2024-08-21 | Where exactly is Vladimir Vladimirovich? This is the adult version of where’s Wally? Find the genocidal tyrant. It’s not even a matter of spotting him amongst the body doubles, trebles, quadruples, quintuples, etc. He’s nowhere. Largely vanished from the screens of state TV and official appearances. ---------- It’s been 2 weeks since a foreign army invaded Russia, the first time in fact for 80 years since the former ally of the USSR, Nazi Germany turned on Stalin. Russia has lost 1,...
Aug 21, 2024•17 min
2024-08-20 | 2024, and Russia’s history is once more turning on the Kursk region. This is the campaign that broke Putin – that showed the world the hollowness and impotence of the Russian army, the lunacy of his invasion of Ukraine and the toxic propaganda that sustains his regime. We are now in the second week of Ukraine’s offensive within Russia, and there is no sign of a military response from Putin that has any chance of dislodging the Ukrainian forces. There are Georgians and Belarussians s...
Aug 20, 2024•22 min
Edition No54 | 19-08-2024 - Washington is effectively blocking Britain’s request for Kyiv to employ Storm Shadow missiles against targets within Russian territory, according to reports. This move comes amidst the Biden administration’s apprehensions about so-called ‘escalation’ of the conflict in Ukraine. ~~~~~ Reports continue to swirl that the US is effectively blocking Ukraine from firing British Storm Shadow missiles on targets within mainland Russia, mirroring its own restrictions on the us...
Aug 19, 2024•37 min
2024-08-18 | Relatives of Russian conscripts are looking for their sons who disappeared after fighting in the Kursk region. “I think Putin doesn’t even know that our sons were sent there.” Reports the Russian oppositional media Mediazona on August 16, 2024. ---------- The Kursk border region is guarded predominantly by conscripts, like many other “second tier” areas, that were previously thought to be safe from large-scale Ukrainian assaults. At the start of Ukraine’s new offensive conscripts fo...
Aug 18, 2024•16 min
2024-08-17 | The disarray in Putin’s military command has been exposed by Ukraine’s attack in Russia. Zelensky’s chief adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak has explained in a recent interview for the British newspaper The Independent that Ukraine’s cross-border offensive in the Kursk direction shows Putin has ‘very little control’ over Russia’s border regions. Shockingly, on Russia state TV, one commentator even suggested that they were lost, and should be abandoned. This idea was shouted down by the othe...
Aug 17, 2024•19 min
Phil Ittner is a veteran broadcast journalist now working independently in Ukraine. Currently he's based in Kyiv and produces a weekly interview podcast "On the Edge". Disillusioned with how mainstream media was covering the historic war in Ukraine, Phil decided he had to step in and bring a professional and credible perspective to reporting from Ukraine. ---------- LINKS: https://www.youtube.com/@PhilipIttner https://x.com/IttnerPhilip https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-ittner-4180271a/ https://p...
Aug 16, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 481
GUEST: Anna from Ukraine - Anna Danylchuk ---------- 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: @AnnafromUkraine https://www.buymeacoffee.com/annaf...
Aug 16, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 480
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. ---------- CHAPTERS: 00:01:35 Back for another conversation at a truly historic moment in the war 00:03:...
Aug 14, 2024•52 min•Season 3Ep. 479
Julia Friedrich interview - The experience of Ukrainians under occupation Research referenced in this video: https://gppi.net/2024/07/30/life-under-russian-occupation-in-ukraine https://gppi.net/media/Friedrich_2024_Life-Under-Russian-Occupation.pdf ---------- NEW STUDY | “They Came to ‘Liberate’ Us and Left Us with Nothing” What does life under Russia’s occupation look like? It is a “total, all-encompassing fear” that dominates all aspects of life – that is how Ukrainians who lived under occupa...
Aug 13, 2024•42 min•Season 3Ep. 478
Ukraine is competing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris from 26 July to 11 August 2024. It is the nation's eighth consecutive appearance at the Summer Olympics in the post-Soviet era and the first since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A total of 140 athletes competed amid the Russian invasion, the lowest number in the history of Ukraine's participation in the games. ---------- DW Phillips is a documentary filmmaker and constitutional attorney with Ukraine Story, a nonprofit foundation for jou...
