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:
The @elonmusk soup was supposed to end the whole series, but there were still too many vatniks to cover and I decided to come back from retirement. Later it was revealed that Musk actually spoke with Putin.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russian-Norwegian mercenary, Yan Petrovsky AKA Voislav Torden AKA "Slavyan". He's best-known as the co-founder of the Rusich Group,for committing war crimes in Ukraine, and for trying to start a normal life after in Northern Europe.
1/20
Petrovsky lived his childhood in St. Petersburg, but moved to Norway in 2004 when his mother married a Norwegian. After graduating from university, he started working at the "True Metal Tattoo" tattoo parlor, a shop famous for its connections to many neo-Nazi organizations.
2/20
In 2010, the tattoo parlor was raided by the police. During the search, they found forged documents and weapons that belonged to another Russian neo-Nazi, Viacheslav Datsik. Petrovsky spent one month in custody, after which he was released due to lack of evidence.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an Austrian journalist, Christian Wehrschütz (@Wehrschu).
He's best-known for supporting and spreading pro-Kremlin narratives on the Russo-Ukrainian War.
1/20
As I've previously written, Austria is a hotspot for pro-Kremlin activities:
This is often factored to strong Russo-Austrian economic ties, but there are other variables at play, too. One of those is the way how @ORF, Austria's biggest media...
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an attempt to create a pro-Kremlin fifth column in Ghana, Africa. This attempt was done by two prominent propagandists, @DD_Geopolitics (DDG) and Simeon "AussieCossack" Boikov.
This research was conducted by the Unintelligence Agency.
1/20
Recently, Niger became another African country where the army seized control of the government and ditched the remnants of the French colonialism. Before this, the same had happened in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Chad, all former French colonies.
2/20
Now, there's nothing wrong with getting rid of old colonial powers, but one should remember that all this was done with strong presence of pro-Kremlin powers like PMC Wagner. They've been accused of executing and raping civilians in Mali, and many of the new military...
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American social media personality, Matt Wallace (@mattwallace888). He's best-known for simping on Elon Musk, and for spreading the most outrageous lies and conspiracy theories online, thus monetizing his social media accounts.
1/20
By his own words, Matt is a "successful entrepreneur and social media personality who creates high value content", but he's actually just a grifter who has allegedly made a lot of money with so-called pump and dump schemes related to cryptocurrencies.
2/20
Pumping and dumping basically means a situation where you promote a crypto/stock/whatever heavily to increase its price and then sell your share. Pump and dump schemes are extremely popular with cryptocurrencies.