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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.
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Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.
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Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.
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NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”. 2/7
To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.
1/20
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.
But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:
Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.
1/20
In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:
The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered… 1/5
…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse. 2/5
Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare. 3/5
In this 6th Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about a complex and controversial topic: conscription. It is used by vatniks to attack Ukraine for drafting men to fight, while conveniently ignoring the alternative, including the horrors of conscription into the Russian army. 1/8
Military obligations are a reality in many countries, from the most peaceful democracies to the most tyrannical dictatorships — unless you have “bone spurs”. Some argue it is a necessity for defense against invading armies, especially for small countries. 2/8
Others point out that it goes against individual rights or that a professional army is better. And Zelenskyy might agree: he did in fact end conscription. But then a full-scale invasion happened: exactly why many nations, including the US, still keep some form of draft. 3/8