'Escape From Tarkov' lives on as eerie foreshadowing as Wagner PMC leader Prigozhin dies mysteriously
Why has this obscure Russian indie game gotten so close to the reality of the Russo-Ukrainian war?
Conspiracy theorists are accustomed to thinking of American media as preconditioning for real-world events, priming our reactions, and possibly exciting us to go to war. The US military has been known to influence movies, TV shows, and video games for decades. But we don’t often think of other countries doing the same thing. Escape From Tarkov is a 2016 video game that began development in 2012, which in hindsight seems to be a shockingly accurate allegory for what was going to happen in eastern Europe in the coming decade.
Spetsnaz, Wagner, and hiding illegal Western biolabs
Escape from Tarkov began development in 2012.[21] Battlestate Games lead developer Nikita Buyanov stated that he and the staff gained their experience through working at Absolutsoft on their previous work Contract Wars.[1] Both Escape from Tarkov and Contract Wars are set in what the developers refer to as the Russia-2028 universe.[22] Some development staff also have experience from real-world military experience, with one being a former Spetsnaz operator.[22]
—Wikipedia, ‘Escape From Tarkov’ (link)
Several Russian military members joined the team, and one was a former Spetsnaz operator. Their real-world knowledge almost certainly influenced the story, setting, and details of Escape From Tarkov, which began development in 2012, two years before the so-called “Revolution of Dignity”, otherwise known as the Maidan Coup, carried out by the CIA to install their puppet politician, and four years before the election of Donald Trump, which triggered so much concern about him investigating the Biden family business in Ukraine. It’s ten years ahead of when Americans started to care about the Ukraine conflict, in 2022.
What exactly does Escape From Tarkov comment on, and how accurate was it?
There are two PMC factions for players to choose in the game: United Security (USEC), a Western-based company, hired by a corporation known as TerraGroup to cover up the company's illegal activities, and BEAR, a company created by the Russian government to investigate these activities.[16][17] Each faction has its own gameplay advantages as well as unique cosmetics. For example, USEC-based players are specialized in Western or NATO-based firearms, while BEAR-players specialize in Russian firearms.
In other words, “United Security” is a proxy for NATO mercenaries who have snuck in trying to hide evidence of illegal bioweapon laboratories, while BEAR is a proxy for the real-world Russian mercenary group Wagner. The controversy surrounds TerraGroup, which is a major international corporation doing shady work there:
TerraGroup is a transnational holding company whose subsidiaries engage in a wide range of activities. It incorporates over 40 large enterprises, represented by branch offices in over 120 countries of the world.
TerraGroup Labs PLC
Is a UK-based private limited company, a subsidiary of the TerraGroup international holding. The company officially deals in scientific research concerned with biotechnology applied in the agribusiness industry and farming and is strongly implicated in illicit activities across Norvinsk and Tarkov.
Tarkov and Kharkov, genocide
The name “Tarkov” happens to be pronounced almost identically to “Kharkov”, which is the second largest city in Ukraine, located right next to the Russian border.1 This city’s location obviously makes it a target in any conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and indeed it was the location of conflict in a battle there in 2022. Photographs of dead Russian soldiers were proudly shared around pro-Ukraine websites reporting on the events. Any Russian military insiders would have predicted this. Kharkov is part of the Donbass region, where the CIA-installed puppet government carried out a genocide against Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens who were hoping to join the Russian Federation, reports say. Western propaganda departments aligned with the Biden family and NATO have fiercely rewritten this history, scrubbing all traces of the Ukraine military being responsible for this genocide, and blaming Russia instead.
Officially, Escape From Tarkov is set in a northern province of Russia and is meant to simulate a city more like St. Petersburg. But with real-world headlines like this…
The “Kharkov Region” was sympathetic to Russia, so that Russia had no reason to invade and randomly kill its friendlies. Dozens of hours of on-the-ground interviews with residents of the Donbass region captured by RT.com showed Ukrainian citizens trying to warn the world that Ukraine nationalists were behind the bombings, while Russia was trying to help its citizens survive.
