Florida attorney Lisa White is under arrest and faces a trail date of November 16, 2026, for allegedly threatening to shoot Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
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A French arbitration judgment has revealed that a British businessman who has become a financial supporter of Nigel Farage previously invested in an Iranian telecommunications venture partly owned by a religious foundation subsequently sanctioned by the United States.
Hossein Ghandehari, known as Sasan, was linked through his family’s HP Trust to a project to develop fibre-optic infrastructure in Iran. Documents examined in an investigation published on 22 October show that Ori Group, ultimately owned by the trust, held 49 per cent of Omran Razavi International, with the remaining 51 per cent held by Astan Quds Razavi (AQR).
The disclosures have attracted attention because Ghandehari has pledged substantial financial support for Reform UK. They do not, however, establish that he breached sanctions or that money linked to the Iranian venture was used to fund British politics.
The telecommunications project originated in a contract awarded by Iran’s state-owned Telecommunication Infrastructure Company in 2012. Ori Group became a shareholder in the joint venture in 2015, although Ghandehari’s lawyers say the agreement for its stake was signed in December 2014.
AQR, based in Mashhad, administers extensive religious and commercial holdings. On 13 January 2021, the US Treasury imposed sanctions on AQR, describing it as an organisation controlled by Iran’s supreme leader and alleging that its assets benefited senior Iranian officials.
That designation came several years after the venture’s collapse in 2016. Sanctions imposed in 2021 cannot, by themselves, demonstrate wrongdoing in transactions conducted before the designation.
According to the reported arbitration material, AQR took control of the joint venture in 2016. Ghandehari’s representatives maintain that the project was intended to expand internet access and encourage political reform, and that the arrangements received approval from authorities in France and the United States.
His lawyers say the venture ended in asset seizures and persecution by Iranian authorities. They reject suggestions that Ghandehari supported the Iranian leadership, and say AQR had been a necessary local partner for infrastructure work in Iran.
The disclosures have renewed scrutiny of Ghandehari’s relationship with Farage. In January, Ghandehari paid for accreditation for the Reform UK leader and a member of his staff at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The House of Commons register of interests records the cost as £50,482.16. This was a declared benefit associated with an overseas visit, not a £50,000 cash donation to Reform UK.
Ghandehari has said he intends to move his tax residence from Switzerland to Britain and make regular substantial contributions to the party. He describes HP Trust as having a portfolio valued at approximately $10 billion, although the trust’s financial position has not been independently established through public accounts.
Farage has repeatedly criticised Iran’s government and supported American military action against Tehran. His public position has brought additional attention to his financial supporter’s historical dealings with an Iranian state-linked institution, although there is no evidence that Farage participated in those arrangements.
Another connection concerns John Richard Simpson, whose company Interior Architecture Landscape donated £200,000 to Reform UK in 2025. Simpson later acquired Orico General Trading, a Dubai-based business previously owned by HP Trust and involved in supplying equipment for the Iranian project.
Simpson says he took over Orico to wind down its operations after the Iranian venture failed. Interior Architecture Landscape has said the Ghandehari family is a client but had no role in its political donations, which it maintains were funded from legitimate British business.
The overlapping commercial relationships have brought renewed scrutiny of Reform UK’s financing. They do not establish that Simpson’s company’s donations originated with Ghandehari, AQR or any Iranian state institution.
The Electoral Commission’s rules permit contributions from eligible UK-registered companies carrying on business in Britain, while placing responsibility on political parties to verify their funding sources. The legality of any individual donation depends on its circumstances and the applicable requirements.
EU Today has previously examined Reform UK’s decision to accept cryptocurrency donations and the questions surrounding identification of the original sources of political funding.
The latest disclosures concern a separate issue: historical commercial dealings in Iran, the ownership of connected companies and their subsequent relationships with British political donors. The arbitration material provides a documented chronology, but does not establish improper financing of Reform UK or foreign interference in British elections.
Driven by painful memories of his detention in an Eritrean prison, Yemeni fisherman Tareq al-Nahari instinctively raised his left hand to protect his head from a barrage of bullets fired by an Eritrean naval boat.The gunfire severed his ring and middle fingers, while one bullet pierced his skull.
Yet he survived, thanks to a medical miracle. However, the projectile that struck his temporal lobe erased his past, identity, and even his future, leaving him unable to form new memories, a condition known as anterograde amnesia.
Despite this, al-Nahari, who is in his forties, remains alive among his family, having escaped death. This is a better outcome than that suffered by his peers, including two fellow fishermen who were aboard the same boat and died in the same incident. One of them was his maternal cousin.
Yemeni fishermen face repeated acts of violence and successive crimes at the hands of Eritrean naval personnel, who intercept them and take them to a network of prisons and detention centres resembling Soviet Gulags.
Eritrean detention centres are no different. Abducted Yemenis are forced to perform arduous labour, including cutting roads through mountains, paving them and constructing military and civilian facilities, without pay or even adequate meals.
This is confirmed by the reports received by Majed Abdo, the sheikh of fishermen in Yemen's Hodeidah governorate. He holds his fellow countrymen responsible for what happens because they enter the territorial waters of a neighbouring sovereign state in their boats.
Amjad al-Omaisi, director-general of al-Khawkhah, a district in the Hodeidah governorate that faces Eritrea on Yemen's western coast, rejects this view. Former Eritrean Supreme Court judge Abdullah Khayyar shares al-Omaisi's assessment.
Life in the Gulag
Tens of thousands of people earn their living from fishing in villages and settlements along Yemen's western coast.
Salem Alyan, a member of the Fisheries Cooperative Union, which organises and oversees the sector, estimates that there are 100,000 traditional fishermen supporting around one million people. However, the sea has become an immediate source of danger amid Eritrean attacks, he told our Arabic-language sister publication, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
This is borne out by the account of Issam Mohammed al-Nahari, who is accompanying his brother Tareq, now suffering from memory loss, on a medical trip to Sanaa. He is one of over 20 fishermen we interviewed during this investigation.
Issam said that when the boat incident occurred on Sunday, 25 January 2026, 50 fishermen were aboard the wooden vessel with his brother.
They were taken to the port of Massawa in southern Eritrea, despite insisting that they had been attacked in Yemeni territorial waters.
They were imprisoned for periods ranging from two months to one year. Issam said his brother arrived at Hodeidah hospital alongside the bodies of the two fishermen killed in the incident.
Tareq remained in intensive care for two months before being discharged with memory loss. He could no longer recognise any of his family members apart from his four-year-old daughter, Aya.
Issam said similar incidents frequently occurred to his fellow fishermen, who faced crimes, abuses, and enslavement in detention centres in Asmara without those responsible being held accountable.
"We were tortured to coerce us into forced labour and deprived of food, except for one meal of poor-quality lentils," he said.
He recalled another experience in the summer of 2024, when he was arbitrarily detained by the Eritrean navy alongside his father, Mohammed al-Nahari, and others.
"Throughout the month, I was subjected to severe beatings in front of my father. In the end, I gave in and agreed to work breaking stones from a nearby mountain in the city of Assab, in southeastern Eritrea, so they could be transported and used to pave the roads," he said mournfully as he sat beside his brother Tareq.
He said he spent daylight hours working alongside 20 fellow fishermen under close surveillance by Eritrean naval soldiers armed with rifles and batons.
Medical reports obtained by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed indicate that Tareq al-Nahari is suffering from a concussion and has undergone two head surgeries.
His treatment has cost more than seven million Yemeni rials ($12,500), and he can no longer afford further medical expenses.
Some of his fellow fishermen were also detained in 2023 and forced into hard labour, breaking stones and building a school in Assab under the supervision of naval soldiers.
The soldiers repeatedly beat them whenever their performance declined because of the scorching heat.
They were fed only flour bran, normally used as animal feed, in addition to a meal of lentils.
As a result, Yemeni fishermen flee immediately whenever they sense an Eritrean naval boat approaching. This has led to repeated cases of drowning and injuries at sea.
The consequences of division and war
On 18 May 2023, Mwatana for Human Rights, a Yemeni non-governmental organisation, announced that Eritrean naval forces had detained 69 Yemeni fishermen in three incidents between 2019 and 2022. Minors were among those detained and subjected to forced labour.
Meanwhile, fishermen whose testimonies were documented by this investigation, said 184 of their colleagues had been detained between the beginning of 2023 and January 2026. Of these, 95 remain in captivity.
However, sources agree that the actual number is much higher and that no official body has documented the total number of fishermen detained over the past years.
This is due to the political and security crises that have gripped Yemen for more than a decade, with serious consequences for traditional fishing.
While politicians have been preoccupied with the war, attacks by the Eritrean navy have escalated amid the difficult economic conditions facing fishermen and their families.
Fishermen either lose their lives or have their equipment seized by Eritrean naval forces before being taken to detention centres in Marsa Fatima, Assab, Massawa, Dahlak and Tiro, as well as Terma Island in eastern Eritrea.
Accounts also indicate that some detainees are transferred to Lesser Assab and forced to work for Eritrean project contractors.
They work throughout the day and return to detention centres only in the evening. They are not repatriated to Yemen until the project is completed.
Their return takes place in stages, beginning with the injured, the sick, the elderly and younger detainees unable to endure the hardships of the work.
Among them is Abdul Salam Bishara, a fisherman from al-Khawkhah in the southern Hodeidah governorate. He suffered a slipped disc after being forced to break stones on a mountain near Assab in 2017.
He received no medical assistance before being deported to Yemen.
"They left me only because I was no longer able to work," he said.
He added that when Eritrean authorities decide to release detainees, another crime reportedly follows.
Large numbers of released fishermen are crammed into unseaworthy boats and sent towards the Yemeni coast without any consideration for their safety.
Between 50 and 60 fishermen are placed on a boat that would normally accommodate no more than 30 people.
Al-Omaisi, the director-general of the al-Khawkhah district, described this as one of the crimes against humanity committed by the Eritrean armed forces.
Speaking to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, he said Yemeni human rights organisations should defend the rights of these victims and file lawsuits against the Eritrean regime in international courts.
Violations of international law
Mohammed Amin, a lawyer at the Court of Appeal in Hodeidah, said the arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearance and coercion of fishermen into working under threat constituted serious violations of international law.
These acts could amount to enslavement and crimes against humanity when committed on a widespread or systematic basis.
To secure justice for the victims, Amin told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that each case should be documented separately through the testimonies of survivors and witnesses, medical reports, photographs and documents, while identifying the date and place of detention and the authorities, individuals or officials responsible.
"After gathering the evidence, human rights organisations and victims' lawyers can submit case files to the relevant international bodies or explore the possibility of prosecution before national or international courts with jurisdiction. This would help ensure investigations, accountability, compensation and reparations for the victims," he added.
This view is shared by Colonel Abdul Ghani Abu Halfah, who has been tasked by the Sanaa authorities with following up on the treatment of injured people in government hospitals, both military and civilian.
He cited the case of Tareq al-Nahari, who was transferred to the military hospital in Sanaa. Abu Halfah noted that he is facing extremely difficult financial circumstances after becoming unable to work.
Between August and September, during this two-month-long investigation, 26 fishermen, most of them from al-Khawkhah, managed to return to Yemen. Port Director-General Ghali Qashr, the head of the Red Sea Fisheries Authority, Wael Abdul Wadoud, and al-Khawkhah Director-General Amjad al-Omaisi received them.
During their meeting with the officials, the returning fishermen confirmed that they had been in Yemeni territorial waters aboard two traditional wooden boats known as jalbah vessels when Eritrean naval boats attacked them and took them at gunpoint to Eritrean prisons.
Held in a prison in Assab, they endured torture and starvation before being forced into hard labor.
The Eritrean forces had seized a tonne of fish they had caught before their arrest, in addition to looting their fishing equipment.
They also took one of the boats, removed its engine and replaced it with an old, dilapidated one. Upon their return, the fishermen were forced to sail the vessel back to Hodeidah's shores, said al-Omaisi.
