Silicon Curtain

Francis Dearnley is Executive Editor of audio projects at The Telegraph, including the award-winning podcast 'Ukraine: The Latest'. Francis has been instrumental in helping to build the world’s most listened to, and award-winning, podcast covering the war in Ukraine. As well as being a highly respected and recognisable voice, he is also a frequent commentator on foreign affairs issues on T...

2026-05-03 | UPDATES #191 | Tupik. Russia's own war correspondents just declared the war a dead end. The confessions of disheartened z-bloggers and turbo patriots. This episode is based on Michael Naki's survey of Russian z-blogger confessions. Whines of doom and gloom, whinging about the weakness of Russia and Putin’s failure to erase Ukraine as a nation, a people, and as a military power...

2026-05-02 | UPDATES #190 | How China became the indispensable engine of Russia’s assault on Europe. Bloomberg confirms 90% of Russia’s sanctioned tech now flows through China. The figure was embedded in a Bloomberg report on Friday, citing officials familiar with private assessments inside European Union institutions. Let’s be clear, this war has gone on for longer, and been more intense, with a...

2026-05-03 | UPDATES #191 | Tupik. Russia's own war correspondents just declared the war a dead end. The confessions of disheartened z-bloggers and turbo patriots. This episode is based on Michael Naki's survey of Russian z-blogger confessions. Whines of doom and gloom, whinging about the weakness of Russia and Putin’s failure to erase Ukraine as a nation, a people, and as a military power...

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. ----...

James Verini is an American long-form journalist and author who writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic and other outlets. The Pulitzer Center describes him as a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic whose work has won both a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. He is also the author of They Will Have to Die Now:...

Silicon Bites Ep329 | 2026-05-01 | Russia is turning into burning hell, as the motor of its war economy goes up in flame – the oil infrastructure that Putin’s power depends on is being systematically destroyed. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. «Посеешь ветер — пожнешь бурю» Comrade. Perm burns, deep in the Russian Urals as Lukoil's largest refinery is hit and Tuapse is smacked for the fourth...

2026-05-01 | UPDATES #189 | Girkin has issued another outburst from prison — 'we are heading for military defeat.’ The man who did more than most to start this war now says it is lost. He is a criminal, but this pronouncement is worth listening to. The implication, the Putin regime has lost control of its own founding myth – its own justification for existing. The rest is failure and defeat. H...

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 Ep328 | 2026-04-28 | Rule by secret decree: how Putin hid half his government from his own people. Inside the Russian Information Blackout. The full scale of the catastrophe of the Russian economy and governance has been hidden. It means the collapse, when it comes will be so much bigger than many suspect, including many people within the Russian system itself. Imagine a country wher...

2026-04-29 | UPDATES #188 | Plant potatoes, because everything has turned to shit. That’s the pronouncement of one of the cheerleaders of Putin’s pointless war. Another propagandist warns that Putin’s regime is toxic and the Tsar may soon be deposed. Yevgeny Golman's potato warning meets Maxim Kalashnikov's toxic-Putin verdict. Russia is racing fast towards a repeat of the disastrous 90s....

Anna Danylchuk has been creating a war diary since the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. Anna Danylchuk aims to tell the truth about Ukraine and Russia’s war and cut through the noise and propaganda. Anna is passionate about the beauty and independence of her country, and communicates this powerfully in her videos, in a clear and honest way.----------LINKS: @Annaf...

2026-04-28 | UPDATES #186 | Tuapse burns – a third wave of strikes has reignited earlier fires and started new ones. Now the flames are burning out of control and may consume the whole plant. This is a major strategic and psychological blow for Putin and his war economy. In this episode – Budanov's doctrine and the end of the 'no cards' lie. April 27–28, 2026 — as Tuapse oil refinery a...

SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up-campaign-to-fight-authoritarian-disinformation----------ACTIVE CAMPAIGN:We are raising funds for 5 of 15 Vampire DronesSilicon Curtain for Kupiansk Vampires. Dzyga’s Paw, together with Jonathan Fink, is joining forces to raise $40,000 to provide the Khartiia Br...

Dr Jade McGlynn is a British researcher — Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, Senior Associate at CSIS in Washington DC, and head of the Ukraine and Russia programme at KCL's Centre for Statecraft and National Security. (Note: she uses she/her pronouns.) She holds a DPhil from Oxford, is a fluent Russian and Ukrainian speaker, and now splits her time between...

Silicon Bites Ep326 | 2026-04-26 | This is Trump’s real plan. Suck weapons out of Europe, leaving it vulnerable to Russia. If you were Vladimir Putin, and you could design the ideal American foreign policy — not overtly pro-Russian, but functionally pro-Russian — what would it look like? If Trump were a Russian asset, what would he be doing differently than he is already doing? Very little, I’d wa...

2026-04-24 | UPDATES #182 | Just stop Russian oil. Tuapse is burning, black rain is falling like some biblical end-times plague, and Ukraine is enforcing the sanctions against Russia oil that Trump won't. It is raining oil in Tuapse. Not metaphorically. Literally. Oily black droplets falling from the sky, coating cars, streets, houses, playgrounds, and beaches. Soot-blackened puddles forming o...

Marathon fundraisers for:Easter Pysanky Trucks 2026https://car4ukraine.com/campaigns/easter-pysanky-trucks-2026Silicon Curtain for Kupiansk Vampireshttps://dzygaspaw.com/silicon-curtain-for-kupiansk-vampires?project=Jonathan%20Fink%20for%20Kupiansk%20Vampires----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/iwihttps://www.patreon.com/iwi----------TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND:Save Ukrai...

2026-04-20 | UPDATES #179 | This is the ultimate case of ‘don’t look up’. Russia’s debt is spiralling, and the banking system is on the verge of a systemic collapse. The Kremlin has built an economic ‘kill switch’ to flip the economy back into a full authoritarian, centralised command economy, one engineered for the digital age. This is the banking crisis nobody will name, the crisis that the Krem...

2026-04-19 | UPDATES #178 | This episode is about how Russia Is building the infrastructure to seize control of every rouble, every account, every transaction, from its population to fuel Putin’s pointless war. Russia’s population are waking up to the reality that their money is not their money. Their property is not their property. Their resources are not their resources. Everything is on loan fr...

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 Ep320 | 2026-04-18 | Ukraine's war on Russian oil, the allies who begged them to stop, and the sanctions waiver that proved whose side Washington is on. On the morning of April 16th, a plume of black smoke rose from the Russian port city of Tuapse on the Black Sea coast. It stretched over a hundred kilometres out to sea. It was visible from space. NASA published the satellite ima...

2026-04-18 | UPDATES #177 | Putin has never been weaker — and he knows it. Everything is falling apart for the tyrant of the Kremlin. Putin has never been in a worse position than he is right now. Nothing is going his way — simultaneously, across every front — in the spring of 2026.The front is stalled. Losses are outpacing recruitment. The economy has contracted for the first time since the invas...

2026-04-18 | UPDATES #176 | Easter lies, fratricide on the front line, and 667 reasons Ukraine’s air defences are the best in the world. On Easter Saturday, Vladimir Putin declared a thirty-two-hour ceasefire. A humanitarian gesture, the Kremlin called it. The truce would begin at 4pm Moscow time and last through Orthodox Easter Sunday. There is a pattern to Moscow’s announcements – major defeats...

Lev Parnas is a Soviet-born American businessman and former associate of Rudy Giuliani. Parnas, Giuliani, Igor Fruman, John Solomon, Yuriy Lutsenko, Dmytro Firtash and his allies, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, were involved in creating the false Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, which was part of the Trump–Ukraine scandal's efforts to damage Joe Biden. As president, Donald Trump said he d...