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
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".
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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.
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On 13 Sep, 2022 Peskov said that Russia has no plans to to announce a mobilization in Russia. This mobilization was then declared by Putin on 21 Sep, 2022. Peskov has also denied the genocidal atrocities in Bucha and in Izium.
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For being an opponent of the Western lifestyle, Peskov's family sure seems to love some aspects of it. His 3rd wife and a former competitive ice dancer, Tatiana Navka was vacationing in Greece just last summer.
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She was sanctioned by the EU along with his husband in 3 Jun, 2022, but apparently this didn't stop her from having good time in a NATO country. While Tatiana was breaking plates in Greece, 🇷🇺 bombed civilians in Kharkiv, killing 12 and injuring 20 people, including children.6/10
Peskov's are also good friends with Timur Ivanov's family. In 2021 Peskov was photographed wearing a 85 000 USD Richard Mille watch at Svetlana Zakharova's birthday party. Dmitry's good friend Timur tried to hide the watch just so that the common folk wouldn't feel jealous.
7/10
Peskov loves Mille's watches, as he was wearing another piece at his wedding in 2015. This particular model cost 670 000 USD. This is more than Peskov declared as his income for a whole year!
Like most of the Russian leadership, Peskov handles his wealth through front organizations in his wife's name. His wife also has real estate holdings worth over 10 million USD and she runs two companies that do business with the Kremlin.
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Peskov's daughter, Elizaveta Peskova lives in Paris and works as an assistant to far-right French politician, Aymeric Chauprade. His son, Deni, also lives in France.
Peskov has been sanctioned by the EU, the US, Australia and the UK.
In today's #vatnik soup, I'll introduce a corrupted Russian Deputy Prime Minister of Russia for Social Policy, Labour, Health and Pension Provision, Tatiana Golikova. Before this, she worked as the Minister of Health and Social Development.
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As a Minister, Golikova has the largest portfolio of powers and is responsible for many things in Russia - healthcare,education and pensions all fall under her huge umbrella. She's married to Viktor Khristenko, and together they have made a fortune from various enterprises. 2/11
Golikova and Khristenko have tried to hide their fortune via offshore companies and front organizations - as is the tradition among the wealthy in Russia. They've also transferred wealth to Khristenko's son, Vladimir.
In today's #vatnik soup I'll talk about windows and heart attacks. Most of you have read about the mystery deaths of Russian businessmen, but let's look at them in more detail - some of them are quite strange.
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But before we move on to the deaths, a little history lesson in ownership and wealth in Russia: at the time of the Czars there was a ruling nobility class called the boyars. They met in a group called Duma and adviced the Czar and the Princes.
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After the Time of Troubles ("smuta"), boyars lost their possessions and properties to the Czar, and were granted a "temporary right of possession". Basically, everything they owned could be taken away from them at anytime by the Czar and/or the state.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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:
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.
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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.