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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Mar 18, 2024 • 16 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup, I'll iterate on the Kremlin's main narratives and how they're currently being used to legitimize Russia's sham election, protest military aid to Ukraine, and confuse people with "whataboutism" ("What about the US/Gaza/Iraq/Israel/Ukraine?").

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Of course none of this is new, it's just that the scale is much more massive than we've ever seen before. Russia's "Firehose of Falsehood" strategy attempts to flood us with a huge volume of emotional and biased content to confuse us and distract us from the topic at hand.

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I'll use few of my recent posts about the Russian sham elections as an example. In the second photo, you see the massive amount of comments compared to likes/shares of the post - a ratio of 1:4 is actually very rare and suggests that the post was found by trolls and bots.

3/15
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This type of posts are also great for discovering the Kremlin troll factory talking points - there aren't that many and they often like to spread the same lies they've done since 2014. Let's take a look at some of them and also see why they're wrong.

4/15
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Let's start with the most classic strategy called "whataboutism". It's not a new tactic,as it was already used by the Soviet propagandists to divert any criticism towards their country. "What about US invasion of Iraq" & "What about Gaza" are typical examples of whataboutism.5/15


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Then there's the deflection tactic of referring to the cancelled elections in Ukraine. It's actually written in the Ukrainian Constitution that elections are not being held during war time, because voting in the middle of an invasion is close to impossible.

6/15


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Now, let's compare Ukrainian presidents to Russian and Belarusian presidents since 2000 - Russia has had 2 (technically 1), and Belarus has had one. It's very easy to see which regimes have limited free speech and taken control over their societies.

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Whenever you bring up the war crimes done by the Russians in Ukraine, Kremlin trolls can't stop talking about the "genocide in Donbas". According to the story, Ukraine "shelled Donbas for 8 years", killing civilians and children in the process.

8/15


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This of course never happened, and even Prigozhin's employees admitted that the people interviewed were actually crisis actors. The unrest was funded by the Kremlin and mercenaries/FSB agents like Igor Girkin. Full debunk here:



9/15
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Then there's an example that's a bit more obscure, but it's more popular among the Russian-speaking population - the 2014 Odesa clashes.

This false narrative claims that "Ukrainian neo-Nazis" burned Russian-speaking Ukrainians alive.

Debunk here:


10/15

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Another classic is the "Ukrainian neo-Nazis" BS. Ukrainian far-right parties had 2,2% support in the 2019 elections. It's actually Russia that has a massive neo-Nazi problem, and their armies are actually infested with them:



11/15



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Another narrative related to this is the "Azov uses civilians as human shields". Throughout the war, Russia has conducted war crimes against civilians, by for example shooting fleeing vehicles and ambulances. They have also targeted hospitals and rescue workers.

12/15


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Then there's the "peaceniks", or accounts that are constantly calling for Ukraine to negotiate for peace, even though Putin himself said recently that "It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine".
Debunk:

13/15




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Expect to see a lot of similar posts in the near future, as they'll be used to attack any pro-Ukrainian stances on X. Also, there will be many more related to the US military aid to Ukraine and to support Donald Trump for the presidency.

14/15


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It's worth noting, that before NAFO came along, all this was happening uncontested. Actually, these narratives still have very little resistance on social media sites like TikTok and Facebook. So, thanks NAFO!



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Find us also on other socials:

instagram.com/vatniksoup/
youtube.com/@TheSoupCentra…
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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup 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
Vatnik Soup 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
Vatnik Soup 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:

2/20
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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
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 25
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered…
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…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse.
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Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare.
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Read 5 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 18
In this 6th Debunk of the Day, we’ll talk about a complex and controversial topic: conscription. It is used by vatniks to attack Ukraine for drafting men to fight, while conveniently ignoring the alternative, including the horrors of conscription into the Russian army.
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Military obligations are a reality in many countries, from the most peaceful democracies to the most tyrannical dictatorships — unless you have “bone spurs”. Some argue it is a necessity for defense against invading armies, especially for small countries.
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Others point out that it goes against individual rights or that a professional army is better. And Zelenskyy might agree: he did in fact end conscription. But then a full-scale invasion happened: exactly why many nations, including the US, still keep some form of draft.
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Read 8 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce the International Olympic Committee (IOC) @Olympics . It’s mostly known for organizing sporting events, and for being supposed to foster the Olympic ideal while actually submitting to dictators.

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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 in Paris by Pierre de Coubertin with a noble goal: promote peace through sports. Politics out, sportsmanship in: sounds great in theory.

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But in practice, the IOC has a long history of accommodating authoritarian regimes, always in the name of “neutrality,” “dialogue,” and “keeping sports separate from politics”, usually not in a particularly consistent or moral way.

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Read 16 tweets

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