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 Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a former Ukrainian politician and president, Viktor Yanukovych. He’s best known for selling his country to Russia, trying to turn it into an authoritarian state, and eventually fleeing to Moscow once his plan failed.
1/22
Now that Russia and the US are planning to replace president Zelenskyy with someone who’s more willing to sell the country to them (most probably Viktor Medvedchuk or one of his cronies), it’s a good time to remind people how Yanukovych and Putin almost took over Ukraine.
2/22
Yanukovych’s first attempt at power came in 2004, when he “won” the Ukrainian presidential election through massive fraud. The rigged vote sparked the Orange Revolution, a wave of protests that forced the election to be re-run. His opponent, pro-Western candidate…
Russia uses Tucker Carlson as a vessel for its propaganda. Many of the most popular narratives originate from his misinformation-filled show, which is funded by Elon. Some of these lies include:
- Bioweapons labs
- Gonzalo Lira being a "journalist"
-Zelenskyy being a dictator
- The banning of the Russian Orthodox Church
- The banning of Viktor Medvedchuk's pro-Kremlin propaganda network
- Putin's interview and revisionism
- That ridiculous St. Petersburg propaganda piece
Bob Amsterdam, who Tucker has interviewed a few times is paid by a Russian oligarch, Vadym Novynskyi.
We now know from the Tenet Media case that Russian state media wants to spread Tucker's verbal diarrhea everywhere. These fake stories have finally made their way to Trump.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll take out my crystal ball and predict what the alliance between the US and Russia could mean for Ukraine, Europe and geopolitics in general. These recent changes could be a real risk for the whole of Europe, and need to be addressed quickly.
1/23
Some of us have been reporting on Trump’s pro-Kremlin tendencies for years now. His Moscow connections go back all the way to the late 80s, and the 2016 US presidential elections raised a lot of red flags about the close connections of his associates to Russian operatives.
2/23
The recent Rubio-Lavrov meeting in Saudi Arabia was an eye-opening event for many who were still optimistic about Trump and Ukraine – the outcome was that Putin got absolutely everything he’s ever wanted from the war, and at the same time it seems that the US got nothing.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce how the Elon’s Election Interference Machine™ (EIM) works. Since Musk & his broligarch allies won the presidency for Trump, they’ve now harnessed the machine to interfere in European elections, including the ones in Germany & Romania.
1/23
At this point it is clear why Elon bought Twitter – his grand plan was to promote “free speech absolutism” (which, of course, doesn’t even exist on the platform) and tweak the algorithms so that they allow him to promote political parties that align with his worldview.
2/23
First, let’s talk about “freedom of speech” that the Trump administration, especially Musk and VP Vance constantly rant about. Incidentally, they only blame the EU for “limiting free speech”, and there’s a good reason for this: they are driving for political change.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce the Russian disinformation network “Doppelgänger”. Doppelgänger is an influence and hybrid operation spreading Kremlin propaganda via AI-generated fake news websites and social media sites, especially X.
1/20
Doppelgänger is a massive influence operation that was initially exposed back in 2022. Their modus operandi is to create near-identical copies of large, legitimate Western news outlets to spread anti-Ukraine, anti-Western and anti-NATO narratives.
2/20
The operation, overseen by Putin’s top aide Sergei Kiriyenko (who’s reportedly communicated with Elon), uses Russian firms like Social Design Agency (SDA) to create fake news sites that mimick legitimate media like The Washington Post, The Guardian, Bild and Fox News.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’m going to talk about Europe’s information defense against foreign influence operations & disinformation.
The EU can’t rely anymore on America’s help in geopolitical struggles, and it’s time we created a united front against information threats.
1/24
Recent news coming from the US should be the final wake-up call for European decision-makers. Recently, Trump’s rhetoric has been openly pro-Kremlin and both anti-Ukraine & anti-EU, and at the same time the US is dismantling all institutions fighting against disinformation.
2/24
So far, the Trump administration has put staffers working on disinformation as well as a team of election security advisers at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on administrative leave.