Silicon Curtain

2025-11-27 | DAILY UPDATES #068 | The civil war has broken out in Russia – but not the one you perhaps imagined. It’s a weird civil war between objectionable characters – one happening inside the pro-war camp. Z-Patriots and propagandists are turning on each other. The Z-patriots, “turbo-patriots,” Telegram war-bloggers and Kremlin talking heads who cheered on the invasion… are now denouncing, arr...

Andriy Borovik is Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine. NOTE: The first half of the video is audio only (with a still image of the guest) - apologies, this is due to a corrupted video file. ----------LINKS:https://acrec.org.ua/en/news/the-first-in-ukraine-master-s-program-anti-corruption-studies-is-open/LVIV MEDIA FORUM:The NGO Lviv Media Forum strengthens media, institutions,...

2025-11-26 | Silicon Wafers #067 | The man sent to sell peace in Russia’s war against Ukraine turns out to have been helping the competition polish their sales pitch. He’s gone from witless and hapless amateur diplomat to become Witkoff the Kremlin whisperer. On the surface this appears to be a treasonous act – but it seems that Trump doesn’t really care, one way of another. It’s at this point we...

2025-11-25 | DAILY UPDATES #065 | As we record, U.S. and Ukrainian delegations are in Geneva working on an “updated” or “refined” version of the plan – with Marco Rubio talking about “tremendous progress” and Ukrainian officials quietly insisting that their red lines are being taken on board. All of this shows weakness, tremendous weakness and delusion. It signals to Moscow that we are divided, di...

Philip Malzahn serves as an in-house reporter for UNITED24 Media, with a focus on investigative reporting in Ukraine’s war zones. By diving deep into the stories behind the headlines, he uncovers key information and brings transparency to the complexities of the war, providing his audience with thorough, compelling and fact-based reporting. LINKS:https://united24media.com/authors/malzahnhttps://mu...

Welcome to our monthly conversation with Konstantin, who is one of the most respected voices on YouTube about what is happening Inside Russia. Konstantin Samoilov is a well-known YouTuber whose channel ‘Inside Russia’ comments insightfully on Russia’s decent into authoritarianism over the last few years. But now, like many others, he’s outside Russia, with no idea of when he can return there. ----...

Dorka Takácsy is a researcher specializing in disinformation and propaganda across Central-Eastern Europe and Russia. She currently serves as a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a research fellow at the Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy. As a PhD candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest, she explores Russian domestic disinformation targeting...

2025-11-23 | Silicon Wafers 065 | Ukraine didn’t just answer Moscow’s “peace offensive” with a strongly worded press release, but with fire and fury. Before dawn, video from the small town of Shatura – about 120 kilometres east of Moscow – flooded Telegram and X: a black sky, a sudden flash, and then a roaring fireball rising over the Shaturskaya State District Power Plant, one of the largest and...

2025-11-22 | Silicon Wafers DAILY UPDATE 064 | Putin’s ship has been taking on water for some time but has now hit an iceberg – it’s called thirty-six dollars a barrel of Urals crude oil. Russia’s flagship Urals crude has collapsed to its lowest price since early 2023 – just as U.S. sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, the two giants of Putin’s oil empire, are about to fully bite. India and China are...

Cormac Smith has worked in Public Relations and Corporate Communications for over three decades. In 2016 he traveled to Ukraine to take up a special appointment as the ‘Strategic Communication Advisor’ to Pavlo Klimkin, then the Foreign Minister of Ukraine. He was attached to the British Embassy in Kyiv but was embedded in Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the first foreigner to hold such a p...

Livestream with Jonathan MS Pearce. ----------SILICON CURTAIN FILM FUNDRAISERA project to make a documentary film in Ukraine, to raise awareness of Ukraine's struggle and in supporting a team running aid convoys to Ukraine's front-line towns.https://buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtain/extras----------https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/autumn-harvest-silicon-curtainDonate and Receive - Collectab...

See the full interview here: https://youtu.be/OUdsZYYd3bo~~~~~~~~~Conversation about the advances in AI and their political and social consequences. Jacob Ward is an American journalist and author who has spent over 20 years covering science, technology, and their social consequences. He’s been technology or science correspondent for Al Jazeera, NBC News, PBS, CNN and others, and former editor-in-...

2025-11-21 | Silicon Wafers 063 | Tonight, Vladimir Putin has *apparently* welcomed Donald Trump’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine, though in guarded terms… if it had stopped there, it would have been worrying for Ukraine and its partners. But Putin then behaved exactly as I’ve been suggesting he would. Whenever he senses weakness, even if it is illusory and based on false information, he double...

