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Feb 14, 2023 18 tweets 8 min read Read on X
In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing a Portuguese "independent journalist" and a politician, Bruno Carvalho. Carvalho is part of the gang that does live - and often staged - reports from Russian-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.

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Bruno's political affiliation is with the communists, and he was elected to city hall of Amadora as a member of the communist party CDU/PCP. Allegedly he joined the party at a very young age, as there's video footage of a 19-year old Bruno being interviewed about politics.

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Perhaps due to his political background, Carvalho is all about them Ukrainian nazis. He calls the Azov Regiment "the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion", being consistent with the views of his party, PCP.

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In May, 2022, he published an image on Telegram of "Mein Kampf", a book written by Austrian politician Adolf Hitler, on top of a Ukrainian flag. He claimed that his "fellow journalist" found the book inside an empty house in Rubizhne.

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Interestingly, he also claimed that it was the ONLY book found inside the house, suggesting that someone really loves Hitler over there in Luhansk Oblast.

Carvalho stated that no one else was present when they entered the apartment, but a video published by the Russians...
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suggest otherwise: it clearly shows that he entered the flat together with Russian soldiers.

He's also interviewed people who were "robbed" by the Ukrainian forces, and denied all sorts of war crimes conducted by the Russian forces, including mass graves in Mariupol.

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In addition, this heroic "independent journalist" has reported on Ukrainian Tochka-U missiles that, based on Bruno, were used to attack civilians in the puppet states of DPR & LPR. During the fake referendums, Carvalho claimed on a news broadcast that "Donetsk is a country".
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Carvalho has also been a target of criticism in Portugal. For example, João Galamba, Minister of Infrastructure has mocked him and the content he's shared on Twitter. Carvalho considered this a serious attack against his journalistic integrity and demanded an intervention... 8/17 Image
... from the Journalist's Union.

Now here comes the interesting part: Bruno Carvalho is a contributor for @cnnportugal. On their website, you can see various video reports from Bruno with titles like ...

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... "It's very difficult to justify a narrative that says it's the Russians who are bombing themselves" and "I counted at least 50 rockets in this zone alone: this is the result of hours of consecutive attacks in Donetsk". You know, variations of the "genocide in Donbas"...
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... narrative that Russia has been pushing since 2014. It is necessary to have reports from both sides of the conflict, but the other side shouldn't be covered by "journalists" who have no respect towards journalistic ethics.

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Former MEP Ana Gomes asked the CNN about the issue,but neither @CNN or @cnnportugal responded to her.Carvalho's shared a video of Zelenskyy with subtitles that turned out the be fake. He added a "correction" that suggested that the "opinions are divided" on what Zelenskyy...12/17 ImageImage
...actually said, which of course isn't true. As of today, Bruno's tweet is still available.

Carvalho's been also going on about the Minsk agreement. He's stated that Zelenskyy should've complied with the Minsk agreements instead of pushing for NATO.

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But as many of you know, Russia never complied with the Minsk agreement, either. I'm by no means expert on this topic, but please read this fantastic analysis by @neil_abrams for more information:


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Russia has a huge propaganda network in Latin America, and news channels like RT Español and Sputnik Mundo are very popular there. Portuguese is an official language in Brazil, a country with population of over 200 million people.

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Yet it is kind of a "blind spot" for the Western analysts focusing on Russian propaganda and disinformation. "Journalists" like Carvalho have large presence in these areas, and their pro-Russian narratives are often published without any criticism.

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In addition, contributing for a prestigious and well-known brand such as CNN, Bruno's considered as a reliable source of information.

Thank you for the sous-chef @Cbritinha and the rest of the Portuguese team for helping me to prepare this soup.

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

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
"Genocide in Donbas":

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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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