In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an Austrian communist and social media personality, Roman GK AKA @GeromanAT. He's best-known for promoting pro-Kremlin perspective on the Russo-Ukrainian War and for trying to monetize his apparent social media addiction.
1/17
.@GeromanAT belongs to the "big three" of pro-Russian Twitter analysts/political commentators, the other two being a Serbian nurse, @200_zoka whose account has since been deleted, and German Russia-LARPer, @Trollstoy88, who's still pretending to be someone he's not.
2/17
As much as he would like to be a Serb, Roman is actually German-Austrian and lives in Austria. So, we have yet another vatnik and fan of authoritarian regimes living comfortably in the West.
Why these people never move the countries they so much seem to like?
3/17
Roman has worked in IT support for a long time, but apparently the business hasn't been exactly booming lately.
Perhaps due to this, he's started a side hustle of spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda. At the moment he makes around 200 USD a month, or around 70 cents per hour.
4/17
What he lacks in knowledge and skill, he makes up with volume - since 2015, he's tweeted almost 400 000 times,averaging to around 120 tweets/day. He's also in X's subscription program.
Fortunately his partner makes decent money, otherwise he'd probably be homeless already.
5/17
Roman is a strong supporter of various conspiracy theories. He believes in the most ridiculous Russian lies, including "US-funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine", that Ukraine is infested with "Nazis", and that the 2014 Revolution of Dignity was an "illegal NATO coup".
6/17
In the Geroman-world, absolutely everything that somehow supports Ukraine or the West is a "psyop".
Here are some examples of events Roman considers to be "psyops": Bucha massacre, QAnon, Anonymous, Pentagon leaks, Chinese spy balloons,...
7/17
...Ukraine's attack on Kherson, Uyghur genocide, White Helmets in Syria, MH17 and Skripali poisoning. He also absolutely despises Bellingcat, probably due to their exposes on Russia's crimes against humanity around the world.
8/17
In Roman's view, Russia can and will do no harm to civilians or civilian structures, and if they do, it's because the evil "Ukrainian Nazis" are hiding out in these civilian buildings. Of course in his twisted world, the evil Ukrainians are targeting civilians all the time.
9/17
The most disgusting of these alleged "psyops" is his denial of the Bucha massacre. He's stated that "We did not see a single video showing Russians killing civilians in Bucha" and that the whole thing was "done by AFU".
10/17
He called the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson and Kharkov planned and professional retreats, and before Ukraine re-captured Kherson, Roman was highly optimistic on Russia actually attacking in both of these directions in addition to southeastern Donbas region.
11/17
He considered the battle of Bakhmut a "designated meat grinder" that was supposed to deplete Ukraine of its troops. Recently his focus has been on Robotyne, saying that UAF is "running down a valley secured by RF held high grounds and will suffer even more casualties."
12/17
Roman thinks that "communism will be the leading world power soon." He's also declared that capitalism has "killed much more people all over the world than Communism" & that you can see that "communism works" by looking at totalitarian,hyper-capitalist countries like China.
13/17
Roman absolutely despises NAFO, probably because they're the ones who always call on his BS. He calls all NAFO members "nazis" and supports so-called "NAFO hunters" who report pro-Ukrainian accounts in order to get them banned.
14/17
He also has a Telegram channel with around 15 000 subscribers. In Aug 2023, Z-supporter Merdan E doxxed the wrong Pekka Kallioniemi and posted his phone number and a flat he was selling on various platforms. This failed doxx was also posted to Roman's TG and is still there.
15/17
It must feel extremely empowering to doxx the wrong people and put them in harm's way.
Apparently Roman has also collaborated somehow with the @DD_Geopolitics collective. It's still unknown if this collaboration extended outside of sharing the failed doxxing information.
16/17
Considering that he seems to loathe all "Nazis", he talks surprisingly little about Russian Nazis like Alexey Milchakov or Yan Petrovsky of the Rusich Group or the Russian Imperial Movement:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes). He’s best-known for his white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic rhetoric, and for being the poster boy for the so-called incel movement.
1/17
Like so many from the white supremacist movement, Fuentes dropped out of university after his freshman year. He studied introductory international relations, which apparently made him a geopolitics expert. Nick was introduced to the white supremacist movement at an…
2/17
..early age - he took part in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia. In 2017, Fuentes launched his political talk show “America First”. Initially the show was aired on Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network, but it was dropped after the rally.
3/17
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a social media personality and TV presenter, Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn). She’s best-known for her far-right rhetorics, spreading conspiracy theories, and spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives on Dutch television.
1/24
Raisa studied philosophy of law at Leiden University. The faculty is best-known for one of its professors, Paul Cliteur. He’s a member of the pro-Kremlin party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), where he is one of the leading figures.Cliteur is also known for supervising the FvD…
2/24
…founder Thierry Baudet’s doctoral thesis, and can be considered a central figure in this Dutch “anti-establishment” movement. While studying at Leiden, Raise also met her best friend forever, Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.
1/22
Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…
2/22
…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials - including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort - interacted intimately with…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’m going to outline the current situation in the West’s information war against Russia & its allies. Currently,the West’s counter-disinformation measures are severely underfunded,making it difficult to combat Russian influence operations effectively.
1/17
Europe today is repeating the same mistake in information warfare that it made in conventional warfare: we are not dedicating enough resources to counter it. Just as Europe was unprepared to fully support Ukraine and prepare for kinetic warfare against Russia,...
2/17
...we have been neglecting information warfare. Next year, Russia is reportedly set to spend around 3 billion USD on its information operations domestically and abroad, with allies like the CCP, Iran, and North Korea likely following suit.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (@Heritage). Heritage is best-known for opposing military aid to Ukraine and for their political initiative called Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a Trump presidency.
1/23
Before we begin, I want to justify this soup that focuses heavily on US domestic politics. As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I see Donald Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s existence, and the reasoning for that can be found in this previous soup:
Heritage was founded in 1973, but it took a leading role in conservative politics during the Reagan presidency, whose policies were mostly taken from the foundation’s book series called Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of this series.