Timothy Ash, who has been professional economist for more than 30 years, with two thirds of that in the banking industry. Timothy’s specialism is emerging European economics, and he writes and blogs extensively on economic challenges for leading publications such as the Kyiv Post, Atlantic Council, the Financial Times, and the United Business Journal. He is also an Associate Fellow in the Russia a...

Livestream with Yuri Rashkin and Jonathan MS Pearce----------Partner on this video: KYIV OF MINE Watch the trailer now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arJUcE1rxY0'Kyiv of Mine' is a documentary series about Ukraine’s beautiful capital, Kyiv. The film production began in 2018, and much has changed since then. It is now 2025, and this story is far from over.https://www.youtube.com/@UCz6UbVK...

2025-11-20 | Silicon Wafers 062 | When is peace not peace? What it’s proposed by the Kremlin, as a pretext for more war, and a strategy to attempt to divide Ukraine from its allies and partners. This is what we are seeing now – a ‘brand-new’ surrender plan cooked up in the Kremlin, which in fact contains nothing new, and has no chance of success. Shame on the media that are hyping this as a new de...

David DeBatto is host of the ‘No Delusion Zone’ podcast @NoDelusionZone is a retired U.S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, a geopolitical analyst, writer, and podcaster. David is an Iraq war veteran who served as Team Leader of a Tactical Human Intelligence Team (THT) in operations within Iraq and is also a former police officer. David is considered too conservative for the progressive left...

2025-11-20 | Silicon Wafers 061 | When is peace not peace? What it’s proposed by the Kremlin, as a pretext for more war, and a strategy to attempt to divide Ukraine from its allies and partners. This is what we are seeing now – a ‘brand-new’ surrender plan cooked up in the Kremlin, which in fact contains nothing new, and has no chance of success. Shame on the media that are hyping this as a new de...

2025-11-19 | Silicon Wafers 060 | DAILY UPDATES | Yesterday we dipped our toes into the political storm engulfing Zelenskyy’s administration. Today we dive into the eye of the storm. For the first time since the full-scale invasion began, it’s not only Putin’s missiles or Trump’s tantrums that threaten peace in Ukraine, but also what’s happening inside Zelensky’s inner circle. And this threatens t...

Fundraiser mentioned in the video: https://www.givesendgo.com/familysupportuaKevin Leach is the main director for Sabre Training Advisory Group, a professional military training non-profit. Their aim is to give Ukrainian defenders the skills to come home alive. Kevin is a Canadian Armed Forces veteran, with a long history of working in Ukraine and in military affairs. He served as a sergeant from...

2025-11-18 | Silicon Wafers 059 | Kyiv has doubled down on the line: “He’s on a planned trip, not a fugitive”. They are referring to former defence minister Rustem Umerov and the persistent rumours he has “left the country and refuses to return”. The government vehemently claims these rumours spreading like wildfire on social media, are ‘very explicitly’ false. So, is this scandal or psyop? Ukrain...

Silicon Bites Ep270 | News Update - Day 1,363 - 2025-11-17 | A railway track in eastern Poland, that you’ve probably never heard of, has been the target of apparent Russia hybrid terror operations. This track would have remained a matter of limited awareness to the world at large, but somebody blew it up. Over the weekend, an explosion ripped through the Warsaw–Lublin line near the village of Mika...

2025-11-17 | Silicon Wafers 058 | DAILY UPDATES | We’re going straight to the heart of Putin’s war machine: fuel. Overnight on 15 November 2025, Ukrainian drones hit one of Russia’s biggest oil refineries in Ryazan, around 200 kilometres south-east of Moscow – and, as Kyiv’s generals quietly noted, that wasn’t the only target. This was part of a coordinated strike package that also hit a Nebo-U ra...

Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta is a Ukrainian cultural manager and curator of contemporary art. She is the director of the state enterprise Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex under the State Management of Affairs. In 2014, she served as the first Deputy Minister of Culture of Ukraine. In 2019, she was awarded the Women in Arts Award. Ostrovska-Lyuta was also a member of numerous pr...

2025-11-16 | Silicon Wafers 057 | DAILY UPDATES | Russia’s war against Ukraine is being fought on a scale that few seem to imagine or comprehend, and that includes the scale of resources that are being consumed, from tanks to vehicles, people to artillery shells. The proportions are huge, and the scale is vast, so it should not come as a surprise that certain commodities essential to war are start...