Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Dec 28, 2022 12 tweets 7 min read Read on X
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
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.

5/12
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!

6/12
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.

7/12
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!

8/12
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.

9/12
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.

10/12
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.

11/12
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.

Sources: navalny.com/p/6631/

12/12

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jan 10
In this first (and maybe last?) Basiji Soup, we’ll look at… the Islamic Republic of Iran, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, how it sells its atrocities as virtue and its repression as morality, how it serves the Kremlin, and the current protests against it.

1/20 Image
Basijis are members of the most fanatical part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In a broader sense: Iranian regime loyalists & propagandists. They may be fewer than vatniks or wumaos, but the goal is the same: destabilize the West to protect a brutal regime.

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In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce our first Czech vatnik, Tomio Okamura. He’s best known for building a political career on xenophobia while being of mixed origins himself, and for pushing Kremlin narratives in Czechia, a country otherwise very supportive of Ukraine.

1/19 Image
Okamura was born in Tokyo in 1972 to a Japanese-Korean father and Czech mother. He spent part of his childhood in Japan, and part in a Czechoslovak foster home where he was heavily bullied. His mixed origins made it difficult for him to fit in either country.

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3/19 Image
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1/20 Image
Steve studied law and political science at Hofstra University in New York. After law school, he worked as a real estate attorney, which led him into property acquisitions and development. He first met Trump in the 1980s when Trump was a client of his real estate law firm.

2/20 Image
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In today’s Vatnik Soup, our first on a non-human vatnik, we’ll talk about… Grok @grok. It’s best known for turning into Mecha-Hitler and Mecha-Putler and for defending its vatnik master, Elon Musk, at all costs, up to being willing to sacrifice the rest of mankind for him.

1/24Image
Let’s start with an introduction into how Large Language Models (LLMs) work, and the new “arguing with your toaster” phenomenon. LLMs like Grok are Artificial Intelligence (AI) but not the way we had imagined — a new form of intelligence that would somehow think like us.

2/24
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Read 25 tweets
Nov 10, 2025
Remember Robert Amsterdam, who’s been pushing with Tucker Carlson’s help the lie that Ukraine (and not Russia) is persecuting Christians?

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1/6
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Robert Amsterdam is also a registered (and well-paid!) agent of Maduro’s Venezuela, the socialist regime and ally of Russia which Tucker Carlson has recently defended for some reason, shocking many of his right-wing supporters.

2/6

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Our soup about Robert Amsterdam debunking his smears against Ukraine and explaining who’s been paying him for it:

3/6
Read 6 tweets
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In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll explain the context of the upcoming Budapest Blunder, and how it follows the infamous Alaska Fiasco from two months ago and Trump’s absurd delaying of serious aid to Ukraine and effective sanctions on Russia for the past nine months.

1/20Image
Two months ago, Trump embarrassed the United States by rolling out the red carpet for war criminal dictator Putin and overall acting like a pathetic servant eager to meet his master. Of course, the Alaska Fiasco didn’t bring peace any closer.

2/20
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Worse, the main outcome of the humiliation was to delay serious sanctions, which the US Congress, in rare bipartisan unity against Russia, was on the verge of passing. Two weeks by two weeks, Trump Always Chickens Out, postponing any real pressure on Putin for 9 months now.

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Read 21 tweets

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