- Halt! (Unless you’re a certain type…) - 16th September 2026
- From Russia without love part two - 15th September 2026
- ‘We don’t need no educashun…’ copyright Pink Floyd - 14th September 2026
News that Russian hacking is increasing, Vladimir Putin has declared Ukraine opened a “Pandora’s box” with its successful drone attacks, and that the country’s polls suggest anxiety is growing, all highlight once again how The Eye has also been targeted.
Russian Oligarchs too are becoming increasingly restive.
An iron rule from Mr Putin that Oligarchs are free to make money, as long as they stay out of politics, is now under strain with a rising number aiming veiled criticism at their country’s leader, and the progress of the war in Ukraine.
Surveys of public opinion in Russia also make for disturbing reading for Mr Putin.
Not since reservists were first mobilised to fight in Ukraine in 2022 have Russians felt so unnerved, and on July 2 the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), a pollster close to the Kremlin, reported that 55 per cent said their colleagues and relatives felt anxious, up from 40 per cent last year.
Drone attacks, once confined to the border cities of Kursk and Belgorod, now threaten much of the country.
On July 6 Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s largest refinery in Omsk, some 2,500 kilometres from the front line.
The war in Ukraine made the small neighbouring independent country of Moldova very important to Russia, but there has been huge concern about what has taken place before an important election there.
According to Moldova’s Government, the Kremlin spent $200 million (the equivalent of one per cent of Moldova’s annual GDP) on disinformation and bribing voters, and on election day itself, bomb scares were reported at polling stations for expatriates in Italy, Romania, Spain and America.
One of Russia’s banks is said to have been opening accounts and transferring money to Moldovans in pro-Russian parts of the country.
Although tiny in comparison to other threats, like others, we have attracted the unwanted attention of those connected to Russian authorities as well.
Our site always used to get a couple of ‘allow requests’ from e-mail addresses with the .ru (Russia) ending, but recently this has increased massively, and at one point there were four or five A DAY!
In the past Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries.
Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
Viginum said it had come across a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames ‘Portal Kombat’.
Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. But over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022.
French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.
Viginum says it closely watched the sites over several months, and managers there have concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media.
The underlying objective it would seem, is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe, and according to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organisation.
The UK too has suffered.
It is declared on the UK Government’s website: “Russia is one of the world’s most prolific cyber actors and dedicate significant resource into conducting cyber operations around the globe. The UK government has publicly attributed malign cyber activity to parts of three Russian Intelligence services: the FSB, SVR and GRU, with each having their own remits“.
Disturbing information like this comes after a dire warning from Sir Ken McCallum, who has been the Director General of MI5 since 2020, and warned that the UK needed to “defend itself robustly” against security threats
He said that Russia had carried out operations which were “routinely” being uncovered.
The concern must be that however many plots are ‘uncovered’, far more are not, and now despite the prospect of greater repression, it seems that Russians are becoming more anxious.
Truths like these by our Editor, Welshman Phi Parry, who was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
‘From Russia without love part three’ comes soon, where we examine how the Royal Household has been forced to make security upgrades in countering the cyber threat from Russia, and what this means for us…
Tomorrow – during a 23 year career with the BBC, and 43 years in journalism, (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor Welshman Phil Parry, has always known that the correct treatment of sectors in society was fundamental, and this is underlined today by news that jobs are advertised in China with the warning “men preferred”. or that women should only apply if they are of “good appearance”!
