In today's #vatnik soup,I'll discuss a man who's small in every sense. He's the ex-president of Russia,Dmitry Medvedev.He's currently working as the deputy chairman of the Security Council, but he's best known for his aggressive social media behavior and sucking up to Putin. 1/12
During his presidency, Dmitry was doing a lot of changes and signaled about a possibility of a more liberal Russia.
Naturally, this was mostly a ruse and his presidency was only granted to him by Putin so that he could be re-elected later on.

2/12
For the 2008 presidential election, everyone expected Putin to support a silovik candidate such as Viktor Zubkov or Sergei Ivanov, but to everyone's surprise he introduced Medvedev as his preferred successor. Putin's endorsement caused Dmitry's popularity to skyrocket.

3/12
Putin's endorsement could've been due to two reasons: 1) He was just as short as Putin,and 2) he was a weak candidate who wouldn't try to do a power grab later when Putin signed up for re-election.
After he became the president, Medvedev appointed Putin as the Prime Minister.4/12
Professor Daniel Treisman has argued that Putin was ready to withdraw to the background, but the 2008 financial crisis and the South Ossetia War changed his mind. Dmitry called the latter absurdly an "Operation to force Georgia into peace".

5/12
In 2008 he established the Anti-Corruption Council. Dmitry was an expert on corruption: later in 2016-2017 Navalny exposed that Medvedev controlled vast amounts of villas, palaces, wineries, yachts, etc. The total value of his belongings was estimated to be 1,2 billion USD.

6/12
His 80-hectare dacha consisted of several houses, a ski run, a swimming pool with a waterfall, three helipads, communication towers and a house for ducks. These ducks became the target of public ridicule and a symbol of protests in Russia.

themoscowtimes.com/2016/09/15/eve…

7/12
After Navalny's revelation, there were a lot of protests around Russia and in 2017 Levada poll 45% of Russians supported his resignation. He worked as the Russian PM until 2020, but after the relations with Putin became sour, Vlad sacked Medvedev and his entire Cabinet.

8/12
Like all good Russians, Medvedev allegedly loves alcohol. There were wild speculations about his sobriety at G-8 meeting back in 2009.These days Medvedev is doing angry rants on social media, calling for genocide in Ukraine on almost daily basis, threatening the West with ...9/12
... both nuclear and traditional weapons, blaming NATO for proxy war - you know,the usual stuff.
One time he rambled about Ukraine:"I am often asked why my Telegram posts are so harsh. The answer is I hate them. They are bastards and geeks. They want death for us, Russia...10/12
... And as long as I’m alive, I will do everything to make them disappear." Maybe stay off the vodka for a while,Dimi?
In July, 2022, he shared a map showing Ukraine divided between Russia, Poland, Romania & Hungary.Based on him,this prediction was done by "Western experts"
11/12
On 26 Dec, 2022, he made a wild prediction for the near future. In his prediction, the US was torn by a civil war and Elon Musk was elected the president. Elon called Dmitry's prophecy "epic".

12/12

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Dec 29
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov.He has worked in this position since 2000. This means that he's been covering up events such as poisonings of Litvinenko, the Skripals & Navalny, as well as the 2nd Chechen War & Russo-Ukrainian War.1/10 Image
Peskov is best known for one incredible ability - whenever he says something, the exact opposite happens. On 15th, Feb, 2022, Peskov stated that allegiations about Russia invading Ukraine were "empty and unfounded" and called it "Western hysteria".

2/10 Image
He also declared that "Russia has never attacked any other nation" and that Russia would be "the last country in Europe to think about starting a war".

He concluded that "we're living in days of fakes and lies". That's the only truth that came out of his mouth that day.

3/10
Read 10 tweets
Dec 28
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce the current Deputy Minister of Defense in Russia, Timur Ivanov. Actually, I'll talk more about his wife and a socialite, Svetlana Zakharova, whose 8000 leaked e-mails were carefully inspected by Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.

1/12
Ivanov is an engineer for the war. He's responsible for building military barracks, cadet corps, submarine bases and military airfields, as well as hospitals and kindergartens.

He is also responsible for many rebuilding efforts in Mariupol.

2/12
Svetlana have mostly been living off his husband(s), and all of her personal business ventures have gone bankrupt. She's mostly known for appearing on tabloid covers and being a TV presenter. She loves glamour and lavish life, including 5-star hotels, yachts and shopping.

3/12
Read 12 tweets
Dec 26
In today's #vatnik soup I'll theorize what's happening with Twitter after Elon took over. As with all social media platforms, Twitter's algorithm is their best-kept secret and there is very little public information available on it.

1/14
Like other social media algorithms, Twitter's is probably powered by a machine learning (ML) components which means that it's constantly changing its behavior. It gets "training data" from the 900 million daily tweets posted on the platform.

2/14
Social media ML algorithms are extremely complex, and engineers from Google and Facebook have said that they sometimes have hard time understanding their own ML algorithms:

vice.com/en/article/y3p…

3/14
Read 14 tweets
Dec 25
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce a 🇷🇺 spokeswoman and a birthday girl, Maria Zakharova. She's been working at this position since 2015.

Maria married Andrei Makarov in a glamorous ceremony in New York in 2005. This soup consists of pictures from this lavish event.

1/9
Maria is probably the most quoted Russian diplomat. She likes to bash the West in her speeches, and often brings up (mostly made up) contradictions from the rhetoric of the US spokespeople.

2/9
Zakharova has made some pretty weird statements throughout the years. For example, she's said that 1995 Srebrenica genocide was staged. She's said the same thing about Bucha and Izyum.

3/9
Read 10 tweets
Dec 24
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce a Russian right-wing politician and a raging spaceman called Dmitry Rogozin (@DRogozin).

Rogozin has also been very active on Twitter, threatening people from Elon Musk to former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly).

1/14
He was involved in Russian military activities already in 1990-92 in the Transnistria War, where he fought against the Moldovan troops. In 2002 became leader of the Rodina party, which was described by Anna Politkovskaya as a controlled opposition party ...

2/14
... "created by the Kremlin's spin doctors specifically [...] to draw moderately nationalist voters away from the more extreme National Bolsheviks." In 2003, Rogozin's far-right coalition (the real neo-nazis) won 9,2% of the popular vote.

3/14
Read 14 tweets
Dec 23
In today's #vatnik soup I'll continue talking about Russkiy mir, the "Russian World". This time I'll focus
on the Russian idea of nationality, "Narodnost", and I'll also discuss Russian imperalism.

The first can be found here:

1/12
Narodnost is Russia's version of nationality. The definition of Narodnost came from Russia's leadership, rather than the population itself. The idea behind Narodnost is that Russian people should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the Tsar, for the country.

2/12
This led to a situation that common folk in Russia is very good at suffering & they've actually made it into a virtue.The general idea behind their suffering is that if you suffer for Mother Russia, you'll have lots of good things afterwards: after your death for the country,3/12
Read 12 tweets

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