Aug 13, 2024•24 min
2024-08-10 | The Battle of Kursk hastens the downfall of Putin's murderous regime. In a historical irony the name 'Kursk' bookends failure at the start of his time in office, and may signal it's end in catastrophic failure. Is Kursk Putin's avenging nemesis? ---------- Kursk - a gamble for victory “A surprise attack, conceived with cunning, prepared with duplicity and executed with ruthlessness, provides international history with its most melodramatic moments.” So explains Sir Lawrence Freedman...
Aug 11, 2024•20 min
2024-08-10 | The Battle of Kursk hastens the downfall of Putin's murderous regime. In a historical irony the name 'Kursk' bookends failure at the start of his time in office, and may signal it's end in catastrophic failure. Is Kursk Putin's avenging nemesis? ---------- Is it accurate to say Ukraine has ‘invaded’ Russia? Imposing that language on the situation may be premature and depend very much on what happens next. In the unlikely event that Ukrainian troops charge up to Moscow, Prigozhin sty...
Aug 10, 2024•19 min
Henry J. Hendrix is a retired United States Navy captain. He has served as an American defence analyst, an official historian and curator of the Navy and an author. His written work has focused on the composition of the United States Navy force, the structure of the Navy, the role of the aircraft carrier in modern strategic environments and the structure of the carrier air wing. ---------- LINKS: https://twitter.com/JerryHendrixII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_J._Hendrix https://sagamorein...
Aug 07, 2024•54 min•Season 3Ep. 477
Ukraine is competing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris from 26 July to 11 August 2024. It is the nation's eighth consecutive appearance at the Summer Olympics in the post-Soviet era and the first since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A total of 140 athletes competed amid the Russian invasion, the lowest number in the history of Ukraine's participation in the games. ---------- DW Phillips is a documentary filmmaker and constitutional attorney with Ukraine Story, a nonprofit foundation for jou...
Aug 06, 2024•29 min•Season 3Ep. 476
Conversation with Sergej Sumlenny and Stephen Douglas. ---------- General Rudenko, the Soviet Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of senior Nazi war criminals made a famous address: about the German leadership having the ‘Morals of Cannibals, the Greed of Burglars’. “The defendants knew that cynical mockery of the laws and customs of war constituted the gravest of crimes. They knew it, but they hoped that total war, by securing victory, would also secure their impunity…” Not unlike Putin’s ...
Aug 04, 2024•51 min•Season 3Ep. 475
EXAMPLE MEMBERS' CONTENT - FREE FOR 48 HOURS. Subscribe to new channel - @SiliconWafers ---------- 2024-08-01 | Political prisoners were released in a historic exchange. Even during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States there was not an exchange of prisoners comparable to this. Many people thought that these people had a de facto a life sentence (or at least until Putin died). The release included Vladmir Kara-Murza, Oleg Orlov, Ilya Yashin, Evan Gershkovich and other lesse...
Aug 02, 2024•19 min
GUEST: Mark Temnycky - Ukrainian-American freelance journalist. ---------- The July 2023 NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania was a chance to end the ambiguity and incrementalism that has left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian aggression and continues to feed Putin’s delusions that he can win the war and beat the Western alliance. The NATO summit, Ukraine's summer counter-offensive, and the recent instability between Russia and the Wagner Group have ensured that the Russo-Ukrainian war remains in the h...
Aug 01, 2024•36 min•Season 3Ep. 467
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 intelligence agencies while on numerous reconnaissance and combat operations in the Balkans, Middle East...
Jul 30, 2024•58 min•Season 3Ep. 473
Yevhen Hlibovytsky is a director of Frontier Institute, a cross-sectoral think tank researching social transformation trajectories and strategic challenges in and around Ukraine. Yevhen has extensive experience in Ukraine’s reforms sector. In the last 20 years, he has also worked for OSCE and other international organizations in countries of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern Europe, building a comparative understanding of transformation in post-communist countries. He is freque...
Jul 29, 2024•53 min•Season 3Ep. 472
EXAMPLE MEMBERS' CONTENT - FREE FOR 48 HOURS. Subscribe to new channel - https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconWafers ---------- 2024-07-24 | ‘I know we will win – and how’: Ukraine’s top general on turning the tables against Russia. Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi weighs Ukraine’s recent setbacks, counter strikes and the changing face of Europe’s biggest war since 1945 in an article in: The Guardian – Wed 24 Jul 2024 by Luke Harding ---------- Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi was tight-lipped about when Ukraine w...
