Silicon Curtain

2026-04-06 | UPDATES #165 | Ukraine takes the war to Russia’s oil jugular. Novorossiysk is burning, again. Russia's most important oil export hub on the Black Sea — the endpoint for pipelines carrying crude from Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan — was hammered overnight by more than fifty Ukrainian drones, in what multiple analysts are calling the most ambitious and damaging Ukrainian strike...

2026-04-05 | UPDATES #164 | Orbán's Pipeline Plot, Russia's Election Machine, and the Seven Days That Could Kill Hungarian Democracy. Today — Sunday, April 5th, 2026 — exactly seven days before Hungary goes to the polls in what may be the most consequential election in European history this year — two backpacks containing what Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic described as explosives of &...

Today I’m speaking with Anders Puck Nielsen, military analyst and influential YouTuber based in Denmark. He specialises in naval warfare and strategy. His public project now spans a YouTube channel, the Logic of War newsletter, and the book The Logic of War, which he describes as an accessible introduction to modern warfare.----------LINKS:https://www.youtube.com/@anderspuck https://www.logicofwar...

Zarina Zabrisky is an American writer based in the Bay Area, California. She is the author of the novel, We, Monsters, several collections of short stories, including Explosion, A Cute Tombstone and her debut work, Iron, and a book of collaborative poetry and art, Green Lions, co-written with Simon Rogghe. Zabrisky is currently based in Odesa, Ukraine. From the beginning of the 2022 full-scale Rus...

2026-04-04 | UPDATES #163 | Trump's Vanishing Act, the War That Won't End, and the Vance Question Nobody Wants to Answer. At 11:08 this morning, the White House called a lid. For the non-initiated: that means the President of the United States will not be seen in public for the rest of the day. No statements, no cameras, no departure for Mar-a-Lago. And on a weekend when there is a remarka...

Col. (Ret.) Vitalii Ostapchuk is the Co-Founder and Director of Memory Way, a Ukrainian non-profit initiative dedicated to preserving memory, dignity, and historical truth through meaningful action in Ukraine and internationally. Michael Henshaw is the Founder and President of the Asymmetric MIA Accounting Group – AMAG, Inc. He is a combat veteran and senior executive with more than 25 years of ex...

2026-04-04 | UPDATES #162 | Russia recorded almost no territorial gains in March. With just 23 SQ km approximately taken in March and losses elsewhere offsetting that advance. Russia’s rate of advance has collapsed compared with earlier months. (The Guardian)The fighting has not gone quiet. The war is not over. Moscow has not renounced its maximalist gains, not one bit. The big change is that thei...

2026-04-03 | UPDATES #161 | Today in Russia, the digital money stopped moving. On Friday morning, customers of Sberbank — Russia’s biggest bank — began reporting failures in payments, transfers, app access, QR-code transactions, and even ATM withdrawals. Other major lenders, including VTB and T-Bank, were also hit by outage reports. Shops and petrol stations switched to cash-only. Moscow metro tur...

Victor Rud is a board member of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs. Rud has more than 35-years of experience as an international attorney. Before Ukrainian independence, he was co-counsel, in the West, for members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Accords Watch Group, and for other dissidents in Ukraine. He was also counsel to the US Public Member to th...

Silicon Bites Ep312 | 2026-04-03 | Ten oil refineries. Twelve S-300 and S-400 air defence systems. Five strategic factories. Fourteen fuel depots. Three warships. Two naval missile systems. And a single microchip plant that has just halted Iskander missile production for six months. Putin is not a Master Strategist, and his war against Ukraine is not going well. That is the March scorecard. And Uk...

2026-04-02 | UPDATES #160 | Now, the follow-on to Hedgehog — the story that Euromaidan Press broke on March 31st, 2026, in a piece titled exactly what it says: "Ukraine fired its NATO trainers. The alliance is running out of time to learn why."Ukraine has been scaling back the training of its own forces abroad. Basic training will now run in just three EU countries with support from four...