Seizing fishermen's livelihoods
Yemeni fisherman Musad Yusuf Zakhm, from Al-Khawkhah, said he was detained in June 2023 for two months alongside nine other fishermen in a prison in Assab.
During their detention, they were forced to cut and pave a road with stones near the city port after their boats had been intercepted and confiscated. They were also tortured and transferred to Lesser Assab, where they spent about 15 days before being released and deported to the city of Mokha.
He added that he had previously been detained in another incident, when he was abducted to Dahlak Island in mid-2022 and held for two months alongside 15 fishermen.
Their fishing equipment and supplies, including nets, refrigerators, the boat engine and its contents, were confiscated. The value of the seized property amounted to $10,000.
In another case, a fisherman estimated his losses at 18 million rials ($33,000), according to documentation examined by Mwatana for Human Rights.
For fishermen, confiscation means more than simply losing property: their boat represents their livelihoods and the means to provide for their families.
A timid official response
According to an official memorandum (No. 355) sent by Hussein Hamed al-Attas, chairman of the General Authority for Red Sea Fisheries, to Hodeidah Governor Abdullah Abdu Ahmed Ateifi on 21 February 2026, at least 95 Yemeni fishermen remain detained in Eritrean prisons.
Al-Omaisi, the director-general of al-Khawkhah, confirmed that violations against fishermen "take place almost daily, without any genuine official action to compensate the victims or prosecute the Eritrean authorities in international courts".
However, al-Omaisi emphasised that these crimes have no time limit for prosecution.
According to lawyer Amin, since Yemeni fishermen conduct their work under the ruling issued by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 1998-1999, which demarcated the maritime boundary between the two countries, the abductions, torture, and forced labour they face constitute violations requiring accountability.
He explained that "what is happening to these fishermen violates Eritrean law, as they are subjected to abuses, have everything they own confiscated and are forced to work. It also violates international human rights law, which prohibits subjecting anyone to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and to arbitrary arrest or detention without a legal charge or a fair trial."
If Yemeni fishermen commit an offence, the appropriate measures under Eritrean law would be to confiscate any fish they are carrying and return them to their country, according to former Eritrean Supreme Court Judge Abdullah Khayyar.
He pointed out that Eritrea has no clear laws and that, even where laws exist, they are not enforced.
"Military rule and its consequences dominate the functioning of state institutions. Everything that happens is dealt with [...] through administrative and military procedures that fall outside the law," he told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
In light of all this, the internationally recognised Yemeni government has limited its response to calling on Eritrea to release the fishermen held in its custody.
However, these appeals do not always receive a response, according to a source at the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Fisheries in Aden, who declined to be named because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
The source cited a request made by the government in June 2020 for the release of detained fishermen and confiscated equipment.19 fishermen were released, while another 100 remained in detention.
Their suffering continues, with no solution in sight. Yet, as Issam al-Nahari said, fishermen cannot abandon their only source of livelihood.
"Death while searching for food to feed your children is better than dying of hunger."
Disclaimer: This investigation is republished from our Arabic sister website, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, and mirrors the source's original editorial guidelines and reporting policies.
The original investigation was published in Arabic on 28 September 2026.
Translated by Afrah Almatwari and edited by The New Arab investigative desk.
Video subtitles were translated by Rose Chacko.
Comments and questions should be addressed to Head of Investigations Mohamed Azzam: mohamed.azzam@alaraby.co.uk.
"I am trying to figure out the way to do this." Those words from MS NOW's Chris Hayes say all you need to know (and likely all you will get) from his interview on Wednesday with Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. There is a litany of questions the liberal host never asked of Omar. Those questions have only increased over the years, leading to the current criminal investigation into immigration fraud. At points, Hayes sounded more like a supplicant than a journalist given his discomfort with asking pressing questions.
ILHAN OMAR IS NOT THE MINNESOTA CONGRESSWOMAN’S 'REAL NAME': SOURCES
The interview had the journalistic nutritional content of a Slurpee that would give any liberal a sugar high and any non-liberal a stomachache.
Many of us have stressed that these allegations are unproven, and that little evidence has been confirmed to support the underlying criminal charges. However, I have also written that Omar has been remarkably unforthcoming in rebutting the allegations or providing her own exculpatory information. Instead, she has spent years denouncing the allegations as racist or Islamophobic without addressing the specific claims.
HOMAN CONFIRMS 'CRIMINAL' INVESTIGATION INVOLVING ILHAN OMAR, SAYS HE KNOWS 'THINGS ARE GOING ON’
While the Biden administration began aspects of these investigations years ago, Omar again sat for another prolonged interview without being pressed (beyond cursory questions) about long-standing allegations.
Hayes exhaustively explored Omar's feelings and reactions to the recent search while largely avoiding any detailed questions about the very allegations that a Washington, D.C., judge found sufficient to show probable cause of criminal conduct.
ILHAN OMAR SAYS SHE LIVES 'PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK' AS DOJ PROBES FINANCIAL DISCLOSURES
It may be useful to consider 10 questions not asked of Ilhan Omar. Asking these questions is not to assume that the underlying claims are true, but to establish the facts from Omar's perspective.
It took 12 minutes for Hayes to mention immigration fraud, and he did so by asking her, "How seriously do you take it?" He then prefaced the fraud question with a laugh, saying, "I am trying to figure out the way to do this that doesn't sound like I'm insane."
Hayes then laughed further with Omar about questions of marriage fraud and said, "There are right-wing people who believe" these allegations, after Omar agreed that such questions are "insane."
Hayes made a series of statements about how "there is not even a kernel of truth" to these claims before inviting affirmations from Omar. He then made a general reference to "moving on to other allegations" without any details.
ILHAN OMAR ISSUES STUNNING ADMISSION WHEN CONFRONTED WITH BROTHER MARRIAGE RUMORS
The questions not asked:
ILHAN OMAR RAID SPARKS OMINOUS PREDICTION FROM WATCHDOG: 'THEY PROBABLY GOT THE GOODS'
In the interview, when Hayes moved on to Omar's previous financial disclosure that she and her husband were worth $30 million before dropping to a little over $100,000, he again failed to address allegations that the drop in income was due to fraud. Instead, he asked about her "lifestyle," then moved on to ask what it is like to be one of the least wealthy members of Congress.
If Omar had answered them, any of these questions would have produced a scoop, but that was clearly not the purpose of this interview. Instead, Hayes spent more time asking Omar how she felt about former President Barack Obama defending her than asking about the specific fraud allegations she faces.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
Never has so much been expressed with so little said.
Hayes culminated the interview by asking, "Do you ever just want to tap out?" and Omar congratulated him on reaching the "real question."
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Unfortunately, MS NOW tapped out of the interview long before that question was asked.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JONATHAN TURLEY
“The ‘job’ … has been mostly accomplished,” said a senior official in Belgium’s spy service, Hugues Brulin, in a WhatsApp message to the Belgian then EU commissioner, Didier Reynders.
“Bravo for the work you did,” said Reynders.
It was back in 2022, and, at least on the surface, they were chatting about a staff reshuffle inside Belgium’s intelligence service, La Sûreté de l’Etat/Veiligheid van de Staat (VSSE) — which was already a peculiar thing for Brulin to be doing on WhatsApp with an EU official.
But their messages, seen by EUobserver and published in full below, were now also evidence in a Belgian police investigation into Reynders on money-laundering charges, which painted them in the light of a potentially criminal conspiracy.
They reconfirmed that Belgian authorities were looking into wider allegations of Reynders’ possible collusion with Russia.
Brulin’s real “job” had been to stop the VSSE from probing Reynders and his potential Russia links, according to five former and current Belgian intelligence officers who spoke to EUobserver.
And Brulin also WhatsApp-ed Reynders on how to “counterattack” a Russia whistleblower.
The 68-year-old liberal politician from Liège, in French-speaking southern Belgium, had had a glittering career before his sudden fall from grace in December 2024, when Belgian police raided his properties, and before he was subsequently charged in 2025 with having laundered some €1m via the ING Bank, using lottery tickets and cash deposits.
Reynders had been EU justice commissioner from 2019 until 30 November 2024 (just four days prior to the police raid) and Belgium’s foreign and defence minister from 2011 to 2019.
And Belgium had vetted and cleared him to read “top secret” national, EU, and Nato documents.
Meanwhile, Europe was scandalised to learn, on 10 October, that Germany’s former spy chief had been arrested for selling secrets.
But if a figure with Reynders’ CV was also found guilty of corruption and foreign collusion, it would be yet another security fiasco for Western allies.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
The “forced digital detox” delivered by Ukraine’s Armed Forces has hit the most profitable part of Yandex’s business: search and AI. The long-term fallout from the attacks on the company’s data centers has yet to be assessed, but supercomputing experts consulted by T-invariant are confident that all three of its supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin — were badly damaged by fire and smoke. Soot and ash may have reached the machines’ microelectronics through their direct free-cooling systems, which use outside air. In the best case, cleaning them will take many months; in the worst, Yandex will have to buy new, extremely scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents, which will take years. The company owns Russia’s best supercomputers, which, according to its financial reports, had recently become key drivers of its growth. On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the global Top500 list of supercomputers, competing with leading systems from the US, China, Japan, and Germany. After the Ukrainian drone strikes, Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the performance of its top supercomputers as early as November.
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All three of Yandex’s supercomputers have been knocked out of service indefinitely by drone strikes on the company’s data centers. The first attack came overnight on October 8 in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. That site houses Chervonenkis, the IT giant’s flagship machine and the most powerful of Russia’s publicly listed supercomputers, as well as Lyapunov, the third most powerful. The following night, Ukrainian forces struck the data center in Kaluga — Yandex’s largest and one of the biggest in Russia. Overnight on October 11, a data center in Vladimir, home to the Galushkin supercomputer, came under attack.
Four specialists interviewed by T-invariant are confident that the company’s computing capacity has suffered serious damage. In their view, the main reason the equipment was so vulnerable to the drone strikes and the fires that followed is the direct free-cooling system, which cools the equipment with outside air (supply fans push the air through filters, and it then flows through the server racks).
Even if the fire didn’t spread to the supercomputer racks directly, air laden with soot and ash could have reached the server boards, and the finest particles could have settled on the board substrate (a lot also depends on the condition of the filters). Carbon conducts electricity. Because the traces on the boards are packed so densely, these particles can act as conductive “bridges” between contacts, causing widespread short circuits and burning out motherboards. What’s more, combustion byproducts can corrode conductors and contact joints.
In the summer of 2026, Yandex announced that it was starting to roll out liquid cooling. “To integrate the technology into existing data centers that operate on free-cooling principles, the company’s engineers developed a specialized solution: sidecars. The sidecars are additional racks fitted with liquid-to-air radiators. They make it possible to introduce liquid cooling without large-scale, costly renovation of the buildings. The hybrid of air and liquid systems provides efficient thermal management for high-load racks and speeds up the adaptation of the infrastructure to the needs of internal services and external partners,” the company said. However, according to the experts interviewed by T-invariant, although liquid-cooled components fare better in a fire, the company is unlikely to have finished this retrofit at all of its data centers.
One of the experts, who works at a global AI tech giant, was skeptical of the technology Yandex uses to cool its supercomputers. “Nobody in their right mind has used free cooling for ages,” the source told T-invariant. Most operators rely on liquid cooling systems (which is what NVIDIA uses), and, less often, on immersion cooling.
According to the specialists, cleaning smoke, soot, and grime off the supercomputers’ components could take up to six months. And if parts need to be replaced — including expensive and, above all, scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents — getting the machines fully back up and running could take one to two years.
Up-to-date videos on science during wartime, interviews, podcasts, and streams with prominent scientists — subscribe to the T-invariant YouTube channel!
Yandex has not commented on the condition of its supercomputers after the attacks. T-invariant asked leading Russian supercomputing specialists — both those working in Russia and those who left to work for global AI giants — for a detailed assessment of the situation and of all the threats and challenges facing Yandex (all of them asked to remain anonymous).
