What is Vatnik Soup? What is a “vatnik”?

A vatnik is someone who, whether through malice or ignorance (witting or unwitting “useful idiots”), spreads Kremlin-crafted narratives designed to facilitate a Russian success in their genocidal invasions. Narratives that help their wars of aggression, their conquest of more land, their deliberate bombing of civilians (by discouraging providing air defense for instance) and the survival of Russia’s current dictatorial regime.

In particular, narratives that help dictator Putin remain in power and oppress both current Russian population and conquer new land with even more people to subjugate.

A vatnik is a pro-Kremlin propagandist.

We make Vatnik Soup. We “soup” vatniks: we expose their lies and contradictions and debunk their propaganda.

Why we make soup

In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we make soup: 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 and their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

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

But not only that. There is another 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.

The costs of war

Russian society itself is destroyed by this as well in the long run. Putin does not represent genuine interests of most Russians — only his own stolen wealth and oppressive power. Russian criminals are released after their “glorious” stint as war criminals in Ukraine, to commit more crimes in Russia. Children are indoctrinated for the next wars, the whole society is militarized, while essential infrastructure goes derelict.

War is very expensive. Missiles, bombs, shells, drones, even troops are expensive, no matter how expendable. And if the air defense is good, if the missiles get intercepted, the troops pushed back, the drones shot down, then it’s all for nothing: might as well not invade.

And in fact Russia would not have invaded if the Kremlin didn’t expect the invasion to succeed. Planning their war since 2003, they were not ready for a full-scale invasion in 2014. They waited for the right moment, when they thought they could win. But they underestimated Ukrainian heroism and overestimated the success of their own propaganda: not good enough to win, but unfortunately good enough to let them get away with destroying a lot of cities and murdering a lot of people.

The point of pro-war propaganda

War is expensive, but propaganda is cheap: spending a few extra bucks on top of that two-million-dollar Kinzhal missile, to convince the world to let that Kinzhal missile murder the civilians that the Russian terrorists have decided to murder, sadly makes all the difference. And yes, it’s cheap and Russia throws insane amounts of money at this, multiplying the damage.

But sometimes they splurge, too. Tim Pool and Benny Johnson for example were each getting $100,000 a week. Did the Kremlin decide that Tiny Tim in particular banging his little fist on the table against Ukraine was actually worth all that money? Maybe, or maybe they think in the long run:

Sowing chaos to destabilize the West. Inciting civil war. Encouraging secession movements. Wagner rampaging through Africa, causing wars and migration crises, and then fuelling populist reactions to it: anti-immigration, pro-Russian parties like the AfD, with Russia playing both sides of social tensions.

And other bought influencers, journalists and politicians are regularly exposed around the world (and how many more that we can only guess). The goal is always the same: discourage help to Ukraine by sowing doubt and confusion, so that Russia can bomb and murder with impunity.

The war is horrible in itself, and what Russia does to Ukrainians, whether to the captured soldiers, through the terrorist bombings, or to civilians under occupation, is unspeakable, and must absolutely be stopped regardless of any other concerns.

A global problem

But for those who don’t think that’s reason enough, there’s other concerns too. Passively letting this terrorist aggression happen emboldens Russia in Georgia, in “hybrid” operations against the rest of Europe (that seem less and less hybrid and more and more closer to open warfare), and possibly to strike the Baltics next.

Trump admires Putin’s authoritarian impunity. Politicians worldwide are corrupted, electoral processes influenced, political parties derailed to help Russia instead of having healthy democratic debates on national policies.

And China is watching as well: bankrolling Russia while observing how the war goes, to decide whether they, too, could get away with invading their sovereign neighbor, Taiwan — another potential war where millions could die or end up under occupation, probably leading to a wider conflict or empowering China to keep expanding further, if left unchecked.

All of this is made possible by the passivity of global public opinion, by the lack of serious sanctions against Russia, by the fact that politicians in positions of power are not laughed out of the room every time they spread vatnik lies about Ukraine or praise a genocidal, warmongering dictator like Putin or the Chinese, Iranian or North Korean regimes.

The Firehose of Falsehood and how we counter it

The Kremlin is not even trying to convince anyone that they’re the good guys. Their goal is to demoralize us: make us lose confidence in truth, morality, Western values — any values. To make us doubt everything, to “bothside” the clearest war ever.

A few extra gullible “useful idiots” will openly join Russia (it never ends well for them). But many more will simply proclaim their indifference to a simple, morally straightforward conflict intentionally made to appear overly complex by propaganda, and hence refuse to act — enough to make the war much easier for Putin.

Our aim is to counter that propaganda. To fight Russia’s impunity in the long run by countering and debunking the lies their entire operation depends on: the active or passive support for their wars manufactured by the spread and acceptance of vatnik narratives.

To make this war end sooner. To avoid further ones.

There are many ways to help Ukraine. But with a war unfortunately going on since 2014, besides the urgent military and humanitarian needs, the underlying propaganda imperatively needs to be addressed too.

And this is what Vatnik Soup does.

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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 to debunk it takes time and effort — please support our work.