷🇺 people.
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His primary mission is to get people riled up about the war and the "brutal Ukrainians". For this, he uses a powerful strategy: he's one of the few people who is allowed to criticize the 🇷🇺 leadership (except Czar Putin, who's always right) and their decisions on the war.
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On 23 Feb, 2022, Italian authorities seized Solovyov's 8 million USD villa on Lake Como. In April, 2022, activists painted the villa's swimming pool with red paint. The villa was also set on fire and was heavily damaged as a result.
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In April 2022, Putin informed that FSB had stopped a plot by "Ukrainian neo-nazis" to kill Solovyov. As a proof, FSB released a video from a flat of these evil nazis, where they found - among other things - a green wig, ...
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... a portrait of Hitler, a nazi flag and three cases of video game "The Sims". It's assumed that they were supposed to find SIM cards but misunderstood their instructions. He accused Banderites funded by the West for this "assassination attempt".
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His propaganda is mimicking the classic Kremlin rhetoric, and he likes to spout about Ukrainian nazis, satanists, Banderites, bioweapons and so on. He's also blamed NATO for waging war against Russia in Ukraine. One of Solovyov's favorite talking points is nuclear weapons...
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... and in June 2022, he declared that "I hope we'll live through this. If everything keeps progressing the way that it is, only a couple of mutants in Lake Baikal will survive; the rest will be destroyed in a massive nuclear strike."
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He's also suggested attacking Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels with long-range cruise missiles. Too bad Russia spent most of them already by bombing Ukrainian civilians.
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After the attack on the Kerch bridge, he also suggested that Russia should attack critical civilian targets such as "bridges, dams, railways, thermal power plants and other infrastructure facilities".
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Solovyov is also a big fan of Hitler. To discredit the opposition figure Navalny, he said that Hitler was a "very brave man" because he didn't get out of army service, unlike Navalny.
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In November, 2022, Russian Mediascope poll showed that Solovyov's talk show dropped out of the Top 10 programs on Russia-1. I guess there's a limit to Russian babushkas for tolerating bullshit.
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
In this 6th Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about a complex and controversial topic: conscription. It is used by vatniks to attack Ukraine for drafting men to fight, while conveniently ignoring the alternative, including the horrors of conscription into the Russian army. 1/8
Military obligations are a reality in many countries, from the most peaceful democracies to the most tyrannical dictatorships — unless you have “bone spurs”. Some argue it is a necessity for defense against invading armies, especially for small countries. 2/8
Others point out that it goes against individual rights or that a professional army is better. And Zelenskyy might agree: he did in fact end conscription. But then a full-scale invasion happened: exactly why many nations, including the US, still keep some form of draft. 3/8
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.
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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.
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But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.