In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce a Ukrainian “scholar” and social media activist, Marta Havryshko (@HavryshkoMarta). She’s best known for spreading anti-Ukraine and pro-Kremlin narratives online, along with a habit of spotting neo-Nazis everywhere in Ukraine.
1/20
Marta hails from Ukraine, where she studied history at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. She received her PhD in history in 2010. Her academic work focused on gender-based violence and wartime atrocities, including publications on sexual crimes in occupied Ukraine.
2/20
She is currently working as a visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Clark University in the US. According to the center’s website, Marta teaches courses on antisemitism, racism, and gender-based violence in armed conflicts.
3/20
But her academic background plays little role in her public profile. Marta gained Grokipedia (not Wikipedia) fame by sharing videos of alleged far-right activity and forced mobilization in Ukraine. She claims the country is a Nazi state, including its government.
4/20
Now, a clear distinction is needed between activism and academic work. Havryshko is not an expert on far-right or neo-Nazi groups and has no scientific publications on the topic. She should therefore be described as a heavily biased, anti-Ukraine online activist.
5/20
Ms. Havryshko eagerly highlights even minor social media posts showing alleged far-right activity in Ukraine, yet shows little interest when the same occurs in the US. In her upside-down framing, American neo-Nazis are protected by the First Amendment, so it’s all kosher.
6/20
Due to her harsh and often unwarranted criticism of everything Ukraine-related, she has become popular in vatnik circles. The appeal is obvious: she is Ukrainian, claims to be “pro-humanity,” and opposes any positive change, like joining the EU, for her home country.
7/20
This likely explains why she has become a regular guest on Norwegian vatnik Glenn Diesen’s show. Diesen is a member of Putin’s Valdai club, has worked extensively for RT, denied Russia’s role in the MH17 shootdown, and labeled the Euromaidan as a “NATO-backed coup d’État.”
8/20
And if chatting shit with Diesen wasn’t bad enough, it gets worse. Much worse. In December 2025, Marta appeared on Jackson Hinkle’s Legitimate Targets propaganda show. As a Ukrainian activist, she did not seem bothered by Hinkle’s open support for the Putin regime.
9/20
And Hinkle is not just your average vatnik, he is a fanatical supporter of all the worst dictators and atrocities around, including the Nazi-themed Wagner group, infamous for torture and sexual abuse, Assad, Iran, Hamas and Stalin. To be fair, he probably gets paid for it.
10/20
None of Hinkle’s or Diesen’s shenanigans seem to bother Marta, which is striking given her academic background in Holocaust and genocide studies, including a stated focus on gender-based sexual violence and wartime atrocities under occupation.
She is celebrated by nostalgia-driven far-leftists and pro-Kremlin “journalists” such as the Grayzone crowd, Tarik Cyril Amar, and Ivan Katchanovski. Even Mark “Russian women expect you to rape them” Ames signed an open letter in defense of Ms. Havryshko.
12/20
Recently, Marta shared a speech by AfD leader Alice Weidel, rhetorically asking her followers whether this was “true leadership that Germany needs.” In the speech, Weidel called for an end to military aid to Ukraine and demanded the repair of the Nord Stream pipeline.
13/20
AfD is a far-right party whose members have openly expressed neo-Nazi views. In 2024, Weidel’s then-advisor Roland Hartwig attended a meeting with neo-Nazi influencers where plans for mass deportations of “non-assimilated people” were openly discussed.
14/20
For some reason, Marta failed to do even basic background research on AfD. She missed that the party’s members have used Nazi paramilitary slogans like “Alles für Deutschland,” and some have openly defended the Waffen SS. And here we thought she was against neo-Nazism.
15/20
If Havryshko sees no issue associating with figures like Jackson Hinkle, who praised Putin from the start of the full-scale invasion, or with parties like AfD, which is openly hostile to Ukraine and supportive of Russia, her sudden re-alignment towards Moscow is clear.
16/20
Judging by her recent sarcastic posts, she now openly despises Ukraine. Marta’s rapid shift from a refugee who fled Putin’s invasion and understood the need to fight him to a pro-Kremlin activist claiming Ukraine started the war raises an obvious question — what happened?
17/20
Marta often encourages pro-Ukraine activists to “go to the front.” One of them did, and later urged her to raise funds for Ukrainian children or civilians. Instead, he was accused of “stalking,” and as far as we know Ms Havryshko has raised a grand total of 0€ for Ukraine.
18/20
Unlike other vatniks, Marta does not deny Russian atrocities — she just seems to argue they are all the more reason to surrender (to those committing them!), as if that would somehow make them stop. Arguably, this is even more insidious than open support for the invasion.
19/20
To conclude, Marta Havryshko is an activist who completely switched sides on the invasion of her home country. This has made her warmly welcomed by the pro-kremlin crowd, who embraced her as one of their own.
Thank you @geogvma for the inspiration for this “poule au pot”.
20/20
Enjoyed this soup? Brandolini’s law: The amount of energy needed to refute vatnik propaganda is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Fact-based research takes time and effort — please support our work: vatniksoup.com/en/support-our…
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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.
1/20
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:
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.
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.
1/20
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:
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.
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… 1/5
…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. 2/5
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. 3/5
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. 1/8
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. 2/8
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. 3/8
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.
1/15
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.
2/15
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.
In today’s Wumao Soup, we’ll tell you 15 things about the People’s Republic of China that you didn’t learn from TikTok, Douyin or DeepSeek.
1/20
This is our 2nd Wumao Soup. In the 1st one, we introduced how the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) online propaganda works. Now we’ll cover some of the big topics they hide or lie about. Think of it as an antidote soup to their propaganda.
1 - Tiananmen Square massacre
Yes, it happened. Yes, it was a massacre. Vatniks, wumaos, and tankies in the West deny it, while China censors the slightest mention of it, even the date it happened.