Silicon Curtain

Edition No228 | 20-08-2025 - So many of Putin’s publicly faithful minions are dropping like flies. Businessmen, oligarchs, apparatchiks, minigarchs and occasionally intelligence personnel. This compels us to ask the question, is everything ok Vova? Are you worried about something? Are people plotting behind your back? Are they whispering about you? Or does Putin need to push some people out of the...

Edition No227 | 19-08-2025 - Today’s episode focuses on security guarantees – Ukraine has been here before. The Budapest Memorandum threw Ukraine under the bus, stripping away its deterrent weapons, while offering illusory guarantees on security. These proved to be toothless and worthless when Russia invaded. 2025, and are we back to the same exercise of making false promises to Ukraine, as it con...

Edition No226 | 18-08-2025 - Oil and Omissions: the Alaska Summit and the Business of War. The curtain has dropped on the Alaska summit, but the analysis goes on – especially as there’s a sequel, in the meeting of Zelenskyy and European leaders with Trump in Washington today. But is it oil that greased the wheels of the Alaska summit, and not peace. But like it’s oil that is greasing the gears of...

Edition No225 | 17-08-2025 - Summits and Surrender: America’s Morality left on the Tarmac. Again, as true gluttons for punishment, addicts for the truth, no matter how searing, and how painful, we're diving into the awkward red‑carpet tango of tyrants that was the Trump–Putin summit in Alaska. No ceasefire. No firm agreement. Just optics, photo‑ops, and America’s moral compass burying its need...

Edition No224 | 16-08-2025 - “Step Right Up! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the greatest geopolitical circus on Earth — featuring a trained killer, a conman, and hordes of gullible media.”The Alaska Summit Spectacle — When Diplomacy Became a Circus – but who humiliated whom at the summit? This episode is a kind of test, a poll – because it has two potential thumbnails. If you clicked on the imag...

Edition No223 | 15-08-2025 - The reaction of Russia’s nationalists, the so-called turbo patriots and war bloggers to Putin’s Alaska Summit with Trump is perhaps not what you might have expected. It’s far from positive, and strikes a tone of caution, fear even, of humiliation, failure and treachery. What on earth is going on? Ordinarily, we would not spend much time reviewing what Z-Patriots think,...

Edition No222 | 14-08-2025 - Putin and Trump seem intent on carving up Europe into an area for manipulation, appropriation and exploitation. This isn’t diplomacy, it’s geopolitical vandalism. There is an imperial and chauvinist style of geopolitics that treats the world like a Monopoly board: you move pieces, trade squares, bankrupt opponents. Everything is transactional, and everyone can be bough...

Edition No221 | 12-08-2025 - Someone should tell Trump that Alaska Is Not Russia. Not anymore. This episode is about dictators challenging borders and annulling the concept of sovereignty and universal human rights, in a world of rapid geopolitical devolution, to a far more barbaric age.“I’m going to Russia on Friday.” Said Trump at a D.C. presser on crime, days before his Alaska summit. He made t...

Jake Broe is a United States Air Force veteran who served for six years as a Nuclear and Missile Operations Officer. But you may know him better as one of the most prominent voices on YouTube throughout the war, someone with absolute moral clarity about who the victim of the war is – spoilers, it’s Ukraine – and who brings direct military experience to his detailed analysis of the unfolding confli...

Edition No220 | 09-08-2025 - This story is rapidly evolving, so may require daily coverage until it plays out. What we are seeing is the culmination of months of theatre, where expectations were toyed with, the notion of peace was teased, abused, manipulated and distorted. Now we see all these things coming together, but no real prospect of peace. No process done in good faith that could lead to n...

Edition No219 | 08-08-2025 - Today marks the deadline for Trump’s latest “final warning” to Putin. The White House says that no date has been decided yet on the much-hyped last-minute Putin-Trump summit. Remember today is last date Trump set to reach a ceasefire in Ukraine. That deadline has blown past, apparently with no consequences whatsoever for the criminal in the Kremlin. In today’s episode...

Edition No218 | 07-08-2025 - Ukraine is striking at the core of Russia's war machine—not on the front lines, but behind them—through surgical attacks on key logistics hubs. On the night of 5–6 August 2025, Ukrainian drones struck the Tatsinskaya railway junction in Russia’s Rostov region. The hub serves as a frontline artery for transport of troops, ammunition, fuel and equipment into the occu...

