In today's #vatniksoup I'm going to talk about the "antiwar movement". After Putin organized the fake referendums in the four Ukrainian Oblasts,various pro-Kremlin parties started calling for immediate peace in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, the movement was planned by the Kremlin.1/18
In Sep 2022, Russia organized referendums to join Ukrainian Oblasts of Kherson,Zaporizhzhia,Donetsk & Luhansk to the Russian Federation.The whole scenario was absurd - everyone knew that the referendums were totally fake & Russia didn't even control any of these areas fully.
2/18
And suddenly, hundreds of vatnik voices around the world started touting one thing, and one thing only: peace.
3/18
The same people who had spread lies about bioweapons labs, "Ukrainian neo-Nazis", "genocide in Donbas", had decided that it is time to forget all these atrocities, and called for immediate peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
4/18
On 25 Feb 2023, 13 000 demonstrators gathered at the Brandenburg Gate, calling for an end to the weapons supplies to Ukraine and yelling slogans like "Lift the anti-Russian sanctions!" and "Launch Nord Stream 2 immediately!".
5/18
As you can already guess, this was no coincedence. On 21 Apr 2023, WaPo with @CatherineBelton published an article on how the Kremlin has been trying to build "antiwar coalition" in Germany. These plans were exposed by a European intelligence service and reviewed by WaPo.
6/18
In many ways, it proved something that has been theorized on Twitter for a long time: the Russians are trying to unite the political opposites on the far-left (die Linke) and on the far-right (AfD).
7/18
The so-called horseshoe theory suggests that, rather than being at opposing ends on the political continuum, they closely resemble each other.
Proponents of theory suggest that both extremes tend to support authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
8/18
The documents showed that the Russian political strategists had met with Kremlin officials, and that the officials ordered the strategists to focus on building antiwar sentiment in Europe in order to reduce the support for Ukraine with slogans like "Buy gas, not war" and ...
9/18
"Ukraine wants war, Germany want peace".
The documents also revealed that one person close to far-left politician Sahra Wagenknecht, and several AfD members were in contact with Russian officials while these plans were being laid out.
10/18
The plan even included highly detailed, anti-US graffiti that would be painted on the walls across Germany.
These rallies were organized throughout Germany, from a small town of Neustrelitz to Stuttgart, and it included demonstrations led by the Reichsbürger, a movement...
11/18
... that rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. 25 members of the group were arrested in Dec 2022, for allegedly planning a coup d'état in Germany.
12/18
The AfD is full of Putin apologists like MEP Maximillian Krah, stating that the war in Ukraine was started by the US, and that Russia was only defending itself. Various AfD members have also been offered all-expenses-paid trips to Russia throughout the years.
13/18
Now, this is exactly what has been happening in the US. The so-called "far-left", including the grifters from @TheGrayzoneNews blog, organized the lackluster Rage Against the War Machine event. And boy oh boy, was it a one big horseshoe gathering.
14/18
It featured, among others, the CodePink movement, the communists, and far-right figures like the white supremacists Matthew Heimbach and RapeWaffen (TG group advocating white supremacy extremism, neo-Nazi Satanism and and rape against women) member Shandon Simpson.
15/18
Recently one of the main speakers at Rage, Jimmy Dore, declared his candidacy for the presidential election of 2024. In the US, they call this pro-Russian movement "anti-neocon" and "anti-globalist", whereas in other countries it's mostly referred as the latter.
16/18
The "anti-globalist" movement often spices up their rhetoric with conspiracy theories involving George Soros, Klaus Schwab and the like, stating that there's a "deep state" trying to take control of all of us.
17/18
Now, when talking with these "antiwar people", it is important to ask them: when did you start supporting for peace? If there's no sign of them calling for peace negotiations before Sep 2022, there's a high probability that they're rootin' for Putin.
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.
1/16
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.
2/16
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.
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.
1/20
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,…
2/20
…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.
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.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.”
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.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.
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.
1/23
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.”
2/23
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.
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.
1/20
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.
2/20
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.