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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Mar 20, 2023 • 19 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatnik soup, I'll introduce a Spanish-Russian "journalist" & political scientist,Liubov "Liu" Sivaya (@liusivaya). She's best-known for her YouTube channel where she spreads pro-Kremlin narratives and denies war crimes conducted by the Russian military for money.
1/18
I consider Sivaya to be a part of the group of "relatively attractive, young women who do pro-Kremlin propaganda" along with people like Mira Terada, Maria Butina, Alina Lipp and Anna Chapman.

She'll probably join some Prigozhin-run propaganda committee in the near future.

2/18
Sivaya has lived in Spain for 10 years, and she's claimed and received Spanish citizenship, and on occasion she has exhibited both passports online in order to defend herself from critics, whilst being fully aware that Spain does not allow double citizenship with Russia.

3/18
Liubov's been actively trying to get into politics for years, and she's tried all political parties ranging from left to right: in Spain, she's toured the PSOE (center left), Ciudadanos (center to center right), PP (right) and VOX (far right).

4/18
This identity crisis finally landed her into the political landscape of "anti-woke", where she emphasizes the importance of traditional values - you know, the kind that Russia preaches but does not practice.

5/18
She's gained quite a lot of traction with the Spanish speaking audience by criticizing the current Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez.

6/18
Liu has participated in several talk-shows on channels such as Cuatro and 7NN where she tells the fairy tale of "eight years of bombing of the Donbas" and spouts on about the alleged persecution of Russians "unlike we've never seen before in history of mankind".

7/18
She's among the group of pro-Russian propagandists or so-called "independent journalists" that claim to "show you what the mainstream media won't show you", meaning that they travel around Donbas with Russian soldiers and produce solid propaganda for the information war.

8/18
In April 2022, Liu, together with notorious denialist of Russian war crimes and lawyer, Ruben Gisbert, visited the occupied Donbas under an armed escort by the authorities of the Russian puppet states DPR and LPR.

9/18
Soon after that, Liu decided to settle on an apparent permanent basis in the Russian occupied territories, from where she keeps working under the protection of the Russian authorities.

10/18
Liu's discourse has evolved from open and staunch denial of the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, up to a repeat of all Kremlin talking points on short videos, in a way similar in both presentation and content to Alina Lipp, Vanessa Beeley and Sonja van den Ende.11/18
She's also occasionally interviewed Finnish propagandist Janus Putkonen on her videos. Putkonen's financial ties to Kremlin we're proved through the 2016 Doni News e-mail leak. Liu even visited Finland where she interviewed people about their NATO stance.

12/18
Amongst the arguments that she keeps repeating are the false flag claim regarding the Mariupol Theater attack, a war crime where over 600 civilians were killed in a Russian air-raid whilst hiding in a building marked with the word "children".

13/18
She's also reported from "rebuilt Mariupol" where the Russians have been building a Potemkin village for propaganda purposes. In her YouTube video she showcases playgrounds, brand new apartments for the residents and other reconstruction projects around the city, ...

14/18
...and of course interviews pro-Russian actors who condemn the evil Ukrainian Nazis and thank their liberators. For obvious reasons, Mariupol has become the main stage for crisis actors and fake "rebuilding efforts" initiated by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

15/18
One can only guess why Liubov is doing this: based on her "political tourism", one could argue that it's all for attention,yet another motivator could be just money.Some have even suggested that she's infiltrated the Spanish society for years, only to become active later on.16/18
It may be that Sivaya has moved to Russia and/or to the illegally annexed areas for good. She's still producing pro-Kremlin propaganda on almost daily basis for her Spanish audience - her latest video focused on "debunking the disinformation spread by the West" - which...

17/18
...indicates that there's still money to be made in this arena of lies.

As I have said before, the West has a blind eye for the Russian propaganda and disinformation spread throughout the Global South, which may partly explain their pro-Russian attitudes towards the war.

18/18
Support my work (and get some AI art!): buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com
Related soups:
Alina Lipp:
Sonja van den Ende:
"Genocide in Donbas":
Architecture:

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

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.

2/20 Image
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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
Vatnik Soup 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.

3/20 Image
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Read 20 tweets

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