Silicon Curtain

Lough is currently Senior Research Fellow and Head of Foreign Policy & International Partnerships at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre (NEST Centre). He leads its foreign-policy work and international partnerships. He remains an Associate Fellow in Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme. ----------LINKS:https://nestcentre.org/author/john-lough/https://nestcentre.org/https://www.linkedin...

Dominic Culverwell is a British-born, Kyiv-based journalist and business reporter at the Kyiv Independent, where his beat covers Ukrainian companies, investment, energy, corruption and reform. He joined the publication in 2023 after freelance work for outlets including the Financial Times, bne IntelliNews, RFE/RL, Euronews and New Eastern Europe. Before that, he worked with StopFake as a disinform...

Silicon Bites Ep406 | 2026-09-26 | What comes after Putin’s sham election? Russia’s hidden mass mobilisation is already running and will be far bigger than the western allies are expecting or planning for. It’s time to wake up to the scale of the threat that Putin represents to the whole free world. Twenty-first of September 2022. Vladimir Putin goes on television and announces a "partial&quo...

Oleksandra Chorna is a Blogger and Therapist based in New York. She runs platforms including on YouTube focusing on democratic politics, authoritarian slide, and Ukraine's struggle to remain independent in the face of Russian aggression. ----------LINKS:https://www.youtube.com/@UC9WVWN8qNEiy2CofIUW9Zpw https://www.instagram.com/mom_ocracy/https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksandra-chorna-30b9088/-...

Silicon Bites Ep406 | 2026-09-24 | Everyone around Putin knows the war is lost — except grandpa. Explosive new leaks hint at what Putin’s inner circle believe, and the picture is hardly of loyalists that are invested in a common vision. Rather a cynical and spineless elite simply clinging to power and their lives – buying more time to grift and protect their ill-gotten gains. But what if there is...

Livestream with Yuri RashkinLINKS:https://rashkinreport.substack.com/https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rashkin-report/id1183073638----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-disinformation----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrainehttps://www.saveu...

Silicon Bites Ep402 | 2026-09-17 | Flares at a Danish Helicopter, Drones over Lithuania and Moldova, Fire on Poland's Doorstep — Putin Has Stopped Deterring Europe and Started Shaping the Future Battlefield. Two flares. No warning. No radio call. One passed within metres of a Danish military helicopter over the Baltic Sea on Monday. A few metres more, and Denmark would be burying aircrew kille...

Andrew Ryvkin was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Boston, then spent close to two decades in Moscow. He studied History and International Relations at St Petersburg State University and subsequently worked across media, advertising, PR and political television. He published glossy magazines in which Kremlin talking points appeared alongside luxury advertising, produced political talk shows th...

Silicon Bites Ep401 | 2026-09-16 | Trump announced a truce that nobody had agreed to. As if uttering the lie loudly and demonstratively would make it so. This little authoritarian trick is wearing thin. Hours later Ukraine burned the AVT-6 unit at a Rosneft refinery — and Russia burned two Kyiv petrol stations. There is no truce. Never was and is very unlikely to be one until Putin snuffs it. The...

Malcolm Nance is a former career US Naval Intelligence officer specializing in counter-terrorism, intelligence and violent extremism. He has been an advisor to the US government’s law enforcement, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies. As an Arabic-speaking special intelligence collections operator, field interrogator he provided top secret anti and counter-terrorism support to national inte...

Silicon Bites Ep400 | 2026-09-15 | A Putin-decorated oligarch paid for Don Jr's wedding party. Jared Kushner was a guest. Four months later, Kushner spoke remotely to an event in Kyiv and explained that the obstacle to peace is Ukraine. He is clearly upset that Ukraine won’t surrender, won’t capitulate to the aggressor, acquiesce to be erased. Both stories are crashing into our timelines today...

Jason Jay Smart is a political adviser who has lived and worked in Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Latin America. Due to his work with the democratic opposition to Vladimir Putin, Smart was made persona non grata for life by Russia in 2010. Jason is a Special Correspondent at the Kyiv Post. It’s the state of US support for Ukraine that we will discuss today.----------LINKS:ht...

Silicon Bites Ep399 | 2026-09-13 | Putin's terror reaches the EU's doorstep — and Washington's answer is not to ask Russia to stop committing war crimes daily, but to ask Ukraine to stop hitting Russian diesel. We are seeing moral and political bankruptcy in real time. Putin is scaling up his terror campaign against Ukraine and sending messages to its allies. Border crossings are being...