Why the Fate of the Supercomputers Matters Most
The strike on Russia’s IT leader had a digital blast radius far beyond its data centers. For more than a week now, Russian users have been dealing with outages in services run by Yandex’s many cloud customers and other B2B clients. They have also been hit by outages in Yandex’s own services — above all, Yandex Disk and Yandex Pay. The Russian internet is flooded with videos from users who have lost access, possibly only temporarily, to their data or their money.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
How Many B2B Clients Depend on Yandex’s Services
According to the company’s financial results for Q2 2026, Yandex Cloud’s total client base grew to 64,000. AI and information security services remain the key growth drivers: they are already used by 37% and 53% of large clients, respectively — up 10 and 9 percentage points from a year earlier. Consumption of commercial tokens via the API on the Yandex AI Studio platform reached 398 billion tokens in Q2 2026 — double the figure for the first quarter and 70% more than in all of 2025. Yandex 360, the company’s cloud office suite, keeps growing: it now has more than 117 million users and 185,000 organizations. At the end of Q2 2026, Yandex 360 had a total of 8.9 million paid accounts, 2.4 million of them at large companies.
Yet the main problem for Yandex itself after Ukraine’s strikes on its data centers is the partial or total loss of computing capacity. And there are at least two reasons why. Yes, the disabled data centers will weigh on Yandex’s market capitalization, but something else matters more: these problems could stall the development of its AI, on which the company’s core business depends, for months or even years.
After the first drone strikes on Yandex’s data centers on October 8 and 9, many investors remained cautiously optimistic about the company: the cloud accounts for only a small share of revenue, and workloads can be redistributed among data centers. The share price dipped by a few percent at the time. The third attack, and the likelihood of further Ukrainian drone raids, made financial forecasts gloomier.
Yandex does not break out AI figures in its financial reports, so one has to go by the Search and AI Services segment. It has the highest adjusted EBITDA margin of all the segments Yandex reports. In Q2 2026, that margin was 46.3%, and for the first half of the year, 44.8% (by comparison, the City Services segment had a margin of 16%, and the contribution of the entire B2B segment, including Yandex Cloud, is far smaller than that of search and AI). The Search and AI Services segment also generated the largest adjusted EBITDA in absolute terms.
The reports also show that AI is already making a measurable contribution to advertising revenue growth: according to the company, its ARGUS recommendation technology accounted for almost half of that growth in Q2 2026. And although Yandex doesn’t disclose the profitability of its AI products separately, its reports make clear just how important AI is to the company’s financial health.
“Yandex remains one of the world’s first companies to expand its experiments with AI-based promotion formats for businesses — in Alice AI, both within Yandex Search and on its own website and app. These formats take a fundamentally new approach to audience targeting. The algorithms take into account not only the query but the entire context of the conversation with Alice AI. This makes it possible to identify a user’s potential interest even before they formulate a specific query. Promotion on AI surfaces is already showing measurable results: the cost of customer acquisition is comparable to that of promotion in Search. In chats with Alice AI, the ad system has already displayed ads from more than 460,000 advertisers — three-quarters of all advertisers on the platform. Alice AI remains the most popular AI assistant among Russians. In the second quarter, the number of weekly users who turn to Alice AI for tasks and conversation grew 39% quarter over quarter to 33.2 million. The number of monthly active Stations with Alice [Yandex’s smart speakers — T-invariant] rose 31% year over year to 22.5 million. More and more users own multiple devices: the number of people who own two or more Stations grew 44% to 4.7 million,” Yandex’s report states.
Clearly, the main risk concerns AI. It is these three supercomputers at two data centers that power the development of the company’s neural networks and other parts of its AI ecosystem. If the computing capacity has to be shut down so the equipment can be cleaned after the fire and smoke, the infrastructure behind almost half of the growth in ad revenue will sit idle for months. If the supercomputers are damaged even partially, development will be set back by years. First, sanctions restrict deliveries of NVIDIA A100 accelerators to Russia. Getting around them is extremely expensive and difficult, as shown by the cloak-and-dagger operation to build MSU-270, a closely guarded supercomputer at Moscow State University (see T-invariant’s investigation). Second, there is a global shortage of cutting-edge NVIDIA chips: orders are booked two to three years in advance, as confirmed by a T-invariant source at NVIDIA and by another specialist at a global AI giant who asked that the company not be named.
As a result, the development of YandexGPT and Alice AI is effectively on hold indefinitely — even as demand for them is growing explosively: according to Yandex B2B Tech data cited by the financial portal Finam, token consumption in Yandex AI Studio grew 18-fold year over year in the first half of 2026. Yandex’s service status page currently lists Yandex AI Studio as unavailable.
[[socialnetworks]]
Why Yandex’s Data Centers Weren’t Ready for War
“Yandex built its data centers and its supercomputers in peacetime, for peacetime. Everything was designed for normal life; it never even crossed anyone’s mind that drones would come crashing through the roof. The Ryazan, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions don’t get earthquakes or other natural disasters, so nobody even thought about investing in physical protection for the buildings,” explains one of the supercomputing industry experts T-invariant spoke to.
Yandex’s public descriptions of its infrastructure (in particular, a post the company published in 2020) reveal the logic behind its design: low energy consumption, redundant power, simple and cheap cooling, and the ability to shift workloads between sites.
According to a BBC source, Yandex regularly practiced taking one data center offline and shifting its load to the others. But the successive loss of several large sites was probably never rehearsed. The BBC’s source also says that Yandex’s services may have treated two separate buildings in Vladimir as backups for each other: losing both at once was considered impossible.
“In Russia, data centers are usually built as fairly basic ‘boxes’: no serious walls, no fencing, nothing like that, almost no liquid cooling, no sophisticated fire suppression systems — even though advanced technologies exist, including Russian-made ones. All of that is considered insane capex by Russian business standards. Nobody could afford it. On top of that, there’s the extreme centralization. About 70–80% of all data centers are located around Moscow and St. Petersburg,” explains the supercomputing expert.
The first public calls in Russia to improve data center security came literally a couple of days before the first attacks. The BBC cites examples: “One of the main tasks now is how to move computing capacity, how to move all the useful IT load out of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Moscow region somewhere farther away… somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, things aren’t landing yet,” Deputy Minister of Digital Development Yevgeny Filatov said on October 6 at the Digital Solutions forum. And on the evening of October 7 (a few hours before the first attack), RBC published a report that representatives of the IT industry and the Ministry of Digital Development were discussing the possibility of placing AI data centers in “friendly countries” [the Russian government’s term for countries that have not imposed sanctions on Russia — T-invariant].
The BBC also points out that by then Russian forces had already been striking data centers in Ukraine. From September 23 to 28, they damaged at least six such facilities. The attacks left people without internet access and disrupted TV broadcasts. The Russian Ministry of Defense even posted an image on its social media channels that read “Digital detox… by force.” As early as October 4, two days before Filatov’s remarks, Volodymyr Zelensky warned of retaliatory strikes: “Do they really think we won’t respond?”
Other striking examples — in every sense of the word — emerged in 2026, showing that data centers are among the top-priority targets in wartime. Civilian data centers were also hit by drones and missiles during the conflict between the US and Iran. Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE were attacked several times after Washington launched its bombing campaign against Iran. Amazon advised customers to move their data to sites outside the region, since there was no telling when the facilities would be back online. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also threatened to completely destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi.
“In Germany, I took a close look at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre near Munich. It’s a windowless cube with a moat around it, so nobody can ram it with a car. The entrance is a small suspension bridge. The cube itself is essentially a building within a building, a Faraday cage [an example of architectural radio-frequency shielding — T-invariant]. So they’ve literally put serious physical and other protective measures in place. And that supercomputer ranked below Yandex’s Chervonenkis on the Top500. Still, the Germans invested very seriously in protection. That kind of protection won’t stop ballistic missiles, but against drones it works just fine. We also know of incredible underground data centers in Norway and Finland. Then there’s Alibaba’s supercomputing center in China. Almost all the Top500 leaders don’t skimp on capex; they install sophisticated liquid or immersion cooling systems. Russia’s IT leaders cut corners on all of it,” the expert explains.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
In Norway, Lefdal Mine Datacenter houses its data halls in a former mine, about 700 meters in from the entrance to the mountain. It combines a sheltered location with cooling by cold fjord water. Some of the supporting infrastructure, including the generators, remains above ground.
The Finnish data center The Rock, located in the Pori area, uses nine tunnel halls originally carved out for military use. The underground facility, covering about 8,500 square meters, combines the natural protection of solid bedrock with segmentation into security zones and specialized engineering infrastructure, including direct liquid cooling.
Who Ultimately Gets the “Forced Digital Detox”
Of Russia’s six largest supercomputers, only the two belonging to the banking giant Sber are located at a site relatively well protected from drone attacks. Christofari and Christofari Neo are housed in Skolkovo, which has better air defense coverage. GROM, the supercomputer owned by the telecom operator MTS, is in Lytkarino, outside Moscow. Yandex’s remaining data centers are also in the Moscow region, in Mytishchi and Ivanteyevka. All of these towns near Moscow regularly come under massive Ukrainian drone raids.
“Restoring supercomputers of this caliber just isn’t going to happen, not now and not anytime soon. And it’s not even about having the money. The main problem isn’t even sanctions, it’s the shortage of chips and other components: there’s a huge waiting list for them worldwide. That said, gray- and black-market imports are very costly, too. So things are pretty Sucksovo these days [a pun on Sasovo, the town where Yandex’s flagship data center was hit, and the Russian slang verb sosat’, ‘to suck’ — T-invariant],” says a supercomputing specialist who spoke with T-invariant.
The next update of the global Top500 list of supercomputers will be published in November. Chervonenkis currently ranks 101st, and Kazakhstan’s Alem.Cloud is 104th (Kazakhstan’s second machine is 122nd, ahead of all of Russia’s other supercomputers). The experts T-invariant spoke to have no doubt that Ukraine’s retaliatory “forced digital detox” will push Russia’s leading supercomputers below Kazakhstan’s on the Top500 as early as this fall. Competing with the US, China, and Japan is out of the question altogether: Russia already lags behind them by two orders of magnitude.
As T-invariant reported earlier, the Netherlands is among the countries ahead of Russia on the Top500 list. Two machines registered to the Netherlands belong to Nebius, the company led by Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh: ISEG (which ranked 16th when it debuted) and ISEG2, with a combined peak performance of about 425 petaflops. According to the government’s Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036, Russia’s five machines on the Top500 together deliver less than 100 petaflops of peak performance. In other words, Arkady Volozh’s company alone has more computing power than all of Russia’s Top500 systems combined.
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Andrei Klepach — one of Russia’s leading economists and a high-ranking economic official of the Vladimir Putin era — has published several academic works over the past six years that are packed with cosmist imagery. His drift into “energy-information cosmism” went unnoticed until Klepach was fired as chief economist of the state corporation VEB.RF — after he publicly offered a bleak assessment of Russia’s ability to compete with the West and with Ukraine. T-invariant traced the economist’s academic evolution into a cosmist and looked into the background of his mentor on the road “toward a cosmoplanetary civilization.” It also turned out that, even after Klepach’s dismissal, VEB.RF has no shortage of people developing alternative “theories of everything”: the “wave hypothesis of life,” the idea of a “Fifth Russia,” and a “noosphere economy.”
On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization is the title [access to eLibrary requires free registration] of a monograph edited by Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, who has been Klepach’s regular co-author for the past six years. Bushuev spent many years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences (JIHT RAS) and, in the 1990s, served as Russia’s deputy minister of energy.
