Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture
Apr 18, 2023 20 tweets 10 min read Read on X
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russo-Serbian-American actor, martial artist and carrot-enjoyer, Steven Seagal. He's best-known for allegedly pooping his pants, for his praise of dictators around the world, for being a dick, and for his sexual harassment lawsuits.

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Seagal's roots go back to Russia, and his paternal grandparents were Russian Jewish (actual Russian Jewish, not the Donbass Devushka kind) immigrants. In an interview by Dmitry Borisov, ...

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...he stated that his paternal ancestry can be located to the Siberian city Vladivostok but also to Belarus and St. Petersburg.

Steven got into the movie business in 1987, when he cooperated in Above the Law with Andrew Davis. With zero acting skills and ...

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...experience in martial arts, he became one of the action movie B-listers, appearing in movies like Hard to Kill and Marked for Death. His wider success came from his 1992 movie, Under Siege. Until the early 2000s, Steven was somewhat successful action star, but after...

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...the relatively successful Exit Wounds (2001), most of his movies have been released as direct-to-video.

His success during the early 90s also landed him a spot as a host on Saturday Night Live. The series' Lorne Michaels, David Spade and Tim Meadows described Seagal...

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...as "show's worst host ever". They called on his humorlessness and on his ill-treatment of the cast and writers. Seagal also refused to do a skit with characters that had previously claimed they could "beat up Steven Seagal".

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Seagal has also been involved in various business endeavors, of which most have failed to make money. In 2005, his company Seagal Enterprises produced an energy drink, "Steven Seagal's Lightning Bolt", but the product was quickly discontinued.

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He's also launched an aftershave, "Scent of Action". In 2013, Seagal teamed up with Russian weapons manufacturer, ORSIS, to promote his signature rifle known as "ORSIS by Steven Seagal". He's also lobbyed for lifting off the US import restrictions on Russian firearms.

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In addition to collecting sword, Seagal also collects sexual harassment lawsuits. He's been involved in various harassment cases since the early 90s, and for example Portia de Rossi has told that he'd unzipped ...

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...his pants after saying "how important it was to have chemistry off-screen" during audition.

He also told then 16-year-old Katherine Heigl in 1994 that "he had girlfriends the same age". Seagal's also been accused of raping an 18-year-old.

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As so many Russian shills,Seagal has been involved in cryptocurrencies. In 2020, after failing to disclose payments for the promotion of Bitcoiin2Gen & agreed to pay a total of 314 000 USD as penalty. He's also been blamed by various stuntmen for intentionally hitting them.
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While filming the movie Out for Justice, Gene LeBell choked Seagal unconscious after Steven had claimed that his "immune" to such attacks. As a result, Seagal lost control of his bowels. This incident may be the reason why Putin likes him so much.

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Steven Seagal is a huge Putin fan, once describing him as "one of the great living world leaders". He showed strong support for the annexation of Crimea, and even appeared there in Aug, 2014, at an event organized by the motor cycle gang, Night Wolves. At the event, he ...

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...depicted Ukraine as a "country controlled by fascists". In 2016, Putin handed out a Russian passport to Seagal at an orchestrated event, but he had gotten his Russian citizenship already in Nov 2014, few months after appearing at the absurd event in Crimea.

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In May 2021, the fake opposition party A Just Russia - Patriots - For Truth announced that they are giving Steven an official membership card to their party. In Mar 2022, Seagal celebrated his 70th birthday in Moscow, with many guests under Western sanctions as guests.

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Later that year Steven visited Olenivka in Donetsk, with former Ponzi schemer and leader of the puppet state DPR, Denis Pushilin as his host. According to Pushilin, Seagal also interviewed Ukrainian POW's, thus breaking the Geneve convention.

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In 2013, Seagal was invited as a guest at Ramzan Kadyrov's birthday party in Chechnya. Steven called him a "great leader", and Kadyrov referred to him as “almost a Chechen national.”

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When visiting Belarussian dictator Lukashenko, Steven was given one carrot and one watermelon as a gift. After receiving the watermelon, he commented "Nice. Nice."

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In Feb 2023,he was awarded with the Russian Order of Friendship for his "major contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation".Earlier this month,it was reported that Russia has recruited Steven to teach martial arts to its soldiers.

