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
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
... 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.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, made together with chef invité @Martinlaineolen, we discuss the extensive links between pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and how Western politicians reinforced these links.
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While MAGA influencers remain silent on Epstein, pro-Kremlin propagandists and bot farms have expectedly launched an anti-Ukraine online operation, spreading fake narratives that connect Ukraine, its politicians, and the late sex trafficker.
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But the emails paint a very different picture: in reality, Epstein had very close connections with Russian officials and intelligence operatives, and even built bridges and arranged meetings between MAGA figures and the Kremlin.
In this 5th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss something that sounds great in theory, but was completely turned upside-down by the tankie kind of vatnik: anti-imperialism. More consistent anti-imperialists call this the “anti-imperialism of idiots”. 1/5
“Anti-imperialism” was popularized by Lenin, who saw imperialism as the ultimate stage of capitalism. Ironically, the largest empire is now… Putin’s Russia, proud heir to both Lenin’s Soviet Union and to the Tsarist Empire. 2/5
Indeed, Russia is an empire that is still ruled by a de facto all-powerful Tsar, that still proudly flies its imperial flag, that still dreams of expanding its already huge territory through brutal conquest and colonization. 3/5
In this 4th Debunk of the Day, we’ll refute an absolute classic of vatnik BS, the crown jewel of peak dishonesty: whataboutism.
Now, not everything that looks like whataboutism is wrong. Seeking consistency or comparing actions or responses is normal. 1/5
But when someone pulls some completely unrelated event, that happened to completely different people, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you know what you’re dealing with: a crass denial of the problem at hand, a bad-faith attempt to derail the topic. 2/5
Logic or chronology plays no role here, nor your opinion on these other topics. You could be the staunchest critic or supporter of these other actions thrown into the discussion, it doesn’t matter. It is irrelevant whether these other things are true or not, or bad or not. 3/5
In this 3rd Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about… “ending” the war by surrendering or ceding territory.
Nearing four years of the 2-day “special military operation”, Russia is desperate to obtain through other means what they failed to conquer on the battlefield. 1/5
An endless army of vatniks therefore tries to demoralize both Ukrainians and supporters.
They sound noble: “anti-war” or concerned about the fate of Ukraine’s civilians, soldiers and cities. They claim that if we just stop fighting or helping, this horror would magically end. 2/5
What they never mention is… WHO started the war, WHO murders Ukrainians, WHO destroys Ukrainian cities: the same monsters they suggest Ukrainians be at the mercy of. Surrendering wouldn’t end the atrocities of the occupation, it would enable them. Surrendering wouldn’t even…3/5
In today’s Debunk of the Day (2), we’ll look at… nuclear blackmail. Vatniks love using Russia’s nuclear threats as a reason for surrendering or for not lifting a finger to help Ukraine: “see, they have nukes, we have to give them whatever they want”.
The argument is absurd: 1/5
Nuclear deterrence has been a reality for decades. Both the US and Russia have lost wars without resorting to nukes. We are not submitting to the whims of Pakistan or North Korea either. For vatniks, it’s just an insidious way of siding with Putin. 2/5
We can’t just give in to the Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail, to the threats their officials and propagandists make five times a day to scare us into letting them have something they know perfectly well is not theirs, with no limit to their appetite. 3/5 vatniksoup.com/en/nuclear-thr…
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
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Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
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She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.