Silicon Curtain

2026-03-25 | UPDATES #153 | How Trump's Iran War Gave Putin a Reprieve He Doesn't Deserve. Based on Mikhail Zygar's New York Times Op-Ed (March 25, 2026) and Mykhailo Naki's Video Analysis. Plastering over the cracks. It is the end of January 2026. Russia is selling oil to India at twenty-two dollars a barrel. Twenty-two dollars. About a third of the market price. The country that...

Silicon Bites Ep307 | 2026-03-25 | Russia’s record attack on Ukraine — and the miracle defence that’s been overlooked. Nine hundred and forty-eight drones. In twenty-four hours. Between the evening of March 23rd and the evening of March 24th, Russia launched the largest aerial assault of the entire war against Ukraine — nearly a thousand drones and missiles fired at cities, at homes, at hospitals,...

Silicon Bites Ep306 | 2026-03-24 | Russia has become a Digital GULAG, as Moscow and St Petersburg go offline. People are reverting to papers, paper maps and cash. Privileged urban Russians are losing their minds, as finally some of them wake up to the idea that the government does not exist to serve their interests, and maintain their privileges, but does not in fact give a damn about their comfor...

2026-03-24 | UPDATES #152 | The reaction was instantaneous — and chaotic. Confused and fevered. On the pro-Kremlin side, there was something close to panic. Several people immediately speculated that Remeslo's account had been hacked. He shot that down by posting video messages insisting the words were his and his alone. He looked composed. He did not appear to be under duress. The Breakfast S...

Adam Dunigan is a 2026 Democratic congressional candidate in Northern Virginia / Virginia’s 8th District. He is a former Marine combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan, later earned a bachelor’s degree in social psychology and a master’s in international relations from Harvard, moved to Virginia in 2014 for national-security work, and eventually served as a CIA case officer. He resigned from th...

2026-03-23 | UPDATES #151 | Ilya Remeslo and the return of the Psikhushka – Political madhouse and state terror in Russia as a Kremlin attack dog turns to bite the hand that previously fed it. On Tuesday night, March 17th, 2026, a man who had spent a decade doing the Kremlin's dirtiest work — hounding dissidents, filing legal complaints against journalists, and personally helping to put Alexei...

Silicon Bites Ep305 | 2026-03-24 | What is Russia testing? A drone crashes on a Lithuanian lake. A village called Lavisas. Varėna district, southern Lithuania. It’s 3:04 in the morning, local time. The forest is dark. The night is cold and the lake is frozen. And then — an eerie buzzing that lasts forty seconds. Followed by a blast and by burning fragments spinning up into the night sky and rainin...

Ken Harbaugh is a former U.S. Navy pilot and mission commander who served from 1996 to 2005 as an EP-3 signals-intelligence aviator, flying missions focused on adversaries including Russia, North Korea, and China. After leaving the Navy, he earned a JD (Juris Doctor) from Yale Law School, taught at The Citadel and as a guest fellow at Yale, co-founded The Mission Continues and Got Your 6, later he...

2026-03-23 | UPDATES #150 | Ukraine burns Russia’s Baltic oil lifeline. Trump made them do it? Outrageous accusation – how is this connected, you may ask? Lifting sanction on Russia oil at sea, lifting sanctions on third country purchases of Russian – oil by India for instance. Another unintended consequence of Trump’s war on the Middle East – or entirely intended? That a point of contention. But...

​Roman Trokhymets is a Ukrainian soldier and media personality. In 2014, when pro-Russian separatists attacked Donbas, Trokhymets volunteered to fight in the Azov Regiment. Working as a real estate agent in 2022, he joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. LINKS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Trokhymetshttps://www.instagram.com/romantrokhymets/?hl=e...

2026-03-20 | UPDATES #149 | Today, we were going to ask a basic question. Is Russia helping Iran? The answer is, of course, that they are, but Valdimir Putin seems to have admitted this, and sees it as another way to manipulate Trump, to gain advantage in his war against Ukraine. But the real question is how committed they are, and what is the extent of their support. And digging deeper, what is t...

