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.
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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.
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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.
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On March 17, 2022, rescue workers were searching for survivors from the ruins of the Mariupol theater. At the same time, Svetlana was buying expensive jewellery in Joel Arthur Rosenthal's jewellery store in Paris. The prices at this establishment start from 100 000s of euros.4/12
Later she travels to London to meet her son, but moves quickly to Paris. There she buys 8000 EUR worth of Prada outfits. Her daughter lives there, too, and they spend family time together for a month in Europe. At the same time, Russia is bombing civilian targets in Kyiv.
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Every year the whole family spends the whole August in the Côte d'Azur in a 120 000 EUR / month villa. 90 000 EUR was spent for a yacht rental. For some villas, they paid 2000 EUR a month extra to see the Russian TV channels - just to see Solovyov lie on Russia-1!
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Timur Ivanov has been a strong opponent of NATO, yet the family has no problem in vacationing in NATO countries like France.
They do all this through front organizations and offshore companies, some of them registered to Luxemburg.
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In 2013-2018 they spent at least 1,3 million EUR
on their holidays in Europe. These included 5-star hotels, and luxurious villas and yachts. Nice boost for the local economy!
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They're also good friends with the press secretary of Russia, Dmitry Peskov. Peskov visited one of their parties and even put on a bear suit to entertain the
guests. As it turns out, Peskov's daughter, Yelizaveta also loves the West - she's living in France.
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Svetlana's spendings seem endless, and she also likes to eat well: while Russian soldiers are eating food-like products in the trenches, Mrs Zakharova eats red & black caviar, croissants and fresh berries for breakfast.
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They're circumventing the sanctions in a creative way: they're cars are registered to their drivers, their yachts are ordered for their nannies, and so on. Jewellery and clothes are paid via offshore companies. They also order construction from their own companies.
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In Oct, 2022,Timur Ivanov (but not Svetlana) was put on sanctions list by the EU. What did they do? They filed for a "divorce", just so that she can continue her glamorous life in Europe. On 3 Dec, 2022, she was again shopping in Paris.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, made together with chef invité @Martinlaineolen, we discuss the extensive links between pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and how Western politicians reinforced these links.
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While MAGA influencers remain silent on Epstein, pro-Kremlin propagandists and bot farms have expectedly launched an anti-Ukraine online operation, spreading fake narratives that connect Ukraine, its politicians, and the late sex trafficker.
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But the emails paint a very different picture: in reality, Epstein had very close connections with Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and even built bridges and arranged meetings between MAGA figures and the Kremlin.
In this 5th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss something that sounds great in theory, but was completely turned upside-down by the tankie kind of vatnik: anti-imperialism. More consistent anti-imperialists call this the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. 1/5
“Anti-imperialism” was popularized by Lenin, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism. Ironically, the largest empire is now… Putin’s Russia, proud heir to both Lenin’s Soviet Union and to the Tsarist Empire. 2/5
Indeed, Russia is an empire that is still ruled by a de facto all-powerful Tsar, that still proudly flies its imperial flag, that still dreams of expanding its already huge territory through brutal conquest and colonization. 3/5
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal. 1/5
But when someone pulls some completely unrelated event, that happened to completely different people, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you know what you’re dealing with: a crass denial of the problem at hand, a bad-faith attempt to derail the topic. 2/5
Logic or chronology plays no role here, nor your opinion on these other topics. You could be the staunchest critic or supporter of these other actions thrown into the discussion, it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether these other things are true or not, or bad or not. 3/5
In this 3rd Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “ending” the war by surrendering or ceding territory.
Nearing four years of the 2-day “special military operation”, Russia is desperate to obtain through other means what they failed to conquer on the battlefield. 1/5
An endless army of vatniks therefore tries to demoralize both Ukrainians and supporters.
They sound noble: “anti-war” or concerned about the fate of Ukraine’s civilians, soldiers and cities. They claim that if we just stop fighting or helping, this horror would magically end. 2/5
What they never mention is… WHO started the war, WHO murders Ukrainians, WHO destroys Ukrainian cities: the same monsters they suggest Ukrainians be at the mercy of. Surrendering wouldn’t end the atrocities of the occupation, it would enable them. Surrendering wouldn’t even…3/5
In today’s Debunk of the Day (2), we’ll look at… nuclear blackmail. Vatniks love using Russia’s nuclear threats as a reason for surrendering or for not lifting a finger to help Ukraine: “see, they have nukes, we have to give them whatever they want”.
The argument is absurd: 1/5
Nuclear deterrence has been a reality for decades. Both the US and Russia have lost wars without resorting to nukes. We are not submitting to the whims of Pakistan or North Korea either. For vatniks, it’s just an insidious way of siding with Putin. 2/5
We can’t just give in to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, to the threats their officials and propagandists make five times a day to scare us into letting them have something they know perfectly well is not theirs, with no limit to their appetite. 3/5 vatniksoup.com/en/nuclear-thr…
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
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Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
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She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.