In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing a Russian money launderer, convicted criminal and Prigozhin's personal propagandist, Oksana Vovk, also known as Mira Terada.
1/13
While living in the US, Oksana was pled guilty to money laundering and she was convicted to 30 months behind bars. She did plea in order to avoid a harsher conviction for drug trafficking.
2/13
Vovk was captured at Helsinki-Vantaa airport in Finland in 2018, and she was extradited into the US in 2019. After being released from prison, Vovk returned to Russia in 2021 where she started her new career as a state propagandist.
3/13
First, she organized a theatrical show where she posted a pile of letters of complaints about her stay in Finland. She claimed that Finland extradited her illegally to the US "to be tortured", she was put in a male prison (she was not), ...
4/13
... her medication was confiscated (they were not) and she wouldn't receive an important surgery while in Finland (she never had the surgery in Russia, either). She also declared that she was beat up by eight guards while naked in the US.
5/13
She stated that she'd been tortured for a whole year in a windowless cell, and that the guards played gun sounds 24/7 to "break her mind".
It almost sounds like they want to make the US prison system sound worse than the Russian one...
6/13
After returning to Russia, she was picked up by no other than Yevgeny Prigozhin to run a sham organization called "Foundation to Battle Injustice". At their front page, the first news is Tara Reade's claim that Joe Biden raped her.
7/13
So yeah, it's that kind of an organization. The site also states that Vovk was "wrongfully convicted", even though there was a mountain of evidence for the conviction and she actually plead guilty to it.
8/13
Finnish propagandist Janus Putkonen interviewed Oksana (and vice versa) in St. Petersburg in Jun, 2022. In this interview, Vovk repeated her accusations towards Finnish and US authorities, and said that she's running a foundation "for battling injustice in the world".
9/13
She had her own talk show, "Limits of Freedom" where he interviewed a Finnish pro-Putinist and MP, Ano Turtiainen. During the show, Mr Turtiainen claimed that Finland is "led from the outside" but that "real Finnish people" will not bend to the will of the EU and NATO.
10/13
He also stated that these "real Finnish" people want to keep up the old spirit of Finlandization and Russia-appeasing.
On 20, Jan, 2023, she organized an event called "International press forum Journalists under the scope: ...
11/13
... attacks on freedom of speech and reprisals against reporters" In this propaganda event she read propaganda statements from a paper and interviewed various disinformation and propaganda "journalists" such as Sonja van den Ende, from the West.
12/13
She also stated that the Grayzone blogger Max Blumenthal was persecuted in the US. As most of you know,the modus operandi of Prigozhin is to hire ex-convicts to do his dirty deeds & this is exactly what she did with Vovk.I'm sure we'll be seeing more of her BS in the future.13/13
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes). He’s best-known for his white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic rhetoric, and for being the poster boy for the so-called incel movement.
1/17
Like so many from the white supremacist movement, Fuentes dropped out of university after his freshman year. He studied introductory international relations, which apparently made him a geopolitics expert. Nick was introduced to the white supremacist movement at an…
2/17
..early age - he took part in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia. In 2017, Fuentes launched his political talk show “America First”. Initially the show was aired on Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network, but it was dropped after the rally.
3/17
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a social media personality and TV presenter, Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn). She’s best-known for her far-right rhetorics, spreading conspiracy theories, and spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives on Dutch television.
1/24
Raisa studied philosophy of law at Leiden University. The faculty is best-known for one of its professors, Paul Cliteur. He’s a member of the pro-Kremlin party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), where he is one of the leading figures.Cliteur is also known for supervising the FvD…
2/24
…founder Thierry Baudet’s doctoral thesis, and can be considered a central figure in this Dutch “anti-establishment” movement. While studying at Leiden, Raise also met her best friend forever, Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.
1/22
Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…
2/22
…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials - including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort - interacted intimately with…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’m going to outline the current situation in the West’s information war against Russia & its allies. Currently,the West’s counter-disinformation measures are severely underfunded,making it difficult to combat Russian influence operations effectively.
1/17
Europe today is repeating the same mistake in information warfare that it made in conventional warfare: we are not dedicating enough resources to counter it. Just as Europe was unprepared to fully support Ukraine and prepare for kinetic warfare against Russia,...
2/17
...we have been neglecting information warfare. Next year, Russia is reportedly set to spend around 3 billion USD on its information operations domestically and abroad, with allies like the CCP, Iran, and North Korea likely following suit.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (@Heritage). Heritage is best-known for opposing military aid to Ukraine and for their political initiative called Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a Trump presidency.
1/23
Before we begin, I want to justify this soup that focuses heavily on US domestic politics. As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I see Donald Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s existence, and the reasoning for that can be found in this previous soup:
Heritage was founded in 1973, but it took a leading role in conservative politics during the Reagan presidency, whose policies were mostly taken from the foundation’s book series called Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of this series.