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Feb 12, 2023 16 tweets 7 min read Read on X
In today's 100th edition of #vatnik soup I'll talk about false flags and casus belli. Russia has utilized false flag tactics to justify their aggression in various conflicts in the past, and they will probably try to use them in the future, too.

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But first let's talk what so-called false flag operations are. The term comes from 16th century naval warfare, where pirates and privateers flew the neutral or a friendly flag to hide their true identity which allowed them to move closer to the enemy before attacking them.

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The first known use of false flag operations as pretext for war was the Russo-Swedish War, when in 1788 the Swedish sewed Russian military uniforms in order to stage an attack on Swedish outpost, Puumala. Russians probably learned a thing or two from this operation.

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The Soviets used this tactic in Nov, 1939, when the Soviet army shelled Mainila, a Russian village near the border of Finland. The Soviets then blamed the Finnish for this incident and used it a casus belli - a justification for war - starting Winter War some days later.

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In 1968, the Kremlin used the KGB to organize a false flag operation in Czechoslovakia to justify a Soviet intervention in the country. Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubček was attempting to adopt democratic reforms in the country, calling it a "socialism with a human face".

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After the collapse of the USSR, KGB archives revealed that Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov used 20 so-called illegals who posed as students, journalists, etc. to fabricate stories that attacked the reformists, tried to get anti-Soviet articles published in the local ...

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media, and planted evidence of a "Western plot" to support the reformists. Sound familiar?

Then, in 1999 Putin used this age-old tactic to fortify his leadership position in Russia. Several apartment buildings in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk were bombed, ...

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killing more than 300 civilians and injuring over 1000. These bombings were then blamed on the Chechen rebels and they were used as a justification for what eventually became the Second Chechen War.

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These bombs were planted by the FSB,but one of the bombs located in Ryazan failed to detonate & was found in a basement. A telephone service employee tapped a suspicious call from Ryazan to Moscow & overheard instructions: "Leave one at a time, there are patrols everywhere".
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The phone call was traced to FSB offices. FSB later explained that the "bomb was fake" & that the whole thing was a "training exercise".Additionally,Russian politician Gennadiy Seleznyov announced one of the explosions in the Russian Duma three days before it even happened.10/15 Image
Several pro-Russian "independent journalists" have been reporting alleged false flag operations in Ukraine. One of these incidents was reported by Patrick Lancaster in the puppet state of DPR.He published a staged video of a "pre-war provocation" from Donbas, in which IED...11/15 ImageImage
... had allegedly killed one of the military commanders of the made-up state of DPR. Explosive weapons expert and a forensic pathologist concluded that the whole scene was staged and the bodies were actually cadavers with evident autopsy marks on their skulls.

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But most of the Russian efforts to conduct false flag operations in Ukraine before and after the full-scale invasion have failed. This is due a drastic change in how intelligence services report their findings - US and UK officials have shared their intel openly with ...

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... prominent newspapers, who have then reported these plans. It is very difficult to do an operation when everyone's already aware it might happen. This rather genius tactic has faltered most of Russia's false flag attempts.

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These days both Ukraine and Russia blame the other party of planning false flag operations, but after the full-scale invasion the number of actual operations has been surprisingly low.

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Support my work (and get some AI art!): buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
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More from @P_Kallioniemi

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
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.

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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:

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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
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.

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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:

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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
Feb 25
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…
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…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.
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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.
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Read 5 tweets
Feb 18
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.
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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.
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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.
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Read 8 tweets
Feb 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.

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But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.

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Read 16 tweets

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