Vatnik Soup

An Encyclopedia of Kremlin Agents and dupes

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

-Abraham Lincoln, 1838

The Kremlin has launched a vast global operation to subvert the political systems of Western democracies. In their new book, Vatnik Soup: The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation (KLE-art, 594 pages) https://www.amazon.com/Vatnik-Soup-Ultimate-Russian-Disinformation-ebook/dp/B0DMPGHN91/ref=sr_1_1?crid=D0AIEQZCP069&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.HK38AFwqDVXfOgI0N1abCsWM4J_heJDGKanfmpDWG0Y1U1EwCB9xx8k_O9W47YGD1EPl8FVO5Sgd-Col7H6p977LlS2GJ2HsWKSmGZ45kLFBz77gViFmL4r09bTf1esptDhYCsagW4BMVhj9cZr_6SX9kPIhLgYXxPwp87WpStP9cX9f0NePBzHgB_F1jCn3RDaMBGwibvjmM0-etOLnvUUSBRTXsHeOWseKWfMBlcRsNQ9WdArI7NFgyq6i9f5kRTY_geePtdpl8oIau_ib_IDK8Z-XlRTc0T2f5bc_Ruo.-ITjMYBy1QkvPZZCThzbZqfJj1agiRYcLCFk51XHxSI&dib_tag=se&keywords=vatnik+soup&qid=1733088221&sprefix=%2Caps%2C112&sr=8-1 , Scandinavian authors Pekka Kallioniemi (a Finn) and Morten Hammeken (a Dane) attempt to provide an antidote.

Vatnik Soup is divided into three sections. In the first, the authors discuss the basic information warfare methodologies used by Putin’s Russia to influence Western political systems. These differ substantially from those employed by USSR. While the soviets did employ all four of the classic MICE (money, ideology, compromat, and ego) methods to create fifth columns within free nations, their most effective tool was the seductive lie of the communist dream. In contrast, Putin’s Kremlin offers no such utopia to recruit armies well-meaning dupes. Instead, it primarily makes use of cold hard cash to enlist the help of agents of influence well-positioned within government, business or the media of the West. Furthermore, while soviet propaganda generally tried to convince Western audiences of versions favorable to Soviet interests, the Putinite system does not limit itself to trying to win debates over current events. It also attempts to destroy the debate process itself by vigorously circulating numerous contradictory lines. The point of this is to so confuse the public to the point where they believe that “nothing is true and everything is possible,” thereby undermining any potential resistance to Kremlin manipulation.

In the second part of the book the authors lay out and refute a number of key falsehoods that are incessantly being circulated by Kremlin agents and duly parroted by their dupes. These include the lies that Russia had been or is willing to conduct peace negations with Ukraine; that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was forced by NATO expansion; that the 2014 popular uprising known as the Revolution of Dignity that broke Ukraine out of Kremlin control was a CIA orchestrated coup; that Ukraine is ruled by neo-Nazis; that Ukraine had been conducting genocide against “ethnic Russians” in the Donbas; that the West is decadent and requires the moral leadership of Putin’s Russia for its restoration to traditional values, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a corrupt oligarch who diverting Western miliary aid to buy himself yachts and palaces around the world.

But the heart of the book is its third section, by far its longest, where the authors present short biographies of no less than ninety-three key “vatniks,” or Kremlin agents of influence. About a third of the vatniks are American, a third European, a quarter Russian, and the remainder scattered among Canada, Australia, and a few other miscellaneous countries.

The biographies are written in a very colloquial style, and many are quite generous to their subjects. For example the authors attribute the incessant pro-Kremlin utterances of venture investor David Sacks to his lack of accurate knowledge about Ukraine. In other cases very interesting associations between vatniks are identified. For example American Communist Party leader Jackson Hinkle, a longtime friend and associate of Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, has been promoted by Tucker Carlson, Russia-1 TV’s Vladimir Solovyev, and the Assad regime.

Particularly instructive are biographies of prestigious individuals whose credentials allow them access to the corridors of power and elite publications. For example, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University might appear to many to be a person whose pronouncements should be given great weight in policy circles. However from reading his biography in Vatnik Soup, the picture that emerges is quite different.

Not only did Sachs, while assigned to directing US aid to Russia during the Clinton administration engineer the rise of the post-soviet kleptocracy, he has apparently maintained his loyalty to it ever since. Sach’s points of apparent Kremlin affinity include calling for dismantling “US hegemony,” parroting the Kremlin’s call for a “a multi-polar world,” claiming that the CIA goaded the Kremlin into attacking Afghanistan in 1979 and aiding Assad in 2015, that the US planned the Revolution of Dignity that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, that eastern European nations such as Finland should be denied the right to join NATO, that the COVID-19 epidemic was the result of a leak from a US biolab, and that the US should deny miliary aid to Ukraine. They go on:

“True to form, Sachs also blames the US for bombing the Nord Stream pipelines and even addressed the UN Security Council on Russia’s behalf on the matter.

“While eagerly defending Russian interests, Sachs also appears to be a big fan of China and has defended the country’s genocide of the Uyghur population by saying that the term “genocide” simply doesn’t apply there. When confronted with this in an interview, he evaded the question and referred to the “huge human rights abuses committed by the US.”

Vatnik Soup’s authors don’t state their own politics, but reading between the lines they appear to be center-left Scandinavian social democrats. This does not stop them from harshly attacking the many European social democrats who have sold out to Putin. But it does distort their political analysis, as they tend to see the drift into the Kremlin camp of “right wing” figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone simply a matter of bad people become worse, while former “leftists” like RFK Jr or Tulsi Gabbard were supposedly once on the side of the angels until they went too far around the political horseshoe and became rightists themselves. This flawed analysis is based on the notion that the concepts of “Left” and “Right,” despite being drawn from the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789, still define political identify today. It’s pretty clear from reading their book that a more useful political spectrum for understanding the crisis they discuss would one opposes not Left to Right, but West to East.

But that is a nit. What is important about Vatnik Soup is not its authors’ politics, but the vast amount of critical facts they have assembled in one useful guide. The West is under attack. There is a kinetic aspect to the assault, but the enemy’s most deadly weapon, by far, is its massive misinformation campaign. All of our military and economic muscle will do us no good if the enemy succeeds in confusing us, blinding us, or sets us fighting among ourselves.

To defeat an enemy, you must know the enemy. Read Vatnik Soup.

Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author of 12 books, including most recently The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mars-Create-Planet/dp/1635768802/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7CO4pdRvL8H17LVNWUDSYa0KKnyJ_MfnhzkY4QSKkbRSOu2SyePr4Q9tjEhq2rw7ns1I7UqAn8e0Ok2iolwuil9DilwIyEMrY6Iomxdz5pQI1DMWAA_ECM3DM9Gx8vLpGzOvGCTAZTlGv6YBWWBFHkXsxf0AkVZnhxqeLqwa2B9aF1ngeShGrYvBBKiwJOD773Y4VoYSXM_pWDZ3Du1DqHDzwoy8h5mwXnAxzdyyClc.b4Kc23jvkxFxdvEyH657niKeg07Ew0m7-TVo1Axvs0A&qid=1730311816&sr=8-1