Research into the path toward a cosmoplanetary civilization, carried out by a team of authors from the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise, leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MGIMO University, and other respected academic institutions, may now be cut short: in August 2026, Andrei Klepach was fired from VEB.RF. According to media reports, Klepach was dismissed after a phone call from the Kremlin, following the uproar over a speech in which he described Russia as falling behind across the board. His words that spread most widely were:
We’re losing both the technological and the economic competition globally. And we’re losing it not just to China and the US — in some respects, we’re losing it to Ukraine, however unpleasant that is, even for me… In this war of attrition, we won’t win the competition…
After Klepach’s high-profile dismissal, many economists and business journalists recalled his professional expertise and his constant willingness to comment for the media. Soon, the outlet Sota pointed out that the economist and official, who from 2004 to 2014 served at the Ministry of Economic Development as a department director and then deputy minister, had put out publications speculating that life on Earth was brought by aliens.
After carefully studying Andrei Klepach’s publications, T-invariant concluded that once the COVID pandemic began, the economist — in parallel with his analysis of the structural and monetary factors of Russia’s economic growth, the sovereign economy, and macroeconomics — moved on to a broader level of generalization: together with a new circle of co-authors, he set out “to discern, beyond the current pandemic and military-political apocalypse, the future of our common cosmoplanetary civilization.”
The scale of the project becomes clear from the abstract of the 688-page monograph, published in 2023 by Energiya Publishing House — a now-defunct publisher co-owned by Bushuev, among others. Klepach himself wrote several chapters, the preface, and the conclusion. Two other employees of the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise are also listed among the monograph’s 12 authors. Here is the abstract in full.
The collective monograph of the authors – representatives of various organizations, specialists in various fields of knowledge (economists and energy specialists, information scientists and sociologists) united a common desire to show that the general hype around global warming, the Covid-19 virological pandemic, and the world military – the political crisis in Ukraine, threatening to turn into the 3rd world war of the early 20s of the 21st century, is not an accidental phenomenon, not a “black swan”, but a natural transition from the former material dominant and the dominant of the unipolar world of social development to a new ideological models of eco-socio-humanitarian civilization. At the same time, the transition is considered as a certain regularity of the turbulent (wave) development of history. This periodicity connects cosmic phenomena, known in the ancient Vedic understanding of the world, with the cyclical nature of solar activity and its reflection in the socio-natural and political processes of human society. It is shown that the current reality also corresponds to the next 35th SA [solar activity] cycle, which, by analogy with the previous history, can be called the beginning of the formation of a “new thinking” and a new policy in the field of domestic and international problems of civilizational development. This new discourse is of particular importance for the formation of the pre-election programs of the leading world powers (USA, China and Russia) in the light of the expected renewal of their leadership.
The preface to the monograph was written by Andrei Klepach himself, as indicated in the “Authors” section. We quote it at length, with some cuts. It is the text of the preface that suggests Andrei Klepach at the very least shares all the core ideologemes of his new co-author, Vitaly Bushuev. These include not only Russian cosmism but also “ancient Aryan world-knowledge,” as well as the idea that life was brought to Earth by aliens from the constellation Ursa Major.
The authors, who include economists and energy experts, sociologists and political scientists, have attempted to solve (or at least to formulate in a well-grounded way) the foresight problem of a new post-COVID world of partnership and struggle between civilizations, using methods based on the turbulence of world history, the cyclicity of socio-natural processes and technological innovation, and the unity and commonality of the energy-information laws of the Earth and the Cosmos. The relationship between solar activity cycles and people’s social passionarity (activity) [a concept from Lev Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis — T-invariant] takes on special importance in our research… At the same time, we view Russia not as a crossroads between East and West, North and South of the earthly oikoumene, but as a bridge between the Earth and the Cosmos, from which we came and to which we are bound to return.
The structure of this collective monograph (and it is indeed a unified, coherent work rather than a collection of separate authors’ articles) encompasses both a statement of the global challenges facing humanity today on the eve of a new “apocalypse” and the grounding of a new metasystemic scientific and methodological approach to studying humanity’s natural habitat, as well as a figurative, goal-oriented vision of the new world that is being born before our eyes and will tomorrow become our common cosmoplanetary Home — Ecos (from the Greek oikos — house, dwelling place). Here we proceed from the premise that “Russian cosmism” is not our invention, nor even a philosophical term introduced by proponents of Eurasianism at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, but our ancient Aryan world-knowledge, which has come down to us from the depths of the ages. The myths of many peoples of the world (not only the Slavs and the Aryans) have preserved the legend that people descended to Earth from various constellations of the firmament and brought into our world the common cosmic laws of existence that governed and still govern humanity.
We believe that the cause of the current crisis of human civilization may lie not on Earth but in the Cosmos. For man himself is a product of cosmic evolution, not earthly evolution. It is precisely by looking at our existence from cosmic heights that we can understand the true goals and essence of humanity’s development.
Honored Power Engineer, Energologist, Energy Cosmist
T-invariant analyzed Klepach’s profile on eLibrary and found that a lot has changed in the economist’s academic trajectory since 2020: first, Klepach developed an interest in “cosmoplanetary civilization” and the “energy-information cosmism of Russia”; second, he acquired a regular co-author — the aforementioned Vitaly Bushuev.
Bushuev is 86. He has more than 60 years of serious work in science and the energy sector behind him. He spent almost 40 years at the Siberian Research Institute of Power Engineering (SibNIIE) of the USSR Ministry of Energy and Electrification, was a People’s Deputy of the USSR serving in the Supreme Soviet, and in the 1990s built a career at the Russian Ministry of Fuel and Energy. Later, together with his former boss at the ministry, Yuri Shafranik, he founded a private company called the Institute for Energy Strategy. In addition, Bushuev worked for more than 10 years as a chief research fellow at the Joint Institute for High Temperatures (JIHT RAS).
Along the way, Bushuev also found his calling as a poet and writer. Back in 1998, the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) published his book Energy Cosmism of Russia, which, in his words, “develops the finest traditions of the luminaries of Russian cosmism.” Over the nearly 30 years since, Bushuev came to the conclusion that his field of knowledge should be called “energology,” and he kept churning out texts on Russia’s energy cosmism, gradually shifting toward “cosmoplanetary development.”
In recent years, Bushuev has also taken up writing for children. His website, for example, features “WORLD-LORE (VEDAS FOR OLDER YOUTHS AND TEENAGERS),” later included in the short story collection The Olympiad of the All-Knowing. It was probably somewhere around this stage that the creative energies of Vitaly Bushuev and Andrei Klepach crossed paths. And Vedic themes, as it later turned out, surfaced in their joint works as well.
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2020. A New Noospheric World-System or a Break with Our Natural Cosmic Roots?
Klepach and Bushuev’s first joint paper was titled “Analysis and Forecast of the Cyclicity of Socio-Natural Phenomena in the First Half of the 21st Century.” According to the abstract, the authors, “drawing on statistics of anomalous socio-natural, political, and economic phenomena collected from various sources, treat all crisis events as manifestations of a certain cyclicity, largely driven by periodic processes of solar activity.” “In this article, the authors not only analyze the rhythm of these events in the past but also, using a specially developed neural model, forecast their cyclical manifestation for the coming period — up to 2030–2050,” the paper states.
The co-authors were Bushuev’s then-colleagues at JIHT RAS: Dmitry Solovyev and Vadim Sokotushchenko. The first pandemic year offered plenty of reasons to worry about the future, but the team of three power engineers turned “energologists” and one economist turned “energologist” also found grounds for optimism. Using cross-wavelet analysis and neural-network modeling (JIHT RAS has a supercomputer called Fisher for such tasks), the authors arrived at the following forecast: “The results of the comparative forecast of solar activity, temperature anomalies, and the US and Russian economies suggest that from 2020 to 2050 a calmer situation is expected both in economic dynamics and in the dynamics of climate change.”
The “Conclusions” section reveals that, at the time of writing, the planet was “at the end of the stagnant 24th cycle, which in 2020 is giving way to the new 25th solar activity cycle, with an expected predominance of a new political cycle in the development of world civilization.” And while the authors generally stuck to the scientific terminology customary for analyzing correlations between numerical series and for mathematical modeling, cosmological imagery creeps into the conclusions:
New global challenges are associated not only with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity, geopolitical confrontation, the “bubbles” of the virtual economy, and the transformation of the structure of global energy, but also with the growth of the Earth’s natural energy activity [sic], as well as the influence of the Cosmos, for which the Earth is a sentient grain of sand on the waves of the cosmic ocean. The overlapping and intensification of all these factors point to an impending change in the World-System in the medium term. To what extent is the human mind, embodied in machines, social ties, books, and now digital information systems, capable of adapting to these natural and cosmic changes? Will we create a new, renewed noospheric and cosmic World-System, or will modern civilization follow the path of a widening break with its natural cosmic roots? Finding the answers to these questions is the most important task facing humanity today and the key to its future.
2022. How the Star Ancestors of Russian Hyperborea “Fertilized” the Earth’s Film
The year 2022 disproved the forecast Klepach and his team had made in their 2020 paper about a relatively calm global situation in the new phase of solar activity. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the confrontation between Russia and Europe, and the coalition of Western countries escalated, and new wars and conflicts broke out in various parts of the world.
In May 2022, Bushuev and Klepach released a text titled “Energy-Information Cosmism of Russia.” Russian civilization, the authors wrote, “occupies not only a special place in the history of Eurasia and the whole world, but also bears clearly pronounced features of a cosmoplanetary world. The hypothesis of the Aryan origin of many peoples of the northern continent (for all the debatable and controversial nature of various racial theories) confirms our special relationship with the cosmos as the ‘ancestral home’ of all russkie (by language) and all rossiyane (by spirit)” [ethnic Russians and citizens of Russia, respectively — T-invariant]. Bushuev and Klepach go on to quote Alexander Tulupov’s book The Clan of the North: Russian Hyperboreans, written in the genre of “Russian fantasy”: “Man traces his roots to his ancestors, but the roots of all that exists lie in the heavens”:
Nature (priroda), kinship unity (rodovoe edinstvo), homeland (rodina) — these are words sharing a common root, reflecting our deep essence, which goes back to the times of Arctida and Hyperborea… this is our earthly oikoumene, our habitat, our Eurasian home, “designed and built” according to cosmoplanetary laws and proportions. And Russia is what has come down to us as an inheritance both from the ancient cosmic settlers and from the pre-pagan tribes.
Another passage from the article is worth quoting — on how, in the authors’ view, this Eurasian Hyperborea came into being:
The earthly oikoumene… was settled by “migrants” from various star systems: the yellow race in Lemuria came from the constellation Leo, the black race in Africa from Sirius, and the white race in the polar expanses of Arctida from the Great Bear. It is no accident that this constellation (hyper — great; bor — bear) became our cosmic symbol, and the entire territory of the settled northern lands came to be called Hyperborea. These “migrants” did not fly to us on physical spaceships; they “fertilized” the Earth’s film holographically (in the form of plasma-like “angels”), giving rise here to a generation of intelligent Aryans. Representatives of the various races have preserved their original cosmic genes, inherited from their stellar progenitors.
Notably, this article was published in the journal Economic Strategies, issued by the autonomous nonprofit Institute for Economic Strategies, which is on the Higher Attestation Commission’s first-category list of peer-reviewed journals [the official Russian register of journals approved for publishing dissertation research — T-invariant]. By the time the article came out, Andrei Klepach had already been chief economist and deputy chairman of VEB.RF for eight years. He was also the academic director and chairman of the board of the VEB.RF Institute.
2025. Galactic Walls and Geotories in Space, Siberia, and the Far East
In recent years, Andrei Klepach has published several articles on the development of territories in Russia and, more broadly, in Eurasia. Among them was an entirely mainstream paper on spatial economics, “Space as a Factor of Economic Development,” which appeared in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2025. That same year, several publications came out on so-called “geotories” [a coinage from “geo” and “territory” — T-invariant] (see 1, 2). Klepach borrowed the term from his co-author Bushuev. To mark his 85th birthday, Bushuev released the six-volume series Energy of Russia (2025). In the sixth volume (Energy Cosmism of Russia), he published a chapter titled “Geotories as Earthly Analogues of Cosmic Structures,” in which he laid out a theory of how cosmic processes influence terrestrial phenomena, drawing on the works of the biophysicist and Russian cosmist Alexander Chizhevsky and the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (read it starting on page 393).
