In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American political strategist, Samuel Charap (@scharap). He's best-known for strongly arguing against the Western military support to Ukraine, and advising Ukraine to give up to imperialist Russia's demands.
1/18
Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank largely funded by the US government. He also studied in Kyiv and at MGIMO, an elite Moscow university with close ties to Russian intelligence.
2/18
He's also member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank that has been described as a "Russian equivalent to Davos", and Dutch sociologist Van Herpen wrote that the club is a soft power effort by the Kremlin in service of Russian foreign policy goals.
3/18
Throughout the years, Charap has called for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but time has shown that a) Putin is not negotiating in good faith, and b) any treaty between Russia and Ukraine (or anyone) doesn't hold.
4/18
Sam's naive attitude towards the Kremlin and their trustworthiness can be seen for example in his 2019 op-ed, in which he called for Ukraine to implement its obligations under the Minsk 2, an agreement that was largely ignored and broken by both Russia and Ukraine.
5/18
In addition, Russia has violated the UN Charter, Nuclear NPT, Helsinki Accords, Belovezha Accords, Budapest Memorandum, Black Sea Fleet Treaty, Friendship Treaty, Treaty on Azov Sea and Kerch Strait, Border Treaty of 2003, Minsk agreements, and the Kharkiv Pact.
6/18
Charap's "peace at any price" stance is always easy to defend, since most people would love to have peace. But if we don't also talk about the costs of peace, the whole discussion is pointless.
7/18
At the 2023 Lennart Meri Conference, Ukrainian activist Olena Halushka asked Charap about the cost of Russia's occupation, referring to mass graves, filtration camps, and mass deportations of children. Charap stated that it's ultimately up to the Ukrainian leadership...
8/18
...to decide whether these consequences are worth the sacrifices in the battlefield. Interestingly, his op-eds and talks are always suggesting for Ukraine to "negotiate" with Russia, which would without a doubt lead to concessions and more of such horrible war crimes.
9/18
I have previously written about the consequences of Russian victory in Ukraine, and most of us can probably agree that this would be a horrible fate for any Ukrainian who is left in these occupied regions:
Also, we should also remind ourselves that the Kremlin hasn't been willing to negotiate for a long time now. In Mar 2024, Putin himself stated that holding negotiations while Ukraine is suffering from ammunition shortage would be "absurd".
11/18
Charap has also been a strong opponent of military aid to Ukraine. In Jan 2022, he published an article on Foreign Policy titled "The West's Weapons Won't Make Any Difference to Ukraine". Take a look at the maps below and tell me if you agree with Mr. Charap.
12/18
In Jun 2023, Charap published another op-ed, criticizing the West for focusing more on providing military aid, intelligence and economic assistance to Ukraine rather than calling for the two parties to negotiate on peace.
13/18
In his Aug 2023 New Yorker article titled "The Case for Negotiating with Russia", he suggested that Ukraine will have to make concessions to Russia, even though Ukraine has successfully liberated over half of the territories Russia occupied at some point.
14/18
All this wouldn't worry me too much if Mr. Charap and his silly talks about negotiations and criticism of military aid were ignored. But they're not. Charap's a regular visitor to the White House's National Security Council (NSC), headed by Jake Sullivan.
15/18
According to Michael @McFaul, Sullivan and Biden recently "bought into" the idea that sending too much military aid to Ukraine would cause Russia to use tactical nukes against the US. This is just speculation, but maybe Sullivan is actually listening to Mr. Charap?
16/18
But there's nothing new with Russia's threatening with nuclear weapons & Putin's people have been doing it since at least 2007. Many people, including Musk & Sacks, use these empty threats as an excuse to let Russia do whatever they want in Ukraine:
To conclude, of course there should always be room for diplomacy and back-channel conversations, but one should always remember the unreliability of the Kremlin.
And just a few days ago, Peskov said that Russia and NATO are already in "direct confrontation".
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American far-right social media personality, Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes). He’s best-known for his white supremacist, misogynistic and antisemitic rhetoric, and for being the poster boy for the so-called incel movement.
1/17
Like so many from the white supremacist movement, Fuentes dropped out of university after his freshman year. He studied introductory international relations, which apparently made him a geopolitics expert. Nick was introduced to the white supremacist movement at an…
2/17
..early age - he took part in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,Virginia. In 2017, Fuentes launched his political talk show “America First”. Initially the show was aired on Trump-aligned Right Side Broadcasting Network, but it was dropped after the rally.
3/17
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll discuss foreign malign influence operations during the 2024 US elections. As in 2016 and 2020, these recent elections were also a target of massive disinformation and hacking campaigns originating mostly from Russia and Iran.
1/17
First of all, my opinion is that these influence operations alone didn’t affect the elections so much, that they actually made a difference.
Unlike in 2016, Trump’s win over Harris was clear and these short-term campaigns didn’t really change that much this time.
2/17
Yet, many of these online campaigns attacked both Harris and Walz on various social media platforms. Especially Walz became a big target after his nomination, and many Russian efforts attempted to defame him.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a social media personality and TV presenter, Raisa Blommestijn (@rblommestijn). She’s best-known for her far-right rhetorics, spreading conspiracy theories, and spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives on Dutch television.
1/24
Raisa studied philosophy of law at Leiden University. The faculty is best-known for one of its professors, Paul Cliteur. He’s a member of the pro-Kremlin party Forum voor Democratie (FvD), where he is one of the leading figures.Cliteur is also known for supervising the FvD…
2/24
…founder Thierry Baudet’s doctoral thesis, and can be considered a central figure in this Dutch “anti-establishment” movement. While studying at Leiden, Raise also met her best friend forever, Eva Vlaardingerbroek:
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American podcaster, Darryl Cooper (@martyrmade). He’s best-known for “Martyr Made”, a history podcast that provides a strongly revisionist and biased analysis on historical events such as the Revolution of Dignity and World War II.
1/22
Darryl became known to big audiences in 2021, when he published a Twitter thread in which he basically described a massive conspiracy against Trump during both 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The culprits were predictable: the corporate press, intelligence agencies…
2/22
…and of course the evil Democrats. To Darryl, Russia was not working together with the Trump campaign, even though there’s clear evidence that many of his officials - including Carter Page, Rex Tillerson, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort - interacted intimately with…
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’m going to outline the current situation in the West’s information war against Russia & its allies. Currently,the West’s counter-disinformation measures are severely underfunded,making it difficult to combat Russian influence operations effectively.
1/17
Europe today is repeating the same mistake in information warfare that it made in conventional warfare: we are not dedicating enough resources to counter it. Just as Europe was unprepared to fully support Ukraine and prepare for kinetic warfare against Russia,...
2/17
...we have been neglecting information warfare. Next year, Russia is reportedly set to spend around 3 billion USD on its information operations domestically and abroad, with allies like the CCP, Iran, and North Korea likely following suit.
In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (@Heritage). Heritage is best-known for opposing military aid to Ukraine and for their political initiative called Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a Trump presidency.
1/23
Before we begin, I want to justify this soup that focuses heavily on US domestic politics. As a strong supporter of Ukraine, I see Donald Trump as a threat to Ukraine’s existence, and the reasoning for that can be found in this previous soup:
Heritage was founded in 1973, but it took a leading role in conservative politics during the Reagan presidency, whose policies were mostly taken from the foundation’s book series called Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the ninth iteration of this series.