Olena Tregub is a Ukrainian expert in policy analysis, policy design and reform implementation, with a special focus on corruption prevention in economic and security sectors. Since 2017 Olena has been Secretary General of NAKO (the Independent Defence Anti-Corruption Committee) – an international oversight body created by Transparency International. It’s her mission to strengthen democratic overs...

Edition No216 | 06-08-2025 - Today we’re deconstructing Russia’s economic façade: the so‑called wartime boom that seemed to fool many international analysts, the slow-acting sanctions shock, and whether the engine of the war economy is finally stalling. This video is based on a collation of articles by financial journalists, but also by compiling videos recently produced by Russian economics exper...

Rostyslav Semkiv is Associate Professor, Department of Literary Studies, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Since 2004, Director of the Smoloskyp Publishing House. His scientific articles have been published in professional periodicals, the Krytyka journal and the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia newspaper, and his reviews are published on the LitAccent literary portal and in The Ukrainian Week magazine....

Edition No216 | 06-08-2025 - Belarus's New Martial Law Proposal. Today, we unpack Belarus's proposal to expand martial law and what it might mean—not just for Belarus, but for Ukraine, its NATO neighbours, and Europe's beleaguered democracies. In August 2025, Belarus’s Defence Ministry submitted a new bill giving it the power to declare martial law not only in the case of aggression ag...

Edition No215 | 05-08-2025 - Today we take apart the drama that unfolded in Sochi — and the unexpected fascistic pop‑culture fallout. Strap in. It’s going to be weird — why the fall of Russia, and Putin, will be live streamed by idiots, and will hardly seem real. In the early hours of August 3, 2025, Ukraine launched a drone strike that ignited at least two fuel tanks at the Rosneft-Kubannefteprod...

Edition No214 | 04-08-2025 - The mounting power of the Axis of Authoritarian States is troubling, and their apparent impunity and immunity to external pressure —Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. We ask: has Russia’s war in Ukraine now actually transformed into China’s proxy war against the West? We’ll explore naval drills, the supply of Chinese drone parts that is fuelling the devastation in U...

https://dzygaspaw.com/projects/jonathan-for-danWebsite: https://dzygaspaw.com/Here at Dzyga’s Paw Charity Fund, we understand that the work of this scale can’t be accomplished alone. The collaboration shared vision, and collective efforts of dedicated Ukrainian and foreign businesses and individuals enable us to make a lasting impact on the lives of Ukrainian Heroes protecting our freedom.--------...

ANDREI YAKOVLEV is an Associate at Harvard University’s Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Visiting Research Fellow at SCRIPTS project at Freie Universität Berlin. VLADIMIR DUBROVSKIY was a Senior Economist at CASE Ukraine. He is an expert on Applied institutional and political economics (corruption, economic reforms, etc.)----------LINKS:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/puti...

Edition No213 | 03-08-2025 - Russia’s new missile, Oreshnik—the "hazelnut" makes a comeback. Why now, and should we take these threats seriously? Putin has announced “mass production” of the missile complex, teased deployment in Belarus, and claimed it can “dual” U.S. defenses. But how real is it? What threat does Europe face? And how much is psychological propaganda and bluff? On August...

Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, translator, literary critic, and academic. He is the author of several collections of poetry and was a recipient of Ukrainian and international literary awards. He is also noted for translating several works of fiction from other languages into Ukrainian. He is the author of five poetry collections, numerous essays, columns, and reviews in Ukrainian a...

Edition No212 | 02-08-2025 - It’s all about oil, stupid. Russia’s aggression is enabled and powered by hydrocarbons. The fact the world has let them export and sell for more than three years to support genocidal aggression is a scandal and morally indefensible. In this episode we ask – “Is Putin screwed?” now the sources of income for his aggression are finally being cut off. The Penza and Samara...

Edition No211 | 01-08-2025 - The July 31, 2025, drone‑and‑missile attack on Kyiv was one of the most substantial and devastating of the war. It was also entirely indiscriminate and purely targeted at civilians. We’ll break down: the scope of the attack, its human toll, the increasing difficulty of interception, voices calling out from Ukraine—and what the implications are for dealing with Russia,...

Edition No210 | 01-08-2025 - Dima Medvedev is rattling the nuclear sabre again, in a highly entertaining spat with Donald Trumo, who in turn is calling the economies of Russia and India ‘dead’. What does all this rhetoric mean? Does it amount to little more than political theatre, until Trump takes real measures to restrain Putin's war machine. We unpack a startling clash: Dmitry Medvedev’s nu...