Silicon Bites Ep311 | 2026-04-02 | Who is the real paper tiger? Ukraine schools NATO on drones while Trump torches the alliance. Several stories around NATO’s future have converged this week – but here are two of the most important. Ukraine fired its NATO trainers. A mystified alliance is running out of time to learn why, suggests Hans Petter Midttun in an article published by Euromaidan Press. Uk...

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...

2026-04-01 | UPDATES #159 | Girkin’s letter from prison on the Telegram Kill Switch, Shoigu Slipping, and the Iron Curtain Descending. Based on Igor Girkin's prison letter (March 22, 2026) and other reporting. Igor Girkin (Strelkov) was once untouchable — a former FSB colonel, a war criminal by any honest accounting, the man who by his own admission pulled the trigger that started the Donbas w...

Silicon Bites Ep310 | 2026-04-01 | April the 1st I thought. This is a very well-produced joke – so close to our worst fears of the dark dystopian hole down which the U.S. has fallen, and into which it’s dragging the world. But no, this does not appear to be an April Fool’s prank. It appears to be a real political vanity project, promoted by Donald Trump and Eric Trump, attached to a real donation...

2026-03-31 | UPDATES #158 | The Tsar is on edge, spooked even. Putin's post-Iran paranoia and the traffic cameras that changed everything. Based on Julia Ioffe's Puck News analysis (March 24, 2026) and other reporting. This is an interesting question. What does it take to terrify Vladimir Putin? Fear of death alone seems not to be enough, but fear of losing power, of humiliation is even wo...

Caolan Robertson is a journalist, film maker, political writer and social commentator. He is a director at Byline TV and now lives in "beautiful Ukraine".----------LINKS:https://www.youtube.com/@CaolanReports @CaolanReports Caolan's interview with the Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYa7H1EmpCMThe Mad Max City In Ukraine Where 300 Drones Atta...

Mark Galeotti is an author and academic – by training an historian – but in practice an interdisciplinary scholar with interests encompassing politics, criminology, security studies, international relations, and anthropology. He is a specialist in transnational and organized crime, security affairs, Russian Politics, Russian History, Intelligence and Security. Mark has a PhD in Government from LSE...

Livestream with Jonathan MS Pearce. Fundraising for equipment through Dzyga's Paw, and trucks for Car4Ukraine, and to support Silicon Curtain trips to Ukraine, to record interviews on the ground. Donate to help out:https://dzygaspaw.com/projectshttps://car4ukraine.com/en-US/campaigns----------SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtainhttps://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtainh...

Silicon Bites Ep309 | 2026-03-30 | The alarm sounds from inside the community of regime loyalists – Russia’s own z-patriots warn of a new 1917 revolution. This episode is based on Maxim Kalashnikov's Telegram warnings, February–March 2026. In February 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed from within — under the weight of a war that had gone on too long, demanded too much sacrifice, and offered n...

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...

Elvira Bary is an author, researcher, and creator working at the intersection of storytelling, self-discovery, and political insight. She also runs an insightful YouTube channel on Russian politics, history, and culture, where she explores how Russia’s history continues to shape the choices that the country makes today. Elvira writes historical fiction and dark fantasy rooted in Russian history an...

2026-03-28 | UPDATES #156 | VYBORG: Ukraine Just Sank Putin's Arctic Dream a Thousand Kilometres from the Front Line. I used to go there from St Petersburg on weekend trips, to stroll around a city with a European scale and ambience (even though it has degenerated from a vibrant cosmopolitan city to a village mentality, when the Soviets stole it from the Finns). It’s odd to see places from one...

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...

2026-03-25 | UPDATES #154 | The economy is where the detail gets most technically damning. And here, Naki provides something Zygar's op-ed gestures at but doesn't fully document: the forensic evidence from inside the Russian financial system itself. In February 2026, the Centre for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting — known by its Russian acronym CMAKP — formally registered...