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Grok Profile picture
@grok
Sep 13, 2023 • 18 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russo-Italian politician, Irina Osipova. She's best-known for her ties to European and Russian neo-Nazi groups like Golden Dawn and Rusich, for her close ties to various Russian officials, and for her new job at the Italian senate.

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She was born in Moscow, Russia in 1987 and his father is Oleg Osipov, former director of the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Rome. The organization is basically a form of Russian soft power & aims to establish contacts between the influential Russians and Italians.

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Today, the organization is led by Dariya Pushkova, former RT propagandist and daughter of prominent Russian politician Aleksey Pushkov who also happens to be the President of the "Commission on Information Policy".

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Osipova got involved in politics at an early age, and already back in 2012, she founded an association called "RIM - Young Italian-Russian", which aimed to bring together all "active and creative young people, who mainly use Russian in their daily lives".

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She also participated in the Rome municipal elections from Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy party in 2016, getting just under 200 votes. Her campaign relied heavily on Putinisms like "The model for Italy to defend national interests" and she referred to Putin as the...

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...Tsar and as "a leader who has no equal in the world." You can still find some of these messages on her old X/Twitter account.

After she wasn't elected, she started touring the Europe, visiting various far-right figures while building new connections.

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Already back in 2014 she was demonstrating against the European sanctions on Russia after they illegally annexed Crimea. These demonstrations also focused on supporting Russia's policy against the Kyiv's "Nazi regime" and their stance on Donbas and Crimea.

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In 2017, she participated as one of the speakers/panelists at an event called "Donbass, a war on the conscience of Europe". Apparently the whole event focused on EU's lack of solidarity towards the fake republics of DPR and LPR.

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Criticizing the Kyiv "Nazi regime" hasn't stopped Irina from hanging out with literal neo-Nazis in Europe and in Russia. He's spent time with Andrea Palmeri, former football hooligan, who was sentenced to 5 years in prison for recruiting people to fight in Donbas.

9/17
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Other groups Irina has associated herself with include a far-right, fascist movement Lealtà Azione, and a Greek, far-right and neo-Nazi and ultranational criminal organization, Golden Dawn.

In 2020, GD's leaders were convicted for heading a criminal organisation.

10/17


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Then there's the founders of the Rusich Group, Alexey Milchakov & Yan Petrovsky, two neo-Nazis who are best-known for their brutal & barbaric terrorism crimes in Ukraine. Read more about Alexey here:

And about Petrovsky here:


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Osipova has also made connections in the Italian politics, and she's collaborated with Lombardy-Russia association since 2014. The group is led by Northern League member Gianluca Savoini, former right-hand man and spokesperson of Matteo Salvini:

12/17

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In 2023, Osipova wiggled her way into the Italian Senate as a "parliamentary assistant". She got the position after participating in a public competition in 2019 which did not require any kind of authorization. She placed 78th and was accepted as an assistant due to ...

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..the dire need of new work force in the Palazzo Madama,the upper house of the Italian Parliament in Rome.The appointment was also noticed by the The Ukrainian Embassy in Rome, who expressed their concern on the matter & criticized the "the hiring of a Russian propagandist"
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Many anti-EU "experts" often refer to the decisions made on the EU level by people who were not elected (supposedly they haven't heard of the EU parliament).

Here we have a clear case of pro-Kremlin Russian who has strong ties to both Russian and ...

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... European far-right movements working at the Italian Senate because she was able to write and speak better than other candidates.

And this is exactly how the Russian soft power works.

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On 12 Sep 2023, a petition calling for the prevention of her appointment was launched:



These petitions may have only little actual effect, but this is definitely something the Italian Senate should consider doing.

17/17change.org/p/impediamo-l-…
Thank you to @Ander_Bruckes for their great thread on Osipova:

All soups:
Support my work:
vatniksoup.com
buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

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More from @grok

Grok Profile picture
May 1
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

1/20 Hasan Piker in Havana, Cuba
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.

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His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.

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Read 21 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Apr 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.

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Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 29
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”.
2/7 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion. Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 9
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

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War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.

But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:

2/20
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Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.

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Read 20 tweets
Grok Profile picture
Mar 2
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.

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In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:

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The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.

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Read 20 tweets

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