Jul 27, 2024•26 min
Joe Lindsley is a traveller and a writer, and American reporting on Chicago's WGN Radio from Ukraine each and every weekday of Russia's full-scale war. He once was protégé to Fox News founder Roger Ailes, but Lindsley escaped that frenzied world where power mattered more than truth. He came to Lviv for a Ukrainian Catholic University journalism conference on Information Overload, AI, and Responsibility. Then the Coronavirus shut down world travel, and he stayed to build a better vision for the m...
Jul 26, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 470
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE is Director of DBG Defence. He is a senior executive with a military, humanitarian, charity and commercial experience. Hamish is a world leading authority on chemical weapons and humanitarian support in Syria, and a vocal advocate for Ukrainian victory. ---------- LINKS: https://x.com/HamishDBG https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamish-de-bretton-gordon-obe-37aa9a35/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamish_de_Bretton-Gordon https://www.theguardian.com/profile/hamish-de-bretton...
Jul 25, 2024•37 min•Season 3Ep. 471
A letter was published in the Financial Times: Calling for an immediate ‘peace’. But this clamour for a cessation of hostilities and a ‘peace at any price’ deal shows blindness to Russian goals, argue the signatories of a counter letter in the same publication. I am joined today by the author of the riposte to that, James Sherr, and one of the key signatories Orysia Lutsevych. ---------- Orysia Lutsevych OBE is deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme and head of the Ukraine Forum at...
Jul 24, 2024•57 min•Season 3Ep. 468
Maria Avdeeva is a Security Expert, Disinformation Analyst and Global Communicator. She is a strategic communications and security expert with experience in consultancy and research, specializing in countering disinformation. After the full-scale invasion, she shifted her focus to documenting Russian war crimes, delivering reports to a broad international audience, and collaborating with leading global media outlets. Her security-related insights have been cited by CNN, BBC, NPR, CBC, DW, and ot...
Jul 23, 2024•30 min•Season 3Ep. 469
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. ---------- LINKS: INSIDE RUSSIA is a source of current news on Russia - Konstantin carefully selects 9 n...
Jul 22, 2024•46 min•Season 3Ep. 466
Edition No53 | 20-07-2024 ~~~~~ SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtain https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ~~~~~ NEWS SOURCES: KYIV INDEPENDENT https://kyivindependent.com/i-dont-care-jd-vance-on-ukraine-in-his-own-words/ https://kyivindependent.com/the-counteroffensive-a-jd-vance-vice-presidency-would-be-a-disaster-for-ukraine/ https://kyivindependent.com/trump-signals-potential-opposition-to-sanctions-against-russia/ https://kyivindependent.com/stuck-in-legal-limbo...
Jul 21, 2024•51 min
DW Phillips is a documentary filmmaker and constitutional attorney with Ukraine Story, a nonprofit foundation for journalism and documentary reporting in Ukraine. He and his documentary team have been filming conducting interviews in Ukraine with victims of Russian atrocities, and reporting stories of courage, defiance and perseverance of the Ukrainian people. He has reported on Russian atrocities in Bucha, and is presently working on issues of Kremlin disinformation campaigns in the American Ri...
Jul 19, 2024•31 min•Season 3Ep. 454
The Putin regime has exploited the vulnerabilities of global social media platforms, using bots and trolls to promote its narratives. They also use it for coercive manipulation to change public attitudes towards Ukraine aid, and to cause fear, indecision, hesitation and caution among politicians and geo-political commentators. But Russia is not alone in using these methods; once developed the same techniques can be used by other powers, international and local to subvert democratic institutions ...
Jul 19, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 3Ep. 462
Fabian Hoffmann is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on missile technology, nuclear strategy and defense policy. His PhD project focuses on the strategic-level effects of long-range strike weapons, including their implications for nuclear strategy. Fabian’s research has been published in Journal of Strategic Studies, European Security, War on the Rocks, and The Washington Post, among others. He frequently contributes to nationa...
Jul 18, 2024•49 min•Season 3Ep. 465
As opponents become enemies, and partisan positions degrade the quality of political debate, is democracy in the US at risk from internal division? How might China, Russia and other hostile actors leverage the situation to their advantage? ---------- Vlad Vexler It’s my pleasure today to welcome back onto the channel Vlad Vexler, Social Philosopher, and unique YouTuber. Our previous three video conversations proved to be extremely popular, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. Please do ch...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 3Ep. 464
