In today’s #vatnik soup, I’ll introduce an American propagandist & a Youtuber, Patrick Lancaster.He’s a former sailor turned pro-Russian disinfo spreader. Ironically, his videos from the Russia-occupied areas have exposed Russian war crimes and sensitive military information.

In June 2001 he joined the US Navy, working on the USS Kitty Hawk as a cryptologic technician. He apparently also held a top-secret clearance. After leaving the Navy, he worked as a real-estate agent until he moved to Berlin and started working as a journalist around 2011.

Patrick calls himself a “independent, crowd-funded journalist”, which means that he’s mostly paid for by the Kremlin. He’s usually the only English-speaking reporter in Russia-controlled territories, and often travels around with Russian troops.

David Ferris, an American filmmaker met Lancaster in Donetsk in 2014 & later commented that “I remember [Patrick] sort of being compromised from the beginning”. Cyber Front Z, a troll farm established in 2022, promotes Patrick’s videos and calls for people to support his work.

He arrived to Ukraine in 2014 to cover the Euromaidan revolution. In the same year, he converted to Orthodox Christianity, settled in the Donetsk Oblast & met a woman who’d later become his wife. Their wedding was covered by several Russian news organizations, including Zvezda.5/13

At some point Lancaster worked as a cameraman for another propagandist, Graham Phillips. By 2022, Patrick had fallen out with Graham, & Patrick described Graham as a “harmless clown who runs around in a panic, like a rabbit in headlights spouting phrases in broken English”.

Graham later retaliated, calling Lancaster an “illiterate, grifting charlatan, with a journalistic acumen and ability lower than a potted plant.”

His Youtube channel gained a huge boost in subscriptions after he started reporting on the war, helping him boost his channel…

…from mere 50,000 followers to over half a million.

Patrick is one of the “dirty dozen” of the most prominent Western propagandists that spread pro-Russian propaganda by masquerading as “independent journalists”. Patrick crowdsources his work, and has over 1000 …

… paying subscribers on Patreon, each paying anything between 3 and 200 USD. By Jun, 2022, his Buy Me A Coffee account had collected over 77 000 USD. He also sells his footage to Kremlin-backed medias, probably gaining him a hefty extra pile of money.

Lancaster has worked for many Kremlin-controlled state medias, including RT, Ruptly & Zvezda, while covering the war in Donbas. In 2022, his only international outlet was the InfoWars. Patrick’s connected to Eric Kraus, a pro-Russian French businessman who’s close to Patrushev.10/13

He’s been involved in various false flag operations, which try to put the blame of “terrorist acts” and “war crimes” on the Ukrainian soldiers.

He published a staged video of a “pre-war provocation” from Donbas, in which IED had allegedly killed one of the …

… military commanders of the made-up state of Donetsk People’s Republic. Explosive weapons expert and a forensic pathologist concluded that the whole scene was staged and the bodies were actually cadavers with evident autopsy marks on their skulls.

Research by Bellingcat also used one of Lancaster’s videos to identify a Russian soldier suspected of torturing and castrating a Ukrainian POW:

Tracking the Faceless Killers…