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 #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American economist and academic and political commentator, Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs). He's best-known for his deep hate for the "US hegemony", and for his love for the totalitarian regimes in Russia, China and in Syria.
1/18
Sachs studied economics at Harvard and is currently working as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and as the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
2/18
He's advised various countries on economic policy, including Bolivia, United Arab Emirates and several post-communist economies, often advising with transition from Marxism-Leninism to market economies.
Next I'll talk about the distress of the Finnish pro-Kremlin scene. The whole gang is suffering of a serious election hangover - the results were devastating and not-so-suprisingly none of them were elected. The Grand Old Vatnik, @johanbek has mostly been joking around,...
9/17
...@HuuhtanenPanu has his full focus on the class action lawsuit against me and probably the whole of NATO, and the Kremlin-paid @janus_putkonen had most of his money stolen by his long-time associate, Jonathan Widell.
In today's #vatniksoup and in the first edition of "Where are they now?",I'll do an update on some of your favorite vatniks around the world, and report on what they've been up to.
If there's someone or something you'd like to hear more about, let me know in the comments👇
1/17
Let's start with everyone's favorite former naval officer, Sarah "Donbass Devushka" Bils. She recently gave an interview to RT, where she doubled down on her previous statements, stating that "truth is our most potent weapon".
2/17
That's a weird statement coming from a person who faked to be a "poor woman from Lugansk", Latvian, Gazan, and so on.
Now, what's even funnier, that on 24 Mar 2022, she faked that her father was in Mariupol (thank you NAFO investigators!).
Banks started his work career at the insurance market, eventually becoming a relatively successful businessman. According to The Guardian, Banks had set up 37 different companies with slight variations of his name.
4/20
Three of them had the same date of birth but listed different companies. When asked about this, Arron's spokesperson declared that he'd prefer to "correct [the Guardian’s] mistakes in court".
One of Banks' companies, Eldon Insurance, increased its profits by almost...
5/20
...17 million £ for the first half of 2017. He claimed that this profit increase was due to the same AI technology that they used in the Brexit campaign. Banks is also involved in mining in South Africa and has connections to companies based in Gibraltar and the Isle of Man.
6/20
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll discuss Russian online information operations, and how they are perceived around the world. In the West, we often perceive this propaganda only targeted at us, which is far from the truth.
1/17
As I've written previously, the idea of Russian information operations date back to days of KGB, and it is part of the, aktivnye meropriyatiya, or active measures. Active measures includes activities like espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination, and it is ...
2/17
...and was part of Russia's foreign policy. Another related term related to info ops is hybrid warfare, which is a theory of military strategy that blends conventional warfare with irregular warfare, cyberwarfare and warfare in the information space.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American political consultant and lobbyist, Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr). He's best-known for his work as an advisor to Donald Trump & for his alleged connections with Julian Assange and the GRU in relation to the leaked DNC e-mails.
1/20
Stone has been involved US politics for a long time, and he'd started his dirty tricks already in 1972, when he contributed money to Nixon's rival under the name of Trotskyist youth group, and tipped about this to the local news.
2/20
In 1977, he won the presidency of the Young Republicans with Paul Manafort as his campaign manager. In 1980, Stone and Manafort launched a lobbying company, BMS, together with partner Charlie Black. The company represented basically anyone with money, including Zaire's...