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Grok Profile picture
@grok
Feb 8, 2023 • 15 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatnik soup, I'll introduce a Ukrainian businessman, Dmytro Firtash. He's best known for funneling money into the pro-Russian political campaigns in Ukraine. He's also been connected to the Russian Mafia boss Semion Mogilevich.

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Firtash established his trading company Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and eventually moved to Moscow in the early 1990s. Firtash's diversified international group companies, Group DF, concentrates on chemical industry and energy and real estate sectors.

2/14
In addition to Group DF, Firtash is co-owner of RosUkrEnergy, a Swiss-registered company that's 50% owned by Gazprom, and the other 50% of ownership can be connected to Firtash and Ivan Fursin.

3/14
In Apr, 2005, Oleksandr Turchynov, the head of Ukraine's SBU, stated that the Russian Mafia boss Semion Mogilevich is a silent partner in RosUkrEnergy and that the SBU had a huge file on Mogilevich's businesses during a 12 year time period.

4/14
A leaked cable revealed that Firtash had told the US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor that he needed permission from Mogilevich to do business in Ukraine during the '90s. It's also suspected that the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank was used as a front to legimitize RosUkrEnergo.5/14
In 2008, Firtash, together with Paul Manafort, was transforming the Drake Hotel in NYC into a spa and luxury mall named Bulgari Tower. The project was worth 895 million USD of which Dmytro was supposed to provide 100 million USD, but the deal was never finalized.

6/14
Firtash financed pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych's campaign in the Ukrainian presidential election in 2010. Once elected, he urged Yanukovych to adopt different policies and learn from the events of the Orange Revolution.

7/14
In Jun, 2021, Ukraine imposed sanctions against Dmytro because apparently his titanium businesses aided the "military-industrial complex of the Russian Federation".

8/14
In Aug, 2021, the Zaporizhya Titanium-Magnesium Plant was returned from Firtash to state-ownership because the plant owner Firtash hadn't invested the required assets for its modernization.

9/14
In Mar, 2014, Austrian authorities arrested Firtash in Vienna, as the US law enforcement wanted to have him extradited to the US on bribery and racketeering charges. A week after his arrest, he was released on bail of 125 million USD, the largest in Austrian history.

10/14
Austrian Supreme Court cleared his first extradition request in 2019. He was also investigated for money laundering in Spain in 2017, but this case was dropped due to "insufficient documentation".

11/14
The US prosecutors filed lawsuits against Firtash in 2017, alleging that he was involved in bribery that supported the Russian Mafia bosses. Allegedly he also attempted to "find dirt" on former VP Joe Biden before the 2020 US presidential election.

12/14
As of 2016, Dmytro and his family - excluding his oldest daughter Ivanna - were all Russian citizens. Firtash acquired a nice villa on the Cote d'Azur of France through the Irish firm Morga Ltd. Dmytro Firtash is living under house arrest in Austria.

13/14
In Apr,2022,Dmytro denounced Putin, saying that "he is never going to come out victorious."Regarding his political stance and businesses,he stated that "I was never pro-Russian, but you have to understand that I am a businessman. And my goal is to earn money. That’s my job."14/14
Support my work (and get some AI art!): buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
Paul Manafort:
Austria:

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More from @grok

Grok Profile picture
May 1
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

1/20 Hasan Piker in Havana, Cuba
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.

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His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.

3/20

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Read 20 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Apr 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.

1/20 Image
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.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
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.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 29
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.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
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 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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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.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion. Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 9
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 Image
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:

2/20
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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.

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Read 20 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 2
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 Image
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:

2/20
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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.

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Read 20 tweets

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