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:https:/...

Ben Hodges is a retired United States Army officer, who became commander of United States Army Europe in November 2014, and held that position for three years until retiring from the United States Army in January 2018. Until recently he was the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies, at the Centre for European Policy Analysis, specialising in NATO, Transatlantic relationship and international securit...

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. ----...

Silicon Bites Ep303 | 2026-03-16 | Moscow is getting a taste — a tiny taste — of what Ukrainians have lived with for years. May it continue and grow ever more inconvenient for Muscovites. For a second straight day, Russian officials were reporting drones headed for the Russian capital. On Saturday, March 14, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Russian air defences had downed 65 drones bound for Mosc...

2026-03-16 | UPDATES #146 | Spectacular explosions in Russia – Ukraine has gone after something bigger than another refinery fire and more consequential than just another spectacular ammo dump explosion on Russian soil. Overnight on March 11–12, 2026, Ukrainian drones struck infrastructure at the Tikhoretsk oil pumping station in Krasnodar Krai — a hub that multiple outlets describe as one of the...

Stanislav Gryshyn is a Ukrainian defence-tech entrepreneur and combat veteran best known as a co-founder and Director of Strategic Development and Project Management at General Cherry, a frontline-focused Ukrainian drone manufacturer specializing in FPV strike and interceptor systems. He is part of Ukraine’s wartime miltech ecosystem, with General Cherry’s products developed for real combat use by...

Silicon Bites Ep302 | 2026-03-15 | Make it make sense. Iran helped Russia attack Ukraine, but Russia is also providing data to Iran to target U.S. military assets in its confrontation with Iran. Yet Trump is lifting oil sanctions on Russia. None of it makes sense, unless we accept that Trump is acting to benefit Russia, whether he is fully conscious of that or not. I’m inclined to believe he knows...

Vladyslav Heraskevych is a Ukrainian Olympic skeleton athlete who became one of the central figures of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics after attempting to compete in a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes and children killed in Russia’s invasion. The IOC ruled the helmet non-compliant with its athlete expression rules, and after he refused to abandon it, he was excluded from compe...

2026-03-15 | UPDATES #145 | Ukraine has gone after some of the most valuable eyes and shields in Russia’s military occupation architecture in Crimea. And scored some, dramatically successful, high-value hits. Overnight on March 15, Ukraine’s General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck two Russian radar systems in occupied Crimea — the 59N6-E “Protivnik” and the 73E6 “Parol” — near Liubknekhivka and...

Stefan Korshak is the Kyiv Post Senior Defence Correspondent. He has worked as a correspondent and photographer since the 1990s, reported from multiple wars, and publishes commentary on Medium and other platforms. Stefan is highly regarded in the activist community for the quality of his insights and sources of information. ----------LINKS:https://medium.com/@Stefan. Korshakhttps://substack.com/@s...

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...

2026-03-13 | UPDATES #144 | This is big. Earlier this week Ukraine just struck one of the nerve centres of Russia’s missile-industrial machine. Why Ukraine hit Kremniy EL now, and why it matters. This is not just another oil depot or barracks. Not another ammo dump or drone cache. A microelectronics plant. It is the very definition of hitting the archer, not just the arrows. The target was Kremniy...

Silicon Bites Ep301 | 2026-03-13 | Let’s be precise. The whole front is not collapsing. But on one crucial stretch of the southern battlefield, Russian defences have very clearly been breached, rolled back, and thrown into disorder. Ukraine’s 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skelya” says it has liberated Ternove in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, after a hard-fought assault on the Oleksandrivka axis — the...

Silicon Bites Ep300 | 2026-03-11 | Oilpocalypse? Iran’s Hormuz shock meets Russia’s budget hole. How Iran’s war just threw Putin a lifeline. A few weeks ago, the mood in Moscow was not triumphalist. It was anxious. Because before the Iran war detonated global oil markets, Russia’s own Central Bank had already started telegraphing a much uglier reality: weaker oil, weaker exports, more budget strai...