A BRAVE NEW YEAR: The Ukrainian Defense Innovation Fund known as BRAVE1 isn’t waiting around to find out what happens regarding U.S. support for Ukraine after inauguration day. Instead, they’re forging ahead with a focus on the future of defense technology – using the valuable lessons learned from the Ukraine war to help shape the future of warfare by hosting an innovation forum in Kyiv next month. The Cipher Brief is a proud sponsor of the event and for obvious security reasons, some of the conference details are still pretty hush-hush but we do know that Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Director General David Petraeus (Ret.) will be there to talk about some of the battle-tested defense technologies that have real potential for reaching well beyond any kind of ‘negotiated’ agreement to end the war. The Cipher Brief - which you may remember sponsored not one, but two conferences in Kyiv after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine - is continuing the tech development conversations stateside this June in Austin Texas, welcoming not just BRAVE1, but other leading investors in the national security space as well as innovators and military experts. We’re told that The Cipher Brief’s inaugural NatSecEDGE conference is still in clandestine mode but we’re expecting to hear more soon. In the meantime, you can find out more about BRAVE1’s Defense Innovation Forum on their LinkedIn events page.
RUSSIAN SIGNING BONUSES: We’ve been paying attention as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military recruiters have been canvasing prisons looking for new recruits who will ‘volunteer’ to fight in Ukraine. In an update to these rather interesting recruitment tactics, The New York Times reports that a recruit no longer has to be convicted of a crime in Russia to earn a signing bonus. Now, individuals who have been charged with crimes can also get in on the deal with promises that even ‘pending charges’ will disappear if they volunteer to fight. And if you’re in debt, a new law that went into effect last month, promises up to 10 million rubles (about $100,000) of your debt can be forgiven if you sign up to serve.
WHAT KIDDERS: And what timing. Right about the time that an Azerbaijan airliner was apparently shot at by Russian air defenses and then crashed in Kazakhstan, those crazy kids in Moscow released a gag video showing a “Western” Santa Claus being shot down by Kremlin air defenses. The shooter and a green-clad Russian Santa-like figure (known as “Ded Moroz”) fist bump each other and say “Target destroyed. We don’t need anything foreign in our world. Happy New Year!” We’re Ded serious. You can’t make this stuff up.
TAKING A GENTLER APPROACH: They didn’t take shots at Santa but the folks at Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5 recruited actor Gary Oldman, to narrate their holiday video. You probably already know that Oldman plays a flatulent and crusty character, Jackson Lamb, on Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. While he voices the video in character, reading an updated version of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, we noted that MI5’s staff portrayed in the video is somewhat more upbeat than the staff portrayed in the fictional TV series.
DID THEY RUN OUT OF GOLF CARTS? We’ve told you before that Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have – from time to time – been forced to use modified golf carts to get around the battlefield. Now comes a report (with videos) showing Russian army personnel using electric scooters. On the plus side – e-scooters can zip around faster than a soldier can run – and are “nearly silent.” But of course, they offer zero protection from gunfire – and can’t outrun a drone. There’s always a drawback.
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MAYBE DIAL BACK ASPIRATIONS?: Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov and friends have been talking recently about their desire to restore the old Russian empire – reclaiming “Finland, Warsaw, the Baltics, and Moldova” – and, with a smile, one panelist at a recent event suggested throwing in Alaska too, while they’re at it. Well, let’s do a quick reality check. Shall we? Approaching three years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow has managed to grab only about 20 percent of the country – at a cost of 700,000 comrades – either killed and wounded. Now, we don’t know how many more lives they can afford. We’re just saying, they may want to dial back their aspirations a bit.
MAYBE CHECK A MAP?: Speaking of territorial ambitions, two can play at that game. Robert O’Brien, one of the former national security advisors in the first Trump administration said recently that President-elect Donald Trump is serious about purchasing Greenland and seizing control of the Panama Canal. Appearing on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” program he complained that Denmark has not been doing enough to defend Greenland. “They can't have this vast empire and then not defend it and leave it to the U.S. to do it. So, we're going to either buy it, they're going to defend it, or they can pay us to defend it," he declared. But if none of that works out, O’Brien had another plan. After the U.S. buys Greenland, he said “Greenland can become part of Alaska. I mean, the native people in Greenland are very closely related to the people of Alaska, and we will make it a part of Alaska." Last we checked, Greenland was about 2,000 miles from Alaska as the crow flies – so it might make more sense to make it part of Maine. But we suspect neither will happen any time soon.
THAT SINKING FEELING: A Russian cargo ship named Ursa Major sank in the Mediterranean last week. Russian TV talking heads criticized Western media for jumping to the conclusion that the cause was an explosion in the ships’ engine room. (Fourteen of the 16 crewmembers were rescued off the coast of Spain.) A State TV commentator jumped to his own conclusion, calling the sinking a terrorist act, and suggesting that the United States was behind the sinking of the cargo vessels said to be carrying two large cranes and heavy hatch lids for icebreakers. Not exactly prime targets – if the cargo manifest is being correctly described. Video of the assertion, thanks to Russian Media Monitor Julia Davis, can be seen here.
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POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
SKIDMARKS IN THE SKY: It is not just his position on the dangers of polio vaccines that make Secretary of Health and Human Services candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s views more than a little outside of the mainstream. He has also joined activists in several states decrying the threat from “chemtrails.” What is a chemtrail, you ask? You know those white, cloud-like lines that are often seen in the skies behind jet aircraft? Well, it seems that there are those who think that toxic chemicals are being intentionally dumped in the aerial puffs. According to The Guardian some proponents of the chemtrail theory believe that the goal of dumping chemicals in the sky may be “mass sterilization or mind control.” Referring to chemtrails, RFK, Jr. posted on X in August that “We are going to stop this crime.” Actual experts say that the streaks are “condensed water vapor from a plane’s exhaust – not a nefarious plot to distribute toxic chemicals.” If you were an evil government entity hellbent on “mass sterilization or mind control” – there would probably be easier ways to accomplish that than randomly dumping “large amounts of bioavailable aluminum into the environment, spraying it in microscopic particulates from airplanes” as Kennedy has suggested might be happening. For example, you could just encourage young people to read that kind of conspiracy theory on X. That alone might turn them off to the idea of reproducing.
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