The cosmos and its objects, such as galaxies, stars, and planets, are characterized by vortex-like motions and structures. Galactic walls are cosmic structures resembling the interweaving of neurons in the human cerebral cortex. Vortices play an important role in the distribution of energy and matter in space, ensuring dynamic equilibrium and sustainable development. Spiral galaxies rotate in a vortex-like manner — for example, the galaxy M74 in the constellation Pisces, located approximately 30 million light-years (9.2 million parsecs) from Earth. Geotories can be viewed as “vortices” on the Earth’s surface, where natural resources and energy potentials are concentrated and redistributed. Like cosmic vortices, geotories ensure the cyclical use of energy and resources, supporting the economic and social development of the surrounding regions. Geotories play an important role in the infrastructural representation of Eurasia, since they are territories with special conditions for human life and activity. They are often remote and sparsely populated regions where access to energy, transport, and information links is limited.
From the Nooscope to the Noosphere Economy
At least two more people at the VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise took part in developing the theory of a “cosmoplanetary civilization.” What’s more, each of them has his own, probably competing, “theory of everything.” Both hold the title of advisor at the Institute.
Oleg Dobrocheev, for one, has spent many years developing a “wave hypothesis of life,” and on top of that he offers his own concept of Russia’s development and a forecast of its future. The theory currently goes by the name “Fifth Russia,” and back in 2006 Dobrocheev published a book of the same title. On his website, Dobrocheev presents himself as a leading research fellow at the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute, lists numerous other titles, and makes a point of noting that he is the author of “seven books, a Calendar of Changes, and more than 200 articles on turbulence, history, and economics.” Most recently, he described his “wave” theory in an article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in August 2026.
The other advisor, Valeriy Muntiyan, can’t match Dobrocheev in the scope of his theories but outdoes him in the scope of his career. Muntiyan is from Odesa and is even a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In Ukraine, he previously served as deputy minister of defense (December 2003–October 2004) and deputy minister of economy (2007–2009; his interview after stepping down can be read here). His main academic affiliation today is the Faculty of World Politics at Moscow State University, where he holds a professorship. In recent years, Muntiyan has been developing a theory of the noosphere economy; for example, two of his articles were included in a book published by Moscow State University in 2022.
The roles Dobrocheev and Muntiyan play at VEB.RF are unclear, whereas Andrei Klepach’s role in shaping Russia’s economic policy was far more visible for many years. In that sense, his drift toward alternative theories is genuinely a matter of public concern. That said, Putin’s entourage has traditionally included plenty of people who subscribe to pseudoscientific theories, among them Kremlin Chief of Staff Anton Vaino with his nooscope and Mikhail Kovalchuk, who has accused the West of creating “service people.”
Klepach (whose h-index in the RSCI core [the core collection of the Russian Science Citation Index — T-invariant] is 10) publishes articles and monographs featuring cosmist and “energological” theories alongside solid expert work in academic journals. And for at least six years, neither his colleagues in the academic community nor the leadership of Russia’s largest state corporation paid any attention to the economist’s drift into cosmism.
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“Andrei Klepach belongs to the group of economists who, from the early 1990s, were critical of the liberal market reforms of that era. Unlike Soviet academicians (such as Leonid Abalkin and a few others), he didn’t try to argue with Yegor Gaidar and the other reformers in the media. He worked with numbers and tried to use data to talk to the people who were actually implementing economic policy,” says Andrei Yakovlev, a visiting researcher at the Free University of Berlin who served for many years as vice rector of HSE University, describing the economist. “In 1998, Klepach briefly became director of the Central Bank’s research department, and then, together with former Central Bank deputy chairman Sergei Aleksashenko, he founded the ‘Development Center’ economic research foundation. For a long time, it was an expert center independent of the state, including financially. It produced a huge amount of analysis that was in demand not only by the government but also by actual businesses. Aleksashenko was always a liberal, while Klepach leaned more toward dirigiste views, with a strong emphasis on structural and industrial policy, but he always considered the role of the private sector very important. And when Herman Gref invited him to the Ministry of Economic Development in 2004, arguing, ‘Well, you keep criticizing us — so come and try to implement your ideas here,’ Klepach joined the civil service precisely for that purpose — to do something for the country. As far as I know, he still commands great respect in industry, including the defense sector, because he really did try to do a lot of useful things. At the same time, he always argued with his bosses and said what he thought. Many people may not have liked that, but he was respected. He left government service in 2014 — the formal order was signed in June 2014, but, as was reported at the time, the decision had been made in March. I think it was connected with Crimea, since Klepach, who dealt extensively with the defense industry, was never a supporter of war. Nevertheless, VEB gave him a prestigious position as deputy chairman and board member. But he was always an awkward person to deal with: when something had to be decided, it was hard to ‘cut a deal’ with him, and so he was later shunted off to do research at the separately created VEB Institute. Klepach understood and spoke about the dead ends of the existing model a very long time ago — before the war and before COVID. And he raised them many times at internal government meetings, at the Nikitsky Club, and at similar expert forums — though never linking them personally to Putin. Still, he believed it was necessary to stay within the system in order to do something for the country — as was once the case with the ‘bourgeois specialists’ or ‘military specialists’ [prerevolutionary experts and former tsarist officers recruited by the Bolsheviks — T-invariant] in the 1920s, who worked for the Soviet government not for the sake of positions but for the sake of the country. It seems to me that his shift in worldview and his fascination with strange theories in recent years may be explained by the fact that understanding the dead ends of Putin’s system, together with the impossibility of doing or influencing anything, is exactly what led him to cosmism. It’s a purely psychological defense mechanism against being unable to change the reality around him.”
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A T-invariant source who knows Klepach well and worked in the Russian government at the same time as he did, though in a different ministry, explains the transformation this way: “He’s basically a nerd, and has been since childhood. But in recent years, a lot of nerds have been stewing in their own juices — they’re not allowed into international [scientific] conferences. Nerds crave depth. But globally — they’re banned. So the nerds drift toward the fringe. The fringe, Dugin, and all that stuff — it becomes the only outlet for thinking people.”
“At the Ministry of Economic Development, Andrei Klepach was treated with respect. He had a reputation as someone willing to make sensible compromises but not willing to play the ‘yes, sir, whatever you say’ game,” recalls the head of one expert group who worked with Russia’s economic ministries for many years.
“How could such a drift have happened? Technocratic types, IT people, often lack a humanities culture. And the reverse is true too, by the way — humanities people may lack a mathematical culture. And technocrats like that sometimes don’t understand the simplest things in life. Every other one of them has these blind spots. Scratch a technocrat and you’ll find all sorts of surprises,” the T-invariant source reflects. “It’s just that Klepach is a public figure who has been speaking out for decades. Unfortunately, he was unlucky: he publicly waded into a subject he knows nothing about, and the result is fantastical nonsense. That makes you feel sorry both for him and for all of us, because our society hasn’t built barriers to keep such things from being published as ‘scientific findings’ at all, so that they stay in the inner worlds of people who lack competence in these areas and are uncritical about the limits of their own incompetence. It’s astonishing that people with intellect and professional expertise in their own field generate ideas and constructs based on primitive conspiracy theories and magical thinking. Outsiders who aren’t part of their circle can’t even imagine what delusional ideas often get voiced there. And if you express any doubt, they’re more likely to feel sorry for you: you don’t understand simple things — for example, that the cosmos rules us.”
In the source’s view, the Klepach phenomenon isn’t about his fascination with mythological cosmist ideas per se: “it could just as well have been conspiracy theories instead of harmless cosmos.”
“The phenomenon is that technocrats haven’t received a solid education and grounding in the humanities — and there’s no expert barrier to the spread of such texts and ‘ideas.’ Look at Western, especially American, higher education.
“At good universities, the liberal arts principle usually applies to undergraduate programs: students get their specialization but are also required to earn ‘credits’ outside their major. STEM students take humanities and social science courses, while humanities students take natural sciences and math. Klepach did study mathematics, of course, but a bit of critical thinking probably wouldn’t have hurt,” the T-invariant source believes.
What Do the Monograph’s Authors Themselves Say?
At the time of publication, T-invariant had not received comments from either Klepach or Bushuev, but did receive a brief comment from their regular co-author Dmitry Solovyev:
These publications were prepared at V. V. Bushuev’s request. My role was limited to designing the illustrations and technical editing of the text. The principal author of the concept and text of all these publications was V. V. Bushuev. As far as I know, these are popular science publications. Obviously, they are not used in the work of government bodies. I don’t know what A. N. Klepach’s role was; I don’t know him personally, but I think he is not the author of these works either. V. V. Bushuev included him among the co-authors for reasons of his own.
T-invariant has sent inquiries to the personal email addresses of Andrei Klepach and Vitaly Bushuev, as well as to the VEB.RF Institute and the press office of the state corporation VEB.RF, and is awaiting a response.
Update, October 9, 2026. The title and abstract of the monograph On the Way to Space-Planetary Civilization have been replaced with the authors’ own English translations.
The post Simply Out of This World: How Andrei Klepach Made His Way Through the Thorns of Structural and Monetary Factors to the Stars appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
On July 23, the U.S. Department of Defense published a new list of organizations that, according to its assessment, pose a threat to U.S. national security or are engaged in problematic activity. The list includes Moscow State University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the Higher School of Economics, Ural Federal University, and numerous other universities and research institutes. The Pentagon believes that these organizations may aim to steal American intellectual property, research data, technologies, and scientific innovations. The Department therefore urges American universities, research institutes, and individual scholars receiving Department of Defense funding not to collaborate with them in any way, exchange data, or provide financial support. Notably, this list is not identical to existing U.S. sanctions lists (read more: “Scientific Front: Who in Russian Science Ended Up Under Western Sanctions — and Why”) and it appeared at a time when, according to Reuters, the U.S. administration has significantly reduced efforts to enforce sanctions against Russia. T-invariant explores what this new policy means for American and Russian academia, how it differs from sanctions law, and who is likely to be affected.
T-INVARIANT BRIEFING
The restrictions certainly apply to:
- Researchers affiliated with the listed organizations and working in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, and defense-related fields.
- American universities and colleges receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.
They are highly likely to affect:
- All employees of listed institutions, regardless of their academic discipline.
- Students of the listed universities when applying to conferences or submitting articles to journals affiliated with American universities or companies.
- Universities, colleges, research institutes, think tanks, and other organizations worldwide that receive funding from the U.S. government.
The restrictions might affect:
- Students and graduates of these institutions when applying to American universities.
- Universities in third countries participating in projects funded by the U.S. government.
- Researchers at other universities and institutes in Russia, Iran, and China.
The list was issued as an implementation of Section 1286 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019. The NDAA is a law that is issued every year and that determines the structure and budget of the U.S. military, including troop numbers, defense spending, modernization programs, and other issues. However, alongside military provisions, Congress also includes neighboring measures, such as foreign policy objectives, and funding allocation. The 2019 NDAA received broad bipartisan support and was signed by President Donald Trump. Compared with previous versions, it increased the military budget, while shifting America’s strategic focus in foreign policy away from counterterrorism toward long-term competition with China and Russia, with considerably greater emphasis on China. This legislation was especially discussed in the media due to the restrictions of Section 889 targeting Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE.
As part of the same great power competition strategy, Congress included provisions designed to protect American academic research from foreign influence and intellectual property theft. Section 1286, which received the updated list of “problematic organizations,” is titled Initiative to support protection of national security academic researchers from undue influence and other security threats and it specifically addresses universities conducting defense and technology research. Although Congress passes a new NDAA every year, the Pentagon continues updating the same list of the Section 1286 of NDAA 2019 because the 2019 law explicitly requires the Department of Defense to revise it on a regular basis. The July 23 publication is therefore not a new law, but the latest update of an existing mechanism. Being published every year, these updates all have special emphasis, relevant for the moment. For instance, the 2025 version is primarily aimed at preventing foreign influence over research sponsored by the Department of Defense.
