In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a British musician and activist, Roger Waters (@rogerwaters). He's best-known for his involvement in Pink Floyd, and for his love for the totalitarian regimes and their lies around the world.
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It actually pains me to brew this soup, as Waters' music, especially the album titled Animals, has been among my favorites for a very long time.
But one should never meet their heroes, they say, so here goes.
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As with many pro-Kremlin propagandists, Waters has been heavily involved in support of Palestine in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He's supported an international campaign, BDS, that boycotts Israel. He visited the Israeli West Bank barrier for the first time in 2006.
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He's compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany, by saying that "The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious." Water himself has said that he's anti-Zionist instead of antisemitist. Some of his gigs have been...
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...cancelled due to his staunch "anti-Zionist" takes. He also made the weirdest connection between Israeli Defense Force and the death of George Floyd, saying that the US police learned the technique that killed Floyd from the Israeli Army.
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Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called Waters a "global hero", only to delete his tweet later, stating that he had "only recently learned about some of his other views, which I do not share." He then added that he supports Israel's right to exist within secure borders.
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Former Pink Floyd Lyricist Polly Samson tweeted that Waters is "antisemitic" to his "rotten core", also calling him Putin apologist and misogynist. David Gilmour, Roger's former band mate and Samson's husband, fully agreed with this assessment.
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Waters has also denied Bashar al-Assad's involvement in the chemical attacks around Syria. He's called the Syrian humanitarian aid NGO, White Helmets, who save civilians from disaster areas a "fake organisation" that produces propaganda for "jihadists and terrorists".
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When it comes to Russia, Roger has been lately digging himself deeper and deeper into the pro-Kremlin trenches. One week before Russia launched their full-scale invasion in Ukraine, Waters was interviewed by RT. In this interview, he claimed that any rumours...
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...about Russia attacking were "bullshit" and anti-Russian propaganda.
After Russia launched their attack, Waters blamed Joe Biden for "fueling the fire in the Ukraine... that is a huge crime," neatly putting 'the' in front of Ukraine to emphasize its assumed role as ...
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.."the borderlands" - a contested region and a part of the "buffer zone". Based on Roger, Russia had only attacked because it was provoked to do so by the NATO - the classic delusional view of uncontrollable "NATO expansion", which according to him "they promised they...
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...wouldn't do when Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe." He's called the war in Ukraine "probably the most provoked invasion ever" and that won't look at Russia from the "current Russo-phobic perspective." After the First...
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Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska appeared on BBC in Sep 2022, Waters published an open letter where he called for the stop of military aid to Ukraine, since the Western countries were "prolonging the war with their support."
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He's also stated that Ukraine broke the Minsk agreements, but yet again forgets to mention that the treaties were broken by both parties, and Russia was funding and arming the separatist movement in Ukraine, as well as sending their own troops to instigate unrest in there.
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In 2022, in an interview by RT, he reminded the US of the "one China" policy, suggesting that Taiwan is actually part of China. He also called the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjian, China, "absolute nonsense", telling the interviewer to "go away and read about it."
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He's also given an interview to Chinese state-controlled CTGN, calling all US media "propaganda".
In Sep 2022, he wrote an open letter to Putin, calling for peace in Ukraine. In the letter, he called Putin a "gangster", but basically stated that Russia has the right to...
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...take Crimea and the Donbas, but that Putin and his forces "want to overrun the whole of Europe, starting with Poland and the rest of the Baltic states", which would lead to a nuclear war.
In Feb 2023, he was asked to appear in front of the UN Security Council on...
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...behalf of Russia. In his speech, he condemned Russia's attack "in the strongest possible terms", but immediately "condemned the provocateurs [US and NATO] in the strongest possible terms". Few days before this, he was interviewed by Berliner Zeitung, in which he...
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...doubled-down on his previous statements regarding Ukraine and Russia. He blamed the US for orchetrating a "coup d'état" in Ukraine in 2014, and even went as far as blamed Zelensky for being a warmonger. As a cherry on top, he promotes the ridiculous Sy Hersh story,...
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...full of holes, on the US involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage. In the same interview, he also mentioned that the reason for Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine was launched because of a) the genocide in Donbas, and b) to denazify Ukraine.
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He'd exchanged letters with a Ukrainian girl that had written to Waters that "I am 200% certain there are no Nazis in Ukraine," to which he replied "I'm sorry Alina, but you are wrong about that. How can you live in Ukraine and not know?"
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Then he basically explains the script of the propaganda piece "Ukraine on Fire", with "evil genocidal Banderites" and the US staging a coup in Ukraine. Then he talks about how "huge majority" of Ukrainians in the Donbas and Crimea voted to join Russia. Of course he also...
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..mentions that the sanctions are hurting the West, that people in the UK have to choose between "eat or heat", and finally he called everyone who disagrees with him "brainwashed" and "idiots". He also gave The Telegraph an interview during that same month, in which he...
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..said that calling Putin "may have been unfair" and that he "changed his mind" on the matter after watching a podcast called "The Duran".He said that after watching the show,he's had more respect for Putin:"It may be that he’s leading his country to the benefit of all of..
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...the people of Russia."
Roger is a big fan of fake news blog @TheGrayzoneNews. He probably gets most of his information from this site, as his views are very much in line with the "journalists" like @aaronjmate and @MaxBlumenthal. He was also their guest in Oct 2022.
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Recently Waters wore an uniform similar to the ones that the SS war in Nazi Germany. This "antifascist" show has been part of his repertoire since 1982, but it's still absurd when it's done by someone who seems to love totalitarian regimes in Russia, Syria and in China.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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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.
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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.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the state of X in May 2025. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, this platform has rapidly transformed into his personal political tool and a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation.
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Not everyone is following this shitshow as closely as I am, so I thought it would be good to write a summary of all the changes that have happened on this forum and outside of it. These changes have drastically changed how the platform operates and who gets “a voice” here.
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Elon’s team has been tweaking the algorithm many times after the takeover. One of these tweaks happened already around Nov 2022, when the platform heavily suppressed the visibility of pro-Ukraine accounts. This change was then noticed & reported by many pro-Ukraine accounts.
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