In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce a propaganda film Ukraine on Fire and its two main creators, Igor Lopatonok (@lopatonok) & Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone). It’s best-known for falsely claiming the 2014 Revolution of Dignity to be a US/far-right-orchestrated coup d’État.
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There seems to be two driving forces in this documentary: director Lopatonok’s love for Russia and his hate for Ukraine, and Stone’s love for Putin and hate for the CIA.

At the beginning of the film, Lopatonok and Stone present Ukraine as a “treacherous country” that…

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…"switches sides" on a whim. It also represents the Western Ukraine as brutal, nationalist Banderites who preyed on Jews and Polish people. What it forgets to mention was that the Ukrainians were between a rock and hard place, when they basically had to choose between…

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…the Nazi Germany and the USSR. Between 1932-1933, Stalin-led famine Holodomor had killed 3, 5-5 million Ukrainians in order to eliminate any independence movement in the country. The film doesn’t mention any of the atrocities committed by the USSR, including the forced…

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…deportations of Crimean Tatars and “Russification” of the Donbas region.

More on the topic here:

Genocide in Donbas

And here:

How Russia Russified the east…

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The film depicts the “crazy 1990s”, where the opportunistic oligarchs became extremely wealthy whereas the common folk had to struggle to get food, in a realistic way, but again fails to mention that the same happened in Russia and in most of the old Soviet countries.

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The filmmakers forget to tell that many of the Ukrainian oligarchs, including Viktor Medvedchuk who is featured in the film, had and have pro-Russian stances and got lucrative business deals from Russia. Many of them also came from the Eastern parts of Ukraine.

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Medvedchuk was funding false flag operations and pro-Russian politicians already at the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004, and his TV channels broadcasted pro-Kremlin propaganda 24/7. He now lives in Russia.

Read more on Viktor Medvechuk here:

Viktor Medvedchuk

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In addition to “evil neo-Nazi Banderites”, the documentary blames the NATO expansion for the 2014 events in Ukraine. It doesn’t make sense to argue this point for the 100th time, as most of you already know that NATO expansion is a) completely voluntary, and…

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…b) done mostly to avoid war with Russia. More about NATO expansion here:

NATO expansion

The film claims that “Ukraine has never been a united country”, and attempts to show the West as the “nationalist, Banderite” region, whereas the east and Crimea are …

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…shown as pro-Russia. All Ukrainian Oblasts voted for the independence in 1991, and Russia promised to honor Ukrainian borders and sovereignty when they signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Also, most of the Russian-speaking population came to Ukraine through forced…

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…deportations during the Stalin era, partly to eliminate the independence efforts in the country.

Like any unbiased documentary, Oliver Stone focuses interviewing only neutral actors like Viktor Yanukovych and Vladimir Putin. He even interviews Vitaliy Zakharchenko, …

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…former Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, who signed a decree that authorized the use of live ammo against the Maidan protesters.

The documentary contains a lot of speculation on the involvement of American politicians and NGO’s and how they had instigated…

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…a “coup d’État” in Ukraine by collaborating with the Ukrainian far-right groups. Whereas the work by NGO’s like NED has been completely overt and transparent, Russia’s covert operations to undermine democracy and independence of Ukraine have been revealed to us through…

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…the Surkov leaks and Glazyev tapes, as well as through revelations made by the Russo-Ukrainian politician, Oleg Tsaryov.

Surkov:

Vladislav Surkov

Glazyev:

Sergey Glazyev

Tsaryov:

In March 2023, Tsaryov a coup plan that was supposed to be done by Yanukovych and his Party of Regions,with the help of Putin. For some weird reason, this plan was revealed by Tsaryov.

13/19 pic.twitter.com/QG4VTYGn9o

— Pekka Kallioniemi (@P_Kallioniemi) April 24, 2023

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Lopatonok and Stone are pushing the age-old “We have to avoid the new Cold War between the US and Russia to avoid a nuclear confrontation” narrative. As we now know, Putin has called all attempt to assist or aid Ukraine to defend itself an “escalation”, …

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…and it didn’t take long after the full-scale invasion had started for the Kremlin to start threatening absolutely everyone with nuclear strikes.

We can probably all agree, that making nuclear blackmail a viable negotiation strategy shouldn’t be normalized.

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The documentary seems to have three core (and false) narratives that are often seen touted by the Kremlin, too: 1) the CIA-backed, far-right forces are in power in Ukraine and shouldn’t be defended (read my debunk here:

Russian nazis

), …

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2) Western countries shouldn’t interfere with Russia’s operations in Ukraine to avoid nuclear war, and 3) it’s actually NATO that’s causing Russia to escalate.

It’s an extremely biased film, only featuring people from the Kremlin side, telling their version of the story.

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The dynamic duo of Lopatonok and Stone really seems to enjoy bootlicking totalitarian leaders, as they also made a documentary on Kazakhstan’s former dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The film received funding of 5 million USD from Nazarbayev’s own charity foundation, Elbasy.
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Stone has later condemned Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though he called it a “trap set by the U.S.”. Lopatonok is still deep in the Kremlin trenches, continuing his propaganda work with an upcoming documentary on the invasion.

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Lopatonok is also active on Twitter, spouting nonsense, denying genocide and other atrocities in Ukraine, occasionally arguing with brain dead Shiba Inus. As is tradition, Igor is residing in Los Angeles, in the country he so much despises.

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