Such activities as funding sanctioned organizations, or exchanging data, were already prohibited by sanctions laws. Also, scholars employed by those organizations could not participate in conferences, or get published in the leading journals if they maintained formal affiliations. There are three fundamental points of difference between the new Pentagon list and sanctions: who is affected, who enforces the law, and what the consequences of violations are.
Who is affected?
Previous sanctions and earlier lists (such as the 2023 Section 1286 list) targeted a relatively small number of universities involved mainly in military technology development or, in Russia’s case, in promoting state propaganda. Moreover, the restrictions were generally limited to individual representatives or to specific institutes. Before the new list appeared, the largest Russian research center to be included in such restrictions in its entirety was Skolkovo, which was added in 2023 – and in that case, it was hardly surprising.
This time, however, the Pentagon included 13 Russian universities as whole bodies, and those were not only institutions specializing in engineering, physics, and biology, but also several major multidisciplinary universities, including Moscow State University (MSU), the Higher School of Economics (HSE), and Ural Federal University (UrFU). Several of China’s leading multidisciplinary universities, including Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, were also added. HSE employees, speaking on condition of anonymity, told T-invariant that until now they had been able to collaborate with Western universities as private researchers without listing their affiliation, they participated in conferences online and sometimes even in person, conducted joint research, and published articles.
However, the wording of the new document makes it possible to extend the restrictions to employees of the listed organizations themselves. This means that concealing one’s institutional affiliation and presenting oneself as an independent researcher may no longer be sufficient to circumvent the restrictions: any collaboration between American researchers and scholars who are simply employed by universities on the list falls under Pentagon restrictions. Moreover, even though most organizations on the list conduct research in physics, technology, and such, the policy could affect physicians, historians, and even scholars of the Swahili language.
Who enforces the restrictions?
Another noteworthy aspect is that these measures operate through the National Defense Authorization Act, meaning they are administered by the Department of Defense, unlike the traditional sanctions system. Sanctions are often described as decisions made by the U.S. government as a whole, but departments matter. In reality, Sanctions legislation is passed through Congress or came in force by a presidential decree, and enforcement is typically carried out by either the Treasury Department or the Department of Commerce. But this list is neither a sanction imposed for specific actions, nor a punishment for participating in war or violating the law. Instead, it is presented as a preventive measure designed to protect American research and technology from national security threats. Meanwhile, the official sanctions lists themselves do not receive any updates, and President Trump has repeatedly signaled a willingness to improve relations with leaders of countries that remain under U.S. sanctions.
The Department of Defense is publishing this update because it is legally required to. At the same time, it does not provide any specific evidence demonstrating that every organization included is “engaging in activities that threaten U.S. national security interests.” The use of national security and foreign influence concerns as justifications for government intervention in science, media, and business is all too familiar from the Russian experience and feels rather unsettling. That is why it is important to understand what this policy means not only for Russian science, but also for American academia.
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After taking office, President Trump began exerting significant pressure on American universities. His primary targets were campus protests and the promotion of woke ideas concerning equality and the rights of gender, racial, and sexual minorities. The principal tool was the threat of cutting off federal funding. Yet even during Trump’s first presidency, the administration had already started intervening in universities through the concerns of espionage, and in 2018, the Department of Justice launched the China Initiative. According to the MIT Technology Review, the effectiveness of the initiative is highly questionable, partly because the Department of Justice never clearly explained its concrete objectives beyond broad references to protecting American technology and combating espionage. It also failed to clarify the criteria used to initiate investigations. Information about many cases never appeared on official government websites, some records were removed following media inquiries and requests for comment, and only about one quarter of the cases received actual convictions. Moreover, many prosecutions had no obvious connection to national security. This precedent is especially significant in light of the new Section 1286 list, as a precedent. As follows from the name of the programme, approximately 90% of those prosecuted under China Initiative were scholars of Chinese origin, and members of Asian diasporas were subjected to disproportionate scrutiny by law enforcement. MIT Technology Review argues that one of the initiative’s most damaging consequences was the brain drain of highly qualified researchers from the United States. Scientists and scholars were leaving because of the discrimination and pressure from the law enforcement, and it became harmful for the American science itself.
During President Biden’s administration, the espionage agenda receded somewhat into the background, but it reemerged, as Trump took office again. On March 26, 2026, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce heard reports on the activities of foreign intelligence services on university campuses. Once again, the discussion focused primarily on alleged espionage involving Chinese students, the recruitment of American students on campus, and cases in which researchers were drawn into projects without being informed on the true purpose of the research. It is worth noting that in his opening remarks, the committee chair emphasized that international collaborations should benefit America rather than its rivals. This idea contradicts the traditional understanding of academia as a transnational space for free exchange of knowledge. International conferences, academic and cultural exchanges, collaborative research, and multinational projects have advanced and benefited science worldwide for decades. As with the China Initiative, extending the logic of national security into universities and scientific research challenges this principle and contributes to the isolation of American science.
At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that espionage, foreign interference in academia and business, and theft of American intellectual property do exist. Roughly one quarter of China Initiative prosecutions ended in convictions, and over the past year, several cases have emerged involving Chinese intelligence agents infiltrating American academic institutions. But these cases differ in one respect, crucial for the NDAA 2019 list: the spies concealed their connections to Chinese universities, military structures, or intelligence agencies. They would typically enter the United States as students, visiting researchers, fellows, or even professors while hiding their institutional ties. They transferred research data and intelligence to the Chinese government, smuggled research materials into or out of the country – it seems that Ksenia Petrova was detained because of this atmosphere of heightened suspicion within academia.
There were also cases of recruiting American students and professors, but it generally happened through malign foreign talent recruitment programs, in which American researchers participated without being informed who would ultimately receive the results of their work or for what purpose. The 2024 version of the Pentagon list was specifically aimed at preventing this practice.
An even more common instrument of espionage has been cyberattacks, like the case reported recently by The Insider. In this case, Microsoft uncovered a scheme that allowed hackers to gain access to data from every device connected to compromised hotel Wi-Fi networks during academic conferences.
Journalist Roman Dobrokhotov described the method for the TVRain channel: “When you try to log in, your credentials get stolen. In the worst case scenario, you’re prompted to download software or click ‘OK’ or ‘YES,’ and a real spyware virus gets onto your laptop. It steals all your passwords and captures everything you type on the keyboard. If a conference has a thousand participants, it is enough just for two or three people to download the malware for the operation to succeed.” According to The Insider, “the group primarily targets governments, diplomatic missions, NGOs, and IT companies in the United States and Europe in order to collect intelligence supporting Russian foreign policy.”
All of these espionage cases share an important point: every time, the perpetrators concealed the affiliations with the organizations they were truly working for, they frequently used false documents, or even operated remotely. This raises a doubt as to the effectiveness of a ban on cooperation with specific universities. Such a policy is unlikely to counter the methods actually used to steal research data.
How grave are the consequences?
The third major difference between this list and sanctions packages lies in the mechanism of the restrictions: the Department of Defense does not put a ban on the activities of the listed organizations, but it is restricting its own ability to fund them. The universities included in the list, their employees, or American scholars – none of them will face prosecution by law enforcement. However, the Pentagon restricts its ability to provide funding to universities, institutes, or individual researchers who continue collaborating with listed organizations or their employees, or who use their equipment.
At first glance, it might seem that losing such a niche source of funding would hardly affect fields unrelated to the military. For instance, professor of Russian literature Oleg Lekmanov, who taught at Princeton University, expressed precisely this view: “As I see it, this is not relevant to the humanities, because no one from the military sector offers us funding in the first place.” However, the Pentagon has numerous programs and foundations that finance research, and not only in fields related to defense, but also in biology, psychology, medicine, linguistics, the social sciences, and area studies. For instance, Natalia Korbo, a former targeting analyst for the U.S. State Department Economic Bureau, confirmed to T-invariant that the Department of Defense supports an exceptionally broad range of projects, particularly in STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Moreover, funding extends well beyond STEM disciplines. For example, the Minerva Initiative distributes long- and short-term grants for research intended to help the Department of Defense better understand future challenges and prepare for them. Thus, the participating projects cover a range of disciplines. According to Science, Minerva allocated $24.8 million in 2024 alone to projects involving artificial intelligence, climate change, and migration. Yet, the Science reports that the initiative had already begun drastically reducing its funding, even for projects that appeared directly relevant to defense interests. Among those unexpectedly terminated were studies examining the factors that motivate military personnel to remain in service and the conditions that prevent the collapse of international alliances. And now, it might become even more difficult to obtain Pentagon funding, since applicants will have to demonstrate that no member of a project is affiliated with any organization on the list of “the undesirables.”
Apart from research, the Department of Defense provides funding for educational purposes. It awards scholarships to undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students studying languages and regions considered “critical to America’s security,” and it sponsors academic centers devoted to these fields.
Judging by the Trump administration’s foreign-policy priorities, particular attention is currently being drawn to South America and the Indo-Pacific region. At the same time, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Russia remain areas of strategic interest as well. Consequently, the publication of the NDAA 2019 list will affect not only researchers in biochemistry, physics, engineering, and technology, but potentially also scholars studying Latin American music or Chinese dance if their academic center receives Pentagon funding.
Moreover, it is unclear whether the funding will be lost only by a project or an institute who maintains ties with a banned organization, or the research of the whole university will be considered compromised in case one body continues collaborations. It is entirely possible that if even one department within a university depends on Department of Defense funding, restrictions on collaboration with listed organizations could apply to the university as a whole.
Furthermore, the preamble to the document contains another provision that may substantially broaden its practical impact. Formally, the list applies only to Department of Defense grants, scholarships, contracts, and other financial support. However, it also warns that cooperation with listed organizations may negatively impact scholars’ eligibility for federal funding. And that is a much more serious prospect. The U.S. federal government finances roughly half of all research and maintenance expenditures at American universities and colleges. Federal money also supports countless scholarships, research grants, and academic conferences. In this light, universities will hardly risk losing access to federal funding, even if the document merely warns of possible consequences rather than imposing an explicit prohibition.
Denis Simon, Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, argues that the U.S. government has effectively stopped distinguishing between leading civilian universities and institutions engaged in security-related research. He also believes American organizations will most likely interpret the conditions of the NDAA 2019 list very broadly. Simon further suggests that universities may begin limiting interaction not only with the organizations explicitly named on the list, but also with other research institutes in Russia, China, and Iran.
A similar concern is expressed by Evgeny Roshchin, Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Policy of the SAIS School of Advanced International Studies: “On the one hand, the document concerns the research funded through Department of Defense grants. On the other hand, the disciplinary boundaries are not specified. That means it could apply to virtually any field of research, including economics, if it is financed through Pentagon grants. Researchers applying for federal grant competitions will also have to disclose all of their connections with people affiliated with organizations on the list. The existence of such connections may reduce their chances of receiving funding. I believe this will become the main deterrent. Of course, everything will depend on how the rules are applied, but the policy could seriously damage academic cooperation, because some researchers might choose to abandon perfectly legitimate collaborations simply to avoid the risk.”
According to research data, international collaboration is a significant driver of scientific progress. Natalia Korbo believes that while some restrictions are understandable, a blanket prohibition is deeply misguided:
“I understand the logic behind banning joint research in fields like bioengineering or physics, although spies are smart enough not to be affiliated with problematic institutions. But prohibiting all collaboration is simply foolish. It will harm both American science and scientific research worldwide. The restrictions will absolutely affect cultural studies as well. Even the closure of the Confucius Institutes had negative consequences for Americans themselves. Yes, those institutes promoted the Chinese government’s propaganda, but in most American cities they were also the only places where people could learn Chinese. These kinds of bans, like the TikTok ban, are often poorly thought out and produce enormous collateral damage.”