Silicon Bites Ep398 | 2026-09-12 | Prepare for an oil shock, and economic reverberations. We are living in a bubble of stability that is going to be shaken to its core, but a sequence of events triggered by Trump’s war against Iran, and of course it is likely linked to Putin’s attempts to erase Ukraine since 2022. Let’s unpack this story that is being dramatically under reported in the world’s med...

​Rick's Last Campaign Before Joining The Army: https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/ricks-last-campaign-before-joining-the-army----------@ricktheukrainian is from Ukraine, and every Sunday gets together with his community online (the Rick Rollers), to make video content and raise funds for the Defense Forces of Ukraine. Rick is originally from Makiivka in the Donetsk area, and lived under Russian...

Moscow's strategic objective has long been to neutralise the United States as an obstacle to Russian power by attacking the cohesion, confidence, institutions and decision-making capacity of American society itself. This is the argument behind Keir Giles’ latest book, American Overthrow (2026).----------Keir Giles has spent his career watching, studying, and explaining Russia, which is fortuit...

Silicon Bites Ep396 | 2026-09-07 | Kyiv's spy agencies opened fire on each other. Forty-eight hours later a Russian drone flew into the office of the SBU chief. These are unprecedented events. Moscow thinks it is watching a state come apart. And Moscow trolls and Kremlin aligned analysts, agents and useful idiots are having a field day. But Ukraine stands and is not collapsing from within – it...

Oleksandra Chorna is a Blogger and Therapist based in New York. She runs platforms including on YouTube focusing on democratic politics, authoritarian slide, and Ukraine's struggle to remain independent in the face of Russian aggression. ----------LINKS:https://www.youtube.com/@UC9WVWN8qNEiy2CofIUW9Zpw https://www.instagram.com/mom_ocracy/https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksandra-chorna-30b9088/-...

YURI RASHKIN LINKS:https://www.youtube.com/@rashkinreportinenglishhttps://www.youtube.com/@RashkinReport/https://rashkinreport.substack.com/https://www.facebook.com/rashkin/https://www.instagram.com/yurirashkin/----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/iwihttps://www.patreon.com/iwi----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrainehttps://www.saveukraineua.org/Superhumans - Ho...

Silicon Bites Ep397 | 2026-09-10 | Putin switched the terror off, in Kyiv at least, for a short period of time, and across a narrow corridor of space. Once more demonstrating that he has full control over the taps of terror – he can turn them on and off at will. The zombie empire that Russia has become is entirely tuned to his pathological will, and like a loyal, murderous machine it faithfully ca...

Valeria Kovtun is was formerly Head at Filter, the National media literacy project founded in Ukraine. She also worked as a journalist at BBC Reel and has been a senior correspondent at major Ukrainian media organisations, and a fellow journalist at the United Nations. She also has a background in video production, content management and news broadcasting. Valeria Kovtun studied law, Media Communi...

Silicon Bites Ep389 | 2026-08-25 | The marketplace economy was Russia's one modern achievement. Ukraine is burning it down. But this is not recreational, for fun (as one British newspaper implied). It is intentional, targeted and strategic. This is wartime infrastructure, as much as it is civilian – with its revenue powering the war economy and its shelves stocking military equipment for the S...

Kyiv of Mine : Chapter 4 – The light that remains - just released to coincide with Independence Day here in Ukraine. This is a must watch!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOTmNxKRnYhttps://www.youtube.com/@KyivOfMinehttps://www.kyivofmine.com/----------“Help DW and the team at Ukraine Story provide portable power banks to mobile air defense and victims of Russian strikes, learn more and donate at...

Silicon Bites Ep387 | 2026-08-20 | Ukraine is stripping the sky away, layer by layer, above Putin's palace. We mean strikes against the layered air defences protecting Putin Palace. The symbolism and psychological impact of destroying the residence, as if it were a Wildberries warehouse would be immense. Last night Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv for eleven hours. At least sixteen peop...

Silicon Bites Ep388 | 2026-08-21 | Something big is happening. NATO filled the Baltic sky this week with aviation assets – what does it mean? These are extraordinary movements of NATO aircraft in the Baltics. Do they constitute exercises, or something more? Deterrence, or moves to counter specific threats from Russia. The debate rages around why Putin may attack or provoke NATO specifically in Eur...