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Support my work: buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi
Past soups: vatniksoup.com

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jun 8
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll talk about Finland and how pro-Kremlin propagandists have become more active in the Finnish political space since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For the first time since 2022, they’ve gained some political power in Finland.

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Russia’s political strategy in countries with Russian-speaking minorities (such as Finland and the Baltics) is typically quite similar: it seeks to rally these minorities around issues like language and minority rights, and then frames the situation as oppression.

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At the same time, Russian speakers are extremely wary and skeptical of local media, and instead tend to follow Russian domestic outlets like Russia-1 and NTV, thereby reinforcing an almost impenetrable information bubble.

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Read 17 tweets
Jun 2
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the Ukrainian SBU’s “Spiderweb” operation and the main disinformation narrative vatniks have been spreading during the afterfall. While domestic Russian media stays silent, the vatniks and Russian milbloggers have been extremely loud.

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This operation was probably the most impactful strike since the drowning of the Moskva, massively reducing Russia’s capability to bomb Ukrainian cities (or anyone else’s). It involved smuggling 117 FPV drones hidden in trucks into Russia. Once near airbases,…

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…the roofs opened remotely, launching drones in synchronized waves to strike targets up to 4,000 km away. The mission took 18 months to plan. The unsuspecting Russian truck drivers who transported them had no idea they were delivering weapons deep behind their own lines.

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Read 21 tweets
May 28
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Russian movie director, propagandist, and former priest: Ivan Okhlobystin. He’s best known for his strong support for the war on Ukraine and for his radical views, which are often used as a testbed for the domestic Russian audience.

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Ivan was born in 1966 from a short-lived marriage between a 62-year-old chief physician and a 19-year-old engineering student. She later remarried, and the family moved from Kaluga province to Moscow. Ivan kept the surname Okhlobystin from his biological father.

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After moving to Moscow, Ivan began studying at VGIK film school. He soon became a playwright for theatre productions and also wrote for Stolitsa magazine, which he later left because, as he put it, “it had become a brothel.”

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Read 21 tweets
May 22
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Ukrainian-born former State Duma deputy, Vladimir Medinsky. He is best known as one of the ideologues of the “Russkiy Mir”, for his close ties to Vladimir Putin, and for leading the “peace talks” in Turkey in 2022 and 2025.

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During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medinsky interned as a correspondent on the international desk of the TASS news agency, learning the ways of propaganda at an early age. Some time later, he earned two PhDs – one in political science and the other in history.

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As is tradition in Russia, Medinsky’s academic work was largely pseudo-scientific and plagiarized. Dissernet found that 87 of 120 pages in his dissertation were copied from his supervisor’s thesis. His second dissertation was also heavily plagiarized.

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Read 21 tweets
May 15
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce an American social media influencer, Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson). He’s best known for his plagiarism while working as a clickbait “journalist”, and for being paid by the Kremlin to spread anti-Ukraine and anti-Democratic narratives.

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Benny graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009 with a degree in developmental psychology. His former high school buddy described him as the “smartest, most articulate kid in school,” and was disappointed to see him turn into a “cheating, low standard hack.”

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After graduating, Benny dived directly into the world of outrage media. Benny’s first job was writing op-eds for far-right website Breitbart, from where he moved on to TheBlaze, a conservative media owned by Glenn Beck, and a spring board for many conservative influencers.

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Read 24 tweets
May 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Cypriot politician and social media personality, Fidias Panayiotou (@Fidias0). He’s best known for his clickbait YouTube stunts and for voting against aid to Ukraine and the return of abducted Ukrainian children from Russia.

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Fidias hails from Meniko, Cyprus. In 2019, he began posting videos on YouTube. After a slow start, he found his niche with clickbaity, MrBeast-style content featuring silly stunts, catchy titles and scripted dialogue. Today, Fidias has 2,7 million subscribers on YouTube.

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Fidias’s channel started with trend-riding, but he found his niche in traveling without money — aka freeloading. In one video, he fare-dodged on the Bengaluru Metro. The train authority responded by saying they would file a criminal case against him.

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Read 22 tweets

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