A similar view is shared by Anton Kapustin, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology: “First, I believe these are serious restrictions, and they extend well beyond defense-related research. Originally, they applied only to projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. But similar restrictions have since been introduced for grants from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies. In practice, they now affect almost all federal grants. Second, the list of proscribed entities grows every year. Now it includes MIPT, HSE, and Moscow State University. If a student has co-authored publications with researchers from these institutions, any American university will think twice before admitting that student to a PhD program, because it will most likely be unable to pay their stipend using federal grant money. There are still many uncertainties, of course, but I think universities will prefer to be overcautious. And obtaining visas will also become more difficult for such students. So the consequences could be very serious.”
Thus, for Russian researchers, the publication of the list may result in profound professional difficulties. But how capable are these restrictions of protecting American interests? And is the loss of cooperation with Russian, Iranian, and Chinese colleagues truly significant for U.S. science?
Entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov argued in an interview with journalist Mikhail Fishman on TV Rain, that Russian universities continue to produce exceptionally strong specialists: “Whatever we may say about Putin’s Russia, or Russia in general, its universities and education – especially in mathematics, computer science, physics, and chemistry – remain exceptionally strong, even compared with the United States. I still think Russian education firmly belongs among the world’s top five, and specialists from Russia are highly valued.”
Academic collaborations with China seem to be even more important for American science. Over the past decade, Chinese science has dramatically strengthened its global position. China ranks second in the world in the number of scientific publications. In 2024, for the first time, Chinese researchers published more papers in leading natural science journals than American scientists did, exceeding the US by 17%. Niccolò Pisani et al. emphasize that China’s success has been driven largely by international collaboration and sustained government investment. Consequently, the restriction of scientific cooperation with China can also have an objective of slowing China’s scientific progress. But such a strategy is likely to have limited effectiveness as long as other leading countries continue collaborating with Chinese researchers. Meanwhile, American science itself risks losing specialists and forfeiting one of its greatest competitive advantages: participation in the global scientific community.
As Denis Simon argues, “the policy is likely to accelerate the fragmentation of the US-China scientific relationship, including in fields that have traditionally relied on open exchanges and multinational research teams. It could also limit US researchers’ access to some of the world’s most productive scientific institutions.” Simon also questions whether the policy is genuinely capable of slowing China’s scientific development.
The publication of the 2025 Section 1286 list may therefore substantially limit cooperation between American researchers and colleagues from Russia, Iran, and China. Although at first glance, the restrictions appear to apply only to defense-related research, they are likely to affect a much broader range of academic disciplines. The precedent of prosecuting cases unrelated to security topics, set by the China Initiative, demonstrated that a program announced with narrow security objectives could, in practice, be applied much more broadly. Meanwhile, the threat of losing Pentagon funding and risk of losing eligibility for other forms of federal support are sufficiently serious that many universities are likely to abandon collaborations with listed institutions simply to avoid the risk. The inclusion of major civilian universities such as Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics potentially affects thousands of scholars who have no connection to military research. It will be harder if possible to participate in American conferences, conduct joint research, or publish in academic journals, even if they present themselves as independent researchers and do not list their institutional affiliation. Even the students from these universities, even though the restrictions do not formally prohibit them from applying to American colleges or universities, may face indirect consequences if institutions, fearing the loss of federal funding, begin extending these restrictions to graduates of listed universities as well. The policy may also affect universities outside the United States that are closely integrated into the American academic system, particularly those receiving U.S. funding. Such institutions may likewise begin limiting cooperation with researchers affiliated with organizations on the list.
Ultimately, the measures intended to protect American science may not only create serious obstacles for researchers from Russia, China, and Iran, but they may also undermine one of the fundamental strengths of American academia itself – international collaboration and the free exchange of knowledge.
The post New “Undesirables”: Why the Pentagon Is Restricting Cooperation with Moscow State University and Higher School of Economics appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology has a new rector, a new Kremlin-appointed overseer, and a new mission. In the fifth year of the war, little remains of the old Skoltech — once a calling card of the Medvedev-era thaw and a small but successful innovation university. T-invariant analyzed the data: of the 358 researchers working there in 2021, only 141 still hold a Skoltech affiliation today. The transformation of this unique institution has been far from smooth: the rector post nearly went to Artem Oganov (a scientist known for his provocative public statements), then almost ended up with a close associate of Putin’s daughter. In the end, the university was entrusted to Yulia Gorbunova — dean of the Faculty of Fundamental Physicochemical Engineering at Moscow State University and a full member (academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her task will be to put Skoltech on a new track — no longer as Russia’s premier globally oriented research center, but as a key pillar of “technological sovereignty.” That sovereignty, judging by the new development program, rests on three pillars: AI, robotics, and drone technologies. T-invariant takes a closer look at why Skoltech was folded into VEB.RF (Russia’s state development corporation — T-invariant), how its leadership was replaced, and what new objectives have been set for it.
In 2026, Skoltech turns fifteen. It was conceived as a new model of the university in Russia, and for all those years it was exactly that. But the state’s vision of what a “new model” should look like has shifted — and the war was decisive in that shift. It transformed the “small innovation university” and “Medvedev’s favorite toy” (as former staff jokingly called it) into an instrument for countering the technological and scientific isolation imposed by the West. The Russian government — perhaps for the first time in the entire post-Soviet era — now knows precisely what it needs science and universities for: survival. And Skoltech will be the testing ground for whether it is possible to produce cutting-edge research and train highly qualified specialists while engaging only with the East and operating under the direct management of the state through VEB.RF.
Sanctions and transformation: how Skoltech has changed over four years of full-scale war
In 2021, several months before the invasion of Ukraine, Skoltech celebrated its tenth anniversary and took stock of its achievements. By that point it had managed to claim 65th place in the Nature Index ranking of young universities — the best result among all Russian institutions. The university’s board of trustees reported record revenue of nearly 250 billion rubles. Skoltech had become home to more than three thousand companies and had generated over 4,500 patents in ten years (including 864 in 2021 alone, of which 262 were filed in foreign countries). Despite Russia’s isolationist and anti-Western course, Skoltech remained a university with internationally recognized standing. It also occupied an unusually strong financial position among Russian universities. While the standard professor’s salary at Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) was 150,000–200,000 rubles, at Skoltech it started at 500,000 rubles. And while graduate students at MSU and MIPT received stipends of 5,000–10,000 rubles, at Skoltech it ranged from 75,000–90,000 rubles.
The start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended cooperation definitively between Russian and Western institutions. On February 26, 2022, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a statement announcing the termination of its contract with Skoltech in response to “unacceptable military actions against Ukraine.” Shortly thereafter, Skoltech was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ukraine; Australia, Switzerland, and Japan followed a year later. Today, Skoltech — alongside MIPT — operates under one of the harshest sanction regimes of any Russian university.
The inevitable consequence of the sanctions was a brain drain — among both visiting professors and Russian researchers who were unwilling to remain affiliated with a sanctioned institution. T-invariant analyzed the career trajectories of Skoltech’s staff and examined how the institute’s standing on the international academic stage has evolved.
In 2020–2021, at least 358 researchers were working across Skoltech’s nine Centers for Science, Innovation, and Education. That figure includes junior researchers and postdocs as well as tenured professors. By 2026, only 141 of them still hold a Skoltech affiliation. 121 have moved to foreign institutions, while another 63 continue to work in Russia but at other organizations. Six individuals hold dual affiliations — one at Skoltech and one at a foreign university. Researcher Alexei Buchachenko died in 2023. The current affiliations of 26 people could not be identified.
Latest news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.
The most common destination for departing researchers was the United States (28), followed by Germany (17), the United Kingdom (15), France (13), Canada (11), and Israel (10). As sanctions have tightened in the fifth year of the war, it has become extremely difficult for a researcher with a Skoltech affiliation on their CV to find employment in Europe or the U.S. Even in Israel, physics and computer science departments now routinely exclude such Russian researchers from work deemed sensitive to the country’s technological defense capabilities.
Interestingly, when researchers are grouped by nationality — Russian and non-Russian — the disparity between those who left and those who stayed is stark. Of the 51 foreign Skoltech staff members in the early 2020s, 37 left Russia. Among the remaining 307 Russian researchers, only 84 departed. In relative terms, foreign nationals left Skoltech at nearly three times the rate of Russians. This disparity most likely reflects that Russian researchers face greater difficulty finding equivalent positions on the international academic market. The pattern is especially visible in the Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery: none of its 36 staff members are foreign nationals, and only seven have moved to foreign affiliations (three in Saudi Arabia and one each in the UK, U.S., Canada, and Switzerland). Russia’s heavy dependence on hydrocarbon-sector research has kept those researchers in place.
The university, which had an informal reputation as a “flagship of Russian science,” was strongly embedded in international academic networks. In the pre-war year of 2021, Skoltech maintained 54 international cooperation agreements. Its former partners included some of the world’s leading research universities — among them the Technical University of Munich, KU Leuven, and the National University of Singapore. Nearly all of those agreements were either terminated unilaterally by the foreign partners or allowed to lapse at expiration. Many of Skoltech’s former partner institutions have since become new homes for researchers who once held Skoltech affiliations.
Over the years of war, Skoltech has adapted to operating under sanctions and to forge new connections, though it has had to shift its geographic focus — and the new partnerships are fewer and less robust than the old ones. As of April 2026, Skoltech has signed 31 agreements, none of which involve Western countries; more than half (17) are with Chinese universities. None of those Chinese partners appear in the top 100 of either the QS World University Rankings or the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The list also includes India, Vietnam, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the UAE, Brazil, Israel, and Oman. The new Skoltech will likely stop losing Russian staff — for whom leaving has become far harder than in the early years of the war — and will instead recruit from Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
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Thus, the story of Skoltech as a university integrated into the global academic market and connected to international technology corporations has come to an end. And the final chapter of that story was a change of rector.
No exit, no return: facts and speculation
On November 10, 2025, Skoltech’s board of trustees approved a new development strategy through 2030. It was already known that the university would be implementing the strategy under new leadership: ten days earlier, incumbent rector Alexander Kuleshov had told colleagues he would be stepping down in December, though he planned to remain at the university in a different capacity. He showed no sign of concern at the announcement. Kuleshov had led Skoltech for ten years, having succeeded the institute’s first president — American Edward Crawley — in 2016. He had tried to resign several times even before the war. And after Skoltech was hit with sweeping sanctions from the U.S. and Europe, his desire to leave the helm of a struggling institution was entirely understandable. Several candidates were considered to replace him. Among them was Skoltech honorary professor Artem Oganov — one of the institute’s most visible public figures, known less for his research than for his political commentary.
At one point, the decision-makers nearly settled on Denis Kuzmin — director of the Phystech School of Biological and Medical Physics at MIPT and author of the Telegram channel “Kuzmin and School.” The young scientist’s academic and administrative credentials were so far out of line with those of his predecessors — and with the scale and significance of Skoltech itself — that rumors began to circulate: only a very well-placed hand could have put his résumé on the desk of those with signing authority. Whether that hand belonged to Maria Vorontsova (Putin’s daughter) — who interacts regularly with Kuzmin while sitting on various scientific councils — or to Andrei Fursenko, who manages the pipeline of young talent for science administration, remains unclear. It is equally hard to determine whether there is any connection between Vorontsova’s working visit to Skoltech — and her initiative to establish a vivarium there (which was to be followed by an expansion of research directions and increased funding) — and the reasoning that an undertaking of that kind would only be entrusted to someone enjoying unconditional trust.
