This video perfectly encapsulates the Russian mindset: a well-dressed woman is stealing plants in broad daylight. When caught, she starts claiming that she wanted to replant them. When the guy tells her not to steal plants, she calls him crazy. That’s how Russia operates: steals, lies, and then calls you crazy. Same shit
The biggest story in America is a president who has completely lost touch with reality. Who thinks the FBI let all the January 6 rioters into the Capitol, that he really won the 2020 election, that the Iran War is going well. Who, when occasionally confronted w reality, panics.
Pay attention to who is willing to break the law for Trump as we head into the midterms—because his end goal is to create a system where others will break the law for him. It's about building a custom where it's normal to break the law for a person. The big case is the military
Europe Wins Again. Obviously.
Armenia went to the polls yesterday. And the results are exactly what you’d expect if you’d been paying attention for the past five years, rather than wallowing in Kremlin nostalgia like a damp sock.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared victory on Monday, with his Civil Contract Party leading with 52.5% of the vote.  Armenia, a landlocked country the size of Belgium that Russia has spent decades treating as a vassal state, has looked at its options and made a decision that required roughly the same level of intellectual effort as choosing between a Michelin-starred restaurant and a skip fire.
They chose Europe.
This election was less a routine vote than a referendum on Pashinyan’s post-2020 course reducing dependence on Russia and moving toward an explicit European orientation. And Russia, naturally, did everything in its power to stop it. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence officials, the election faced heavy Russian covert interference, including disinformation campaigns and a plan to transport Russian Armenians into Armenia to sway the vote. One analyst collective described it as one of the largest state-backed disinformation campaigns in modern European history. And Armenia still told them to get lost.
Putin had already warned Armenia it would face economic consequences for drifting westward, and introduced restrictions on Armenian agricultural exports in the weeks before the vote.  Threats, propaganda, economic blackmail. The full Russian toolkit. Result: irrelevant.
Now, Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance would like you to believe that Russia represents some superior civilisational model. A proud, white, Christian fortress holding the line against the Muslim hordes supposedly swamping Europe. It is a compelling narrative, in the same way that flat earth theory is compelling if you ignore every single fact available to you.
Here is one such fact: between 10 and 15 percent of Russia’s own population is Muslim. Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis. Millions of them. Russia is, by its own demographic reality, a multi-ethnic, multi-faith state with a larger Muslim population than most of Western Europe. But you’re not supposed to know that. It complicates the story.
Meanwhile, the Muslim share of the EU population sits at around 5 percent. But the Tucker Carlsons of the world need you frightened, so the numbers get quietly shuffled off stage.
So Armenia joins the queue. Behind Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and every Eastern European country that isn’t currently run by a Slovak who seems to have wandered in from a Moscow focus group. The pattern is not subtle. Every country that has actually experienced Russian influence in practice is sprinting in the opposite direction. The only nation currently moving toward Russia’s orbit is the United States, which managed to elect a man whose foreign policy instincts were apparently shaped by a property developer’s admiration for strongmen with good buildings.
The world watches America and hopes it finds its way back. Most people think it will. Eventually. The damage, however, is already considerable, and democracy, like a soufflé, does not always survive rough handling.
Armenia made its choice. The right one. Obviously.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Kasparov: Merkel was the best agent of Russian interests, not as a spy, but politically.
She made Germany and Europe dependent on Russian gas, built Nord Stream 2 after Crimea, and paralyzed efforts to build a strong coalition against Putin.
I’ve been investigating the russian refinery for days now and the story gets darker and darker. The shipments are sent to Siberia, smelted, and sold to the russian company ‘ASK’. This company distributes aluminium directly to Russia’s missile & drone manufacturers.
This is putin casually admitting to what can only be described as a textbook war crime, and he’s doing it with a smug smile on his face.
He literally brags about using Ukraine as a human testing ground.
He openly admits that they didn't fire their "Oreshnik" missile at a military test range. Instead, they fired it at populated areas in Ukraine just because it was "convenient to watch”.
Think about that for a second. He sent explosive warheads into communities, and then sent drones in right after just to count the bodies and measure the craters "down to the millimeter" like it’s some kind of science fair project.
But the scariest part is how he ends it. He casually drops that they are collecting this data so they can figure out how to better use these massive missiles in "urban areas”. That is political speak for densely populated cities filled with civilians, apartment buildings, and schools.
It’s pure, calculated terror.
putin: “After all, we... we used to test such systems at testing ranges. But 'Oreshnik' wasn't tested that way. And this wasn't a combat application. In fact, we haven't had a single combat application of 'Oreshnik' over the territory of Ukraine in the full, so to speak, sense of the word.
And the last one—to be completely honest, I will reveal a major, major state military secret to you. We simply struck a location where it was convenient to observe the results. Well, this concerns Bila Tserkva, and it especially concerns... concerns the DPR [so-called Donetsk People's Republic] area within the perimeter of the main fortified area.
Afterward, our drones flew into that area—the target area we had struck—and simply looked at how the multiple reentry vehicles had landed. They calculated everything down to the millimeter, exactly where everything hit.
For us, this is important in order to make future decisions regarding the full-scale deployment of 'Oreshnik' against designated targets. Including within urban areas.”
Scandal brewing in “neutral” Ireland after revelations that one Russian-affiliated plant there has been supplying over 83% Irish exports of alumina to Russia where it’s smelted into aluminum, a critical component for war production.
Aughinish Alumina in County Limerick, Europe’s largest alumina refinery, owned by United Company Rusal (Russia’s largest aluminium producer), whose parent EN+ Group was founded by sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska. An investigation by the Irish Times, OCCRP and other outlets, drawing on confidential documents, customs data and satellite imagery, established the supply chain.
The Irish government tried to deflect but when a reporter filmed the plant with signs in Russian, they could no longer deny it. Now internal documents were leaked showing that the company is threatening the Irish government with loss of jobs and all sorts of things if it tried to curb its exports to Russia.
The newest defense is that alumina isn’t under EU sanctions so technically no rules were broken. Except Ireland had no problem defying the EU and forging ahead with its own restrictions on imports from Israel with its Occupied Territories Bill. Because… reasons (or maybe Russian occupation of Ukraine is OK while Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is not).
Australia stopped its alumina exports to Russia because the material is so necessary for the war (its main exporter was also 20%-owned by Deripaska). The neutral Irish government is operating under different standards, where morality is spelled in Russian.
I wonder what the Irish people, who overwhelmingly support Ukraine (in fact, they are among the strongest supporters in Europe when it comes to economic and financial aid), think about all of this.
Did anyone dig into historical media about Auginish Alumina? There is some real eyebrow raisers 😳 The Irish Independent reported back in 2013 that a highly profitable Auginish Alumina paid just €1,952 in total corporation tax over 5 years despite €191 million in sales 🤔
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@P_Kallioniemi@iEndure_4evr Just to clarify:
When they say “how Moscow might react”,
what they mean is “how Moscow will release their copy of the Epstein files if we sale the Tomahawks to Germany”.
According to Politico, the Trump administration may cancel planned Tomahawk missile sales to Germany because it fears the move could anger Russia.
Europe's largest economy wants to strengthen its defenses against an aggressive, expansionist Russia, and Washington's concern is how Moscow might react.
This is exactly why Europe needs to become militarily independent of the US.
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll introduce an American conspiracy theorist, podcaster & antisemite, Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO). She’s best known for spreading conspiracy theories, attacking Ukraine, promoting pro-Kremlin BS, and becoming a favorite of Russian state media.
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