In today's #vatniksoup, I'm going to talk about MICE. Not the rodent, but an acronym that originates from CIA recruitment strategy used in espionage. MICE explains the main motivators for covert and also overt action, and it stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego.
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Whereas CIA Staff Historian Randy Burkett has stated that MICE has "outlived its usefulness" in counterintelligence, it seems to still apply quite well to those who are recruited to spread online propaganda. When doing research and deep dives on individuals who are...
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... producing and promoting pro-Kremlin viewpoints, one can quickly find connections between the people and these four motivators. Naturally, these motivators can also overlap. One example from counterespionage is the case of Earl Edwin Pitts, who had been an FBI agent...
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...who sold secrets to the Soviets and later to the Russians. During his interrogation, he told that he was treated badly while working for the FBI,but was also motivated by the stacks of rubles the Russians offered.
These days people who work to benefit a foreign actor..
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...are called "useful idiots", a term falsely attributed to Lenin. In my view, it's counterproductive to refer to these people as idiots, as some of there are actually quite intelligent, and they've simply taken an opportunity to benefit from "working for the enemy".
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A research project called Project Slammer, conducted during the late 80s, suggested that the subjects who become spies often see themselves as special, even unique; deserving, living in unsatisfactory situation, has ran out of other options (than to engage in espionage),...
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...and not a "bad person". This probably applies to most online propagandists, too.
Propagandists, like spies, often think of their work as "victimless" crime - many might feel that spreading disinformation and false narratives doesn't hurt anybody, it's just...
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..."another version" of the story. Yet these actions often have consequences - they can, for example, affect the support and aid that Ukraine gets from the West.
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Now, I'm going to move to the territory of speculation. I've been researching "independent journalists", politicians and other pro-Russian actors for quite some time, and I feel like I have a hunch of what drives some of them.
Here's my analysis for each motivator:
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Money: This one's the easiest - most of the pro-Kremlin mouthpieces are motivated by money. In fact, if you'd take the money out of the equation, they'd stop producing their nonsense and would move on to other things.
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In my opinion, most "independent journalists", including Janus Putkonen, Mike "iEarlGrey" Jones and Patrick Lancaster are driven by money. All of them have had some hardships in their previous lives, and have moved on to work for the Kremlin to make a decent living.
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Some businessmen were offered lucrative business deals by the Kremlin, possibly to help with their cause.
In addition, there are those politicians and grifters who are most probably driven by both their ego and their money.
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These include Gonzalo Lira, Jackson "Z" Hinkle, and most of the MAGA crew. Politicians like MTG and Boebert will drop any ideology (for example, QAnon) as soon as it no longer serves their self-interests.
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Ideology: Ideology can be extremely strong motivator and often creates staunch and loyal propagandists. Most of the ideology-driven Putin propagandists come from the far corners of the left and right,but many of them also believe in various conspiracy theories and have no..
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..political affiliation. Some people who in my opinion are driven by ideology, include Caitlin Johnstone, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Caleb Maupin, Steve Bannon and of course Noam Chomsky. It's not rare to see people from the far-left and from the far-right cooperate in this...
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..domain,reinforcing the idea of the horseshoe theory. Even though rabid anti-US/NATO/Western stance is not an ideology per se, it is a strong motivator for many propagandists. Russia is also often pushing the idea of "decadent West" vs "traditional Russia.
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Compromise/Kompromat: This refers to damaging information about a person, which can then be used for blackmail. The most common type of kompromat is some kind of sex tape of the person involved. Putin has used this strategy to his benefit since forever.
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The most famous case happened in 1999, when then FSB Chief Putin released a sex tape where Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov was in bed with two young women. Skuratov had started investigating corruption of Putin's then boss, Boris Yeltsin, and this tape was used to make...
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...him resign from his position. Kompromat is the most difficult to detect,as once the compromising material has been exposed, these people often become useless. In my opinion, those men who have visited Russia on various occasions are the most evident targets of kompromat.
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Some of these people include Mark Ames, John Dolan, Andrew Anglin and Graham Phillips. Ames has even written about their sexcapades during the 90s and 00s in Moscow.
Ego: Ego is another strong motivator, and can create very loyal propagandists.
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In many cases, propagandists ego has been "bruised", and they often feel like they have been mistreated by their own country. For ego-driven propagandists, two prime examples are Scott Ritter and Douglas Macgregor. Both were at some point quite talented in their work but...
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...were, to some degree, mistreated by their superiors. Macgregor's career was hindered due to his unorthodox methods, and Ritter was humiliated as a weapons inspector. Now they're both pushing Kremlin narratives, and Ritter is even touring around Russia, even going to...
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... talk shows to praise Russia and defame the US and Ukraine. In my opinion, fake news bloggers like Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal are driven by their huge egos, and formerly prestigious old school journalists like Seymour Hersh have the same problem.
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MICE is good at describing our core motivations for producing and promoting propaganda, but it's also oversimplifying things. Randy Burkett has stated that it excludes important factors like family, tribe, religion, ethnicity and nationalism.
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But I still argue that it is a useful tool for determining what drives these actors to publish disinformation and false narratives, and that in most cases we can apply these motivators to most people.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.”
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.
In today’s May 9th Vatnik Soup, we discuss the ambiguous relationship of the Kremlin with Nazism and explain why so many vatniks can be outright Nazis, and promote or excuse them while at the same time being so hysterical about alleged “Nazis in Ukraine”.
1/23
Of course, Kremlin propaganda employs the Firehose of Falsehood and often lacks any consistent ideology other than spreading chaos and seeking power, so such contradictions can be commonplace. However in this case there is a certain cynical consistency there.
2/23
To understand modern Russia, we need to go back a hundred years to the beginnings of Soviet Russia/Soviet Union — a genocidal terror regime under dictators Lenin and Stalin, whose totalitarian and imperialist legacy Putin’s Russia fully embraces.