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 #vatnik soup I'll introduce yet another "independent journalist". She's an American Canadian conspiracy theorist and propagandist, Eva Bartlett. Eva is part of the "may be partially or wholly under the editorial control of the Russian government" gang.
1/10
Like so many of these so-called journalists, she started as a Palestine activists, and she was a campaigner for the International Solidarity Movement. Bartlett visited Gaza several times, reported about the situation there in her blog.
2/10
She also did speaking tours around North America. Eventually she moved on to Syrian civil war.
These days Bartlett is very much in the same group of al-Assad and Putin apologists as the Grayzone blogger Max Blumenthal, Sonja van den Ende and Vanessa Beeley.
In today's #vatnik soup, I'll talk about Russiagate and the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Twitter Files by @mtaibbi and The Grayzone blogger @aaronjmate have often suggested that the Russians had no effect on the election, which simply isn't true.
1/17
Many pro-Russian actors have been downplaying the effects of Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns during the 2016 elections.
In Jan, 2023, Eady et al. published their research on Nature Communications which concluded that ...
2/17
on Twitter, 1) the Russian disinformation was heavily concentrated, 2) the exposure was focused on people who identify as Republicans, and 3) the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group. I have written about the topic before, but now that it's been designated as a Transnational Criminal Organization by the US, we should reiterate some key points and update the latest news about them.
1/16
Wagner is a Russian paramilitary organization that consists of network of mercenaries, and many consider it to be the private army of Putin. Private military companies are actually illegal in Russia, so basically the group operates beyond the law.
2/16
Despite of its illegality, Wagner trains its personnel in a Russian MoD facility, Molkino. This camp is masked as a "children's vacation camp". New Lines magazine concluded that Wagner members come from fifteen different countries, but most of them are Russian.
In today's #vatnik soup I'll introduce a Dutch "independent journalist", a columnist and a conspiracy theorist, Sonja van den Ende (@SonjaEnde). Sonja was recruited to report on Ukraine by Alexander Dugin through his Euroasia organization in March, 2022.
1/12
Before the invasion, she was reporting from Syria, and even claimed to be related to the al-Assad family through her now-ex husband. She has accused the US and Israel of mass murder in Syria, and has praised Putin for his help in "defending the Syrian people".
2/12
Van den Ende has spread conspiracy theories about the Syrian volunteer group the White Helmets, and she was also (naturally) involved in various COVID-19 and WEF related conspiracies.
In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing an Australian propagandist and ex-news reporter, Mary Kostakidis (@MaryKostakidis). She's best known for her storming out from the SBS newsroom in 2007, after which she's been mostly doing hot takes on the US & NATO, Russia & China.1/11
Mary was setting up the SBS Television in the early 80s, and presented World News on the channel until 2007. In Aug, 2007, she stormed out of the SBS newsroom, protesting the increase in advertising time during the program and never looked back.
2/11
She's a former Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation, a non-profit that's associated with the University of Sydney. They present the annual "Sydney Peace Prize", and some of the winners of this trophy include John Pilger and Noam Chomsky.
In today's #vatnik soup and the newest edition of "You pronounced this nonsense, not me", I'll talk about the NATO expansion and how - according to Russia - NATO and the West are actually at fault for the war in Ukraine.
1/13
In 2007, around the same time when Russia started their "economic war" against Europe, Putin held a fiery speech at a Munich Security Conference in which he accused the West of expanding NATO, thus breaking a "solemn pledge" given by a US secretary ...
2/13
... of state James A. Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. According to some, Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany's unification.
But this was never agreed. What Baker actually promised was that NATO would expand ...