Bytes and Borscht

Topic

russia

A collection of 11 issues

Trying to understand Russia

The collective West is often treating Russia as a country whose internal logic seems impossible to grasp - emphasis on "seems", because it's not actually impossible. Understanding the internal logic of the current Russia requires holding several uncomfortable truths at once.

The Byzantine Heritage in Russian Security Culture

I would argue that Byzantium remains a key driver of Russian (strategic) security and intelligence culture. In this post I want to explore how I came to this conclusion and talk about how Byzantine "intelligence traditions" influenced Russian statecraft across the ages.

Understanding the Russian Way of Deterrence

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, deterrence has stood as one of the central pillars in international security policy. Initially conceptualized in the West to prevent total war through mutual threat of retaliation, ..

Strings Attached: Talking about Russia's agenda for laws in cyberspace

Russia's longstanding proposals for "information security" agreements may sound cooperative, but they conceal a Trojan horse - a push to legitimize censorship, silence dissent, and bind others to rules it won’t follow.

A curated list of dead trees.

A post in which I explain why I decided to create a curated list of publications on Russia and how I went about doing it.

Breathe in, breathe out - and then start writing.

A lot of fuss has been made about the fact that Russia released their revised nuclear doctrine pretty much the day that Ukraine used long-range missiles to attack targets inside Russia.

Kursk? More like curse!

The first (major) incursion into Russian soil by enemy troops since the Second World War might end up being much more costly for Vladimir Putin outside of the battlefield than on it.

Perpetrators don't matter

The following post has been composed in the night after the terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, on 22nd of March 2024. I ended up only sharing it with a few people because I wasn’t entirely comfortable with posting it here at the time. So .. here it is now.

It's cyberwar-o-clock .. or something like that.

As was the case at the beginning of the war in Ukraine a year and a half ago, reports about the possible role of cyberattacks in this conflict emerged relatively quickly shortly after the events that shook Israel on October 7, 2023.

Cyber is effective. Explosions are effective-er.

The publication of documents that allegedly describe the work of a Russian IT company on behalf of Russian intelligence services caused quite a stir in various journalistic publications at the end of March this year.