The Ukrainian government is preparing a false-flag attack against a railway station filled with civilian refugees, in order to accuse Russia of war crimes, the Russian military claimed on Friday. Moscow cited intelligence to name the target, method, and even point of origin of the impending attack, which it said was patterned after the recent carnage in Kramatorsk.
“The Kiev regime is preparing another monstrous provocation, similar to the one carried out in Kramatorsk, to accuse Russian servicemen of war crimes with a massacre of civilians,” Lieutenant General Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, outlined on Friday afternoon.
—RT.com (link)
Western mercenaries were flooding into the zone and tried to save the innocent Ukrainians, only to realize that they were on the wrong side. Obviously Wagner played a role in fighting back, making the Tarkov “fictional” conflict all-too-real.
Biolabs in Ukraine
In March, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed it had found documents in Ukraine which showed that Ukrainian biological laboratories partnered with the US in research involving dangerous pathogens, such as plague and anthrax. President Vladimir Putin said in April that Russia has evidence that the laboratories were used to develop “components of biological weapons.”
—RT.com (link)
This smacks so much of the plot from Escape From Tarkov that it’s stunning. NATO countries sending mercenaries into Ukraine to destroy evidence of biological weapon development, while Russian mercenaries fight to gather the evidence and expose the West’s illegal activities in the vassal country. In August last year, the US government officially denied that the biolabs in Ukraine had anything to do with weaponry.
None other than US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says otherwise:
The US military outsourced some of its biological weapons research to the government installed by the 2014 coup in Kiev, Democrat presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Junior has claimed in an interview.
“We have biolabs in Ukraine because we’re developing bioweapons,” RFK Jr. told independent journalist Tucker Carlson in a lengthy conversation posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday evening. Though the US signed the ban on bioweapons in the 1970s, he explained, the Patriot Act adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 allowed the Pentagon to resume research.
According to Kennedy, the bioweapons program has operated under the guise of “life sciences” research, such as gain-of-function experiments on viruses and other pathogens, ultimately overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between 1984 and 2022.
—RT.com (link)
Was it a message?
Escape From Tarkov is a highly advanced military simulation, keeping track of ballistics, detailed inventory tracking, and the player character’s hydration, blood loss, and body wounds. It features some of the most sophisticated sound and visual design in video game history. It was not squeezed out quickly, but had a tremendous amount of talent and work poured into it. Was it funded by the Russian government or military? Was it designed to raise awareness of the situation in Kharkov, Ukraine years before Zelensky even took power with the help of the United States?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Much like spelling “Kiev” as “Kyiv” to be politically correct to the Ukrainians, Kharkov is now rendered Kharkiv to distance it from Russian pronounciation.
Fascinating stuff. Nothing surprises me anymore as video games and real life merge. We will soon all be characters in it if we are not careful. Smart cities and how to escape them could feature all of us unless we stop complying with their data gathering . We need to expose the truth about the 4th Industrial Revolution and who is really behind it, like Alison McDowell does.
I don't know much about Russia or Ukraine but I do suspect RFK Jnr and Tucker Carlson are part of 'the establishment' and are playing roles. That doesn't mean however that some of what they say is not true but it is probably already well known.
Very impressive and concise article! It reads like a lean, mean, and modern version of your great META GEAR articles. I haven't played Escape From Tarkov, but it's cool to hear about games being used as a tool to communicate something important rather than just trying to waste your time.
Video games can be used to train the player to think about certain things a certain way, so once countries' gov'ts realize this, they'll start investing in more refined propaganda à la video games (I'm not saying Tarkov is propaganda). A good example of this is the game 'The Witness' by Thekla. The point of The Witness is basically to prove to you how games can affect the way you think without you realizing it (the 'video ending' makes it obvious). I highly recommend The Witness BTW (ignore pretentious audiologs in the game).