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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Feb 25, 2023 • 17 tweets • 8 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatnik soup I'll be introducing an American journalist, author and a podcaster, Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled). Ames is best-known for being the editor of the eXile tabloid in Moscow between 1997 and 2008, and for co-hosting the Radio War Nerd podcast.

1/16
Mark established the eXile in 1997 while living in Moscow. Shortly after starting it, he hired Matt Taibbi to work with him. The tabloid consisted of articles mainly on politics, organized crime, prostitution, sex and drug use.

2/16
In 2000 Taibbi and Ames published a book about their adventures in Russia called "The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia". Based on an Observer interview from 2000 Ames quickly delved into sexual escapades with Russian ladies, stating that getting attention...

3/16
...from Russian girls was something new, and he stated that "I didn’t even think of women anymore because they could just smell failure on me". Then, he continued that in Russia "It was pretty much just fuck whoever you wanted to". Based on Taibbi, Ames was...

4/16
..."universally loathed in the Moscow foreign community".

"Tens of millions of people live in dire circumstances, stranded in the center of the world’s largest continent, with little hope of going anywhere," Mark claimed."Which means–sexual opportunity for me”, he continued.5/16
Then he claimed that "Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them", and that "it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that’s what they want, it’s like a mock rape."

6/16
In their book, Ames described another scenario where he had sex with a pregnant 15-year old girl. He then wrote: "Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely." In the book, he also threatened to kill a pregnant Russian girl if ...

7/16
... she didn't do an abortion. Their book was described as "nonfiction" but both Taibbi and Ames later said, on many, many occasions, that the whole thing written as a satire. Incidentally, Mark's ex-girlfriend has called him a "fucking psychopath".

8/16
Why write about all this,if not to defame Mark? Because Russia has an age-old strategy that they've been using effectively for decades:kompromat.Spending 10 years in Russia,using drugs & having casual sex to me seems like a perfect scenario for becoming a target of blackmail.9/16
When it comes to his views on Russia, Ukraine and the war, we can clearly see where Mark stands. He masks his pro-Russian stance as anti-imperialism and hate for the CIA and the "neocons".

10/16
Ames blamed the US for most of Russia's problems, including the chaotic times during the 90's, Putin's election rigging and the rise of the far-right within Putin's government. Ames was also rejoicing over Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008.

11/16
Like a good Putin's puppy, he likes to talk about the "Azon nationalists" and "Banderites". He's called the Yuschenko regime "hard-line, monocultural, nationalistic". He criticized Zelenskyy for publishing the arrest picture of Viktor Medvedchuk, ...

12/16
Putin's old pal who funded false flag operations and large media operations to help Yanukovych at the presidential election already back in 2004. In the eXile, Ames has often written about a Russian politician Eduard Limonov who founded the National Bolshevik Party...

13/16
...together with Aleksandr Dugin and Yegor Letov in
1993.
John Dolan and Mark Ames have featured the pro-Russian Grayzone blogger Max Blumenthal in their War Nerd podcast. They were also the first people to interview Seymour Hersh after the publication of his fictitious...14/16
...story on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. Ames has also attacked the Bellingcat multiple times, stating that they're funded by the CIA and blamed them smearing Seymour Hersh already back in 2017 after Hersh's article "Trump's Red Line".

15/16
Ames' audience is of course the Americans. He's trying to convince people, that the US leadership (excluding Trump) has meddled with Russia & Ukraine for too long,and that the military aid should be stopped.He barely speaks of Russia's imperialism and their barbaric history.16/16
Support my work (and get some AI art!): buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
Viktor Medvedchuk:
Max Blumenthal:
Alexander Dugin:
Seymour Hersh:

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup Profile picture
May 11
In this 9th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss “legitimate military targets”. Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, with no declaration of war, hiding behind a “special military operation”. Yet vatniks & useful idiots pretend Russia has any legitimate or lawful targets in Ukraine.

1/8 May 6, 2026, Sumy, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine Russian drones hit a kindergarten in central Sumy. Two women were killed and seven injured. Photo: Suspilne Sumy
Russia started the war in 2014 by seizing Crimea with unmarked soldiers, “little green men”. Russians have been waging an undeclared, illegal war with endless war crimes ever since, whether it’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children with genocidal intent…

2/8
… the concentration camps for Ukrainians under occupation, conscripting Ukrainians from occupied territories, or the terrorist, deliberate bombing of civilians, including their infamous “double tap” strikes.

So no, Russia does not have any “legitimate targets” in Ukraine.

3/8
Margarita Simonyan, head of Putin’s state propaganda media RT: “We are bombing everyday.”
Read 8 tweets
Vatnik Soup 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 21 tweets
Vatnik Soup 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
Vatnik Soup 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
Vatnik Soup 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
Vatnik Soup 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

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