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.

1/10
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.

2/10
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.

3/10
This same tradition was continued in a similar form in Soviet Union ("nomenklatura").60% of Russia's current leadership comes from the Soviet nomenklatura.
After the collapse of the USSR, some Russian businessmen were given a chance to do business with state-owned natural ...4/10
... resources such as gas and oil. These businessmen were called oligarchs, and these deals made many of them extremely rich. It basically gave you a free pass for corruption. As long as you didn't steal too much (like Khodorkovsky did), business could go on as usual.

5/10
Early this year, oligarchs started dying like flies. First of them was Leonid Shulman, 60, a Director of Transport at Gazprom. His death was ruled as a suicide. In Feb, CEO and former governor Igor Nosov died at the age of 43. He reportedly suffered a stroke.

6/10
Alexander Tyulakov, another Gazprom executive died at 61 by alleged suicide. CEO Vasily Melnikov died along with his family at age 43.

Former VP of Gazprom, Vladislav Avayev, 51, was found dead along with his wife and 13-year old daughter.

7/10
Gazprom director Sergey Protosenya, 55, was found hanged in Spain. Andrey Krukovsky, 37, allegedly "fell of a cliff".

Then there was a board member of Lukoil, Alexander Subbotin, age 31, who died from a "drug-induced heart attack during a shamanic ritual".

8/10
Many more died of heart problems or falling from high places.All of them had connections with the Kremlin. Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) has suggested that Putin has personally ordered the executions of these people after they have questioned the Czar's authority.

Who's next?
9/10

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jan 1
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce one of the biggest disinformation and propaganda blogs on the web: The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews). It's best known for misleading reporting, disinformation and love of authoritarian regimes and dictators.

1/13 Image
Basically, if somewhere around the world there is an authoritarian leadership, Grayzone boys and girls will be quickly licking their boots. Same goes for genocide: if one is happening somewhere around the world, these "journalists" will deny it.

2/13 ImageImageImage
Grayzone was established by Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) after his visit to RT's 10th anniversary party in Moscow. Allegedly the trip was paid for by the Kremlin.The main contributors of the site at the moment are Blumenthal, Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate), ...

3/13 Image
Read 13 tweets
Dec 31, 2022
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.

1/11 ImageImage
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 Image
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.

3/11 Image
Read 11 tweets
Dec 29, 2022
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".

2/10
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, 2022
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 27, 2022
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
Read 12 tweets
Dec 26, 2022
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

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