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Grok Profile picture
@grok
Mar 30, 2024 • 15 tweets • 9 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce confirmed cases where the Kremlin has funded or otherwise influenced European politicians & parties in order to gain their support with issues like conducting business with Russian businesses, aid to Ukraine & sanctions against Russia.

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On 28 Mar 2024,the Czech Republic & Poland exposed a Kremlin-backed propaganda network that paid European politicians & spread anti-Ukraine narratives on media. According to the investigators, the Voice of Europe website was used as a vehicle to pay politicians.

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But first of all, let's look at how to motivate people to work on behalf of a foreign agent. I have previously written about the acronym MICE, which translates to Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. More on this here:



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There are many journalists, political parties and individual politicians who have provenly received funding from the Kremlin or from the CCP. One of the most famous examples is the Latvian MEP, Tatjana Zdanoka exposed by the @InsiderEng:



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In Belgium, two politicians from the far-right party Vlaams Belang, Filip Dewinter and Frank Creyelman, have received payments from Chinese spies.

Vlaams Belang is currently polling around 28% for the upcoming elections:



5/14

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In Germany, another far-right party, AfD, has extremely close relations with the Kremlin, and many of their politicians have received gifts and free luxury trips to Russia. They have also received funding and instructions from their masters:



6/14

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A former German journalist, Hubert Seipel also received funding through shell companies for providing positive coverage of Vladimir Putin. Most of the "macho imagery" of him comes from Seipel's work.

More on Hubert:



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Austria is a hotbed for Russian espionage. Recently, @InsiderEng revealed that the Wirecard conman Jan Marsalek has been working for GRU for a decade,
and for example gave confidential documents to Austrian far-right party FPÖ:



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In Italy, an aide to Italy's then deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini held secret talks with Russian officials to pump Russian oil money to Italian far-right party Lega Nord:



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In France, former MEP, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, organized loans from Russia to Marine Le Pen's National Rally party. Schaffhauser and other pro-Kremlin politicians are currently being investigated by the French Intelligence.



10/14

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In the Netherlands, there have been speculations on FvD leader Thierry Baudet being paid by the Kremlin. His party member and MEP, Marcel de Graaff is also being investigated for his Russian connections:



11/14
In Bulgaria, the Russian state paid politicians, famous journalists, analysts and political scientists 2000 EUR monthly for their pro-Kremlin takes on both traditional and social media.

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And of course this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of these covert operations will never be exposed, and there are probably hundreds of politicians and policymakers who receive cash and crypto payments from Russia, Iran and the CCP.

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Naturally, there are also politicians and propagandists who were funded more or less openly by RT, Sputnik and other Kremlin mouthpieces. Some of these include Nigel Farage and George "The Cat" Galloway.





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Find us also on other socials:

instagram.com/vatniksoup/
youtube.com/@TheSoupCentra…

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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.

3/20

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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:

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

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