In any case, a young scientist who had only recently struggled to defend his dissertation would have seemed out of place in the role. In April 2025, Kuzmin managed to defend his doctoral thesis at the All-Russian Research Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology — with difficulty, and not on the first attempt: a preliminary defense at the MSU Biology Department had failed, forcing him to seek out a different committee. In the end, though not without some dissenting votes, the doctoral degree was awarded. The Higher Attestation Commission (VAK — Russia’s national body that ratifies doctoral degrees — T-invariant) still needed to ratify it. Two months later, however, Kuzmin was called before the VAK in connection with the case of his co-author and doctoral student Sorokin, who had defended in the same committee in January 2025. A week before Kuzmin’s own defense — back in April — the deputy minister of science and education had signed an order annulling Sorokin’s degree. Kuzmin’s and Sorokin’s dissertations closely resembled each other; both were defended before the same committee, a few months apart. For Kuzmin, the VAK review concluded successfully: his doctoral degree was confirmed. After all that, the only way to explain Kuzmin’s presence on the shortlist for one of the most prominent rector posts in the country was influential patronage. That said, many who know Kuzmin personally speak positively about him — describing him as someone who “has a realistic sense of his own place in the academic landscape” (as one of T-invariant’s sources put it). So his appointment was expected as something nearly inevitable — but not, in most eyes, as something to dread.
Kuzmin was expected to begin his transition into the role in January, but after the new year Kuleshov was still running the university — his contract had been extended for another year. Then, suddenly, on February 13, 2026, it was announced that his authority had been terminated and that senior vice-president Alexander Safonov — Kuleshov’s longtime deputy — had been appointed acting rector.
For a moment it seemed as though Kuleshov might be employing the classic “successor gambit” — where a seasoned, well-connected leader steps back into the background and continues managing his former domain from behind the scenes, leaving a loyal protégé as the figurehead. He had done something like this before, when he left the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP) to move to Skoltech — and it ended in a major scandal (T-invariant covered it in detail here). But on February 20, the former rector sent colleagues a farewell letter (a copy of which is on file with the editors).
“Dear friends, I write with sadness to announce that my ten years of work at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology have come to an end. I am proud of what we accomplished during this time. In my very varied life, these may well have been the best ten years. I am grateful to everyone — the professors, students, researchers, and of course the wonderful administrative staff — for what we built together. A single number captures what Skoltech is today: in 2025, there were 31,450 applications for 248 places. We are not simply — or even primarily — a teaching university; we are a ‘technology factory,’ and modern technology is impossible without world-class science. And we managed to achieve exactly that: to combine fundamental science with cutting-edge technology. I won’t turn a personal letter into a technical report, but let me share just one figure: in December alone, more than 1,000 5G base stations were deployed based on our documentation.
I don’t yet know what comes next for me, but I am quite certain I still have enough energy and intellect to start my fifth life. The first four I lived beautifully.
I wish Skoltech as a whole — and its graduates and students — every success. Believe me: a good life awaits you.
Yours, AK
P.S.
My deepest thanks go to our founders, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev and Viktor Felixovich Vekselberg. Without them, none of this would have been possible.”
The letter was interpreted differently by different people at Skoltech. Some saw in it signs of frustration and resentment over unfair treatment. Others saw the opposite — relief: a sense that “I’ll be fine, now you figure it out without me.” But what stunned everyone was that a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who had successfully led first an academic institute and then an innovation university had apparently been given no position after his departure. And yet Kuleshov had never left institutions in decline in his wake. In 2015 he left IITP, which under his leadership had become one of the leading interdisciplinary academic institutes in the Russian Academy of Sciences — covering mathematics, biology, and information technology. By 2026, despite severe economic and scientific sanctions from the Western academic community, he had managed not merely to keep Skoltech operational but to develop it. And yet he received nothing — no honorary presidency to provide oversight and guidance, no advisory post with a lifetime pension supplement, not even his own “little domain” in the form of a technology center. That was unexpected.
All of this indicated that something had happened between the November academic council meeting — when Kuleshov announced his upcoming departure along the lines of “I’m leaving, but this isn’t goodbye” — and the February board of trustees meeting. The scenario that many had anticipated, including Kuleshov himself — an outside appointee takes the top job while the senior local academic stays on — had evidently been rejected at the highest level. Which meant the role of that senior heavyweight was now open. And it was offered to Yulia Gorbunova — a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and dean of the Faculty of Physicochemical Engineering at Moscow State University. She was to become Skoltech’s vice-president for research.
What followed over the next month and a half is described by Skoltech staff themselves as “chaos.” Dividing responsibilities between Gorbunova and Kuzmin in a way that didn’t shortchange either party — while still producing a workable management structure — proved almost impossible. It fairly quickly became clear that this was an unworkable arrangement, at which point Denis Kuzmin withdrew his own candidacy and withdrew from the running. He could only have done so if someone influential had promised to protect him from the Skoltech board of trustees. In the academic world today, very few people hold that kind of influence. Whether it was Kuzmin’s direct superior — MIPT rector Dmitry Livanov — or Maria Vorontsova herself, will likely become clear in the near future. If Kuzmin stays at MIPT, the behind-the-scenes actor was almost certainly Livanov. But if his career suddenly accelerates through other institutions, the speculation about Vorontsova’s role in Skoltech’s leadership transition may turn out to be more than speculation.
None of T-invariant’s sources, however, supports the claim in which Vorontsova personally orchestrated Kuleshov’s removal. The decision to push Kuleshov out of Skoltech entirely is attributed to Dmitry Medvedev, who was presented with a dossier on Kuleshov. Whether that dossier contained financial materials — potentially connected to the Audit Chamber’s recent visit to Skoltech — or was purely ideological in character (Kuleshov had been insufficiently enthusiastic in his support for the government’s policies, made critical public statements, and notably did not sign the letter from Russian rectors in support of the war) — no one knows for certain. One thing was clear: it would likely be difficult for Kuleshov to launch his “fifth life” using whatever “energy and intellect” he mentioned in his farewell letter — say, in France, where his family lives and of which he is a citizen. He has not been personally sanctioned by the U.S. or the EU (no asset freezes or travel bans), but the UK and Ukraine have imposed personal sanctions on him, and with that background he cannot work professionally with U.S. or EU organizations. He had evidently been planning on living his “fifth life” inside Russia — and that is what he ultimately received.
On April 3, 2026, Skoltech’s website announced that the institute had a new rector: Russian Academy of Sciences full member Yulia Gorbunova. The announcement also noted: “Yulia Gorbunova has succeeded Alexander Safonov, who served as acting rector following the end of the term of academician Alexander Kuleshov, who led Skoltech from 2016 and will now take up the position of chief engineer of the institute.”
At the last moment, a man who had already been forced to say his goodbyes was brought back. The key role in this, according to T-invariant’s sources, was played by Viktor Vekselberg. The position of “chief engineer” had not previously existed at Skoltech. Indeed, it is an unusual position title for any Russian university. Only a handful of institutions have introduced it in recent years — such as Irkutsk National Research Technical University or Siberian Federal University. But in those cases, the people who hold the title are twenty or thirty years younger than Kuleshov, who turns 80 on May 2, 2026. This suggests that his “fifth life” has little chance of resembling the one he was living back around 1983, when he served as chief engineer at the NPO Kibernetika research production association.
What, then, might Skoltech become?
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The chessboard, flipped
On March 27, VEB.RF chairman Igor Shuvalov announced: “We are currently relaunching Skoltech’s capabilities. You will soon hear about the appointment of a new rector — and that new rector has ties to Moscow State University.” Just a week later, it emerged that the new rector would be carrying out the relaunch under Shuvalov’s own supervision: he became the new chairman of the institute’s Board of Trustees. The previous chairman, Viktor Vekselberg, became his deputy. This was not a repetition of the situation five years earlier, when Shuvalov replaced Vekselberg as chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation’s board of directors. It signaled the beginning of a new chapter for Skoltech — one in which the institute’s role within the Skolkovo Foundation ecosystem is being significantly redefined and is becoming central. What does this mean in practice?
Until now, Skoltech was formally an autonomous university and a part in the Skolkovo Foundation ecosystem — their relationship officially described as a partnership. In practice, it was far from that. The Foundation controlled the university through key mechanisms of control. The primary decision-making body at Skoltech — the Board of Trustees — approves the development strategy, decides on the appointment of the rector, and controls the budget. Its composition changed periodically, but representatives from the Skolkovo Foundation always played a central role. The Foundation also provided significant funding to the institute. Now Skoltech will become a considerably more influential organization within the Skolkovo ecosystem — but far more directly accountable to the state. And Shuvalov’s appointment as chairman of the Board of Trustees clarifies the vague phrase “relaunching Skoltech.” What it effectively means is integrating the institute into the mobilization economy and maximizing output from it. The new board chairman himself put it in more measured terms, announcing that Skoltech faces “an overhaul of its educational model and closer integration into the efforts to achieve the country’s technological leadership.”
From Skoltech’s Development Strategy through 2030:
“Despite its relatively small size and reputation as a ‘boutique’ research institute, Skoltech already makes a quantitative and qualitative contribution to the achievement of national goals. <…> In the national projects aimed at ensuring technological leadership (including ‘Unmanned Aviation Systems’ and ‘New Atomic and Energy Technologies’), Skoltech is a key project executor and sits on expert groups developing roadmaps.”
The policy documents set out the following new priorities:
The state had never before explicitly dictated the research agenda of a specific university. That had never happened in Skoltech’s history either. From the institution’s earliest years, its Board of Trustees had included leading international figures — among them former CIA Director (1995–1996), chemist, MIT professor, and Citigroup board member John M. Deutch; former president of the German Research Foundation and head of the European Science Foundation, biochemist Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker; and MIT professor, expert in systems engineering and space systems design, Edward Crawley. After the first year of the war, the board shrank by half and was reduced to a list of six names: Alexander Kuleshov, Irina Okladnikova, Alexander Vedyakhin, Anastasia Rakova, Dmitry Peskov — chaired by Viktor Vekselberg.
It is obvious that such a composition did not significantly strengthen Skoltech’s international standing. In 2026, two foreign nationals were added to the board: former president of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and mathematician Tony F. Chan, and technology executive Simon Bradley, who spent 13 years in various senior roles at Airbus and served as global head of cybersecurity at Siemens. Yulia Gorbunova joined the board as rector.
Foreign and Russian colleagues alike describe Gorbunova as a true scientist — a person of deep academic integrity and strong ethical convictions. And yet, even five years ago, the appointment of her to this post would have seemed inconsistent with the spirit of Skoltech, which in choosing its leadership had always placed priority on international experience in universities, corporations, and engineering centers. Gorbunova has spent her entire career within the structures of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where the approaches and practices are quite different. But in the new political and economic reality, many colleagues see her appointment at Skoltech as the best thing that could have happened to the university at the time of its “relaunch” — at a moment when the state has decided to take a hands-on role in the substantive and operational aspects of scientific work. Her job will be to serve as a buffer in that process. And this role will impose new ethical demands on her, because science is no longer a refuge where one can wait out a dark era. The institutional experience of the Brezhnev years and the post-Soviet period is becoming increasingly less useful for working within a state that intends to operate under siege. Skoltech offers a vivid illustration of how, for the first time, the Russian government has seriously considered what it actually needs science for — and why it needs to be integrated into a new economic model under conditions of prolonged war and sanctions. If before 2022 Skoltech had no real engagement with the defense sector, it will now need to develop one. Staff who were directly involved in Skoltech’s procurement processes before 2022 told T-invariant that nothing resembling defense work was evident there. Agreements with Rostec and Uralvagonzavod, according to those sources, were largely framework arrangements that produced no tangible results. In that sense, Kuleshov was being completely candid with his 2022 comments on the sanctions imposed on Skoltech:
“We have nothing to hide — everything here is open. The only true statement in the State Department’s announcement is the first one: that Skoltech creates critically important technologies for the Russian economy. Everything about defense contracts and specific companies — Uralvagonzavod and the rest — is entirely unfounded.”
He repeatedly stated that Skoltech was an open civilian institution with many foreign professors on staff (which made classified defense research effectively impossible), and that the real aim of the sanctions was to accelerate the “depletion of Russia’s intellectual potential.”
This was partially corroborated by Skoltech professor Igor Krichever:
“Skoltech was sanctioned because it launched with significant publicity — not because any defense contracts were being run there. I chaired the committee responsible for hiring professors, and I can say confidently that never did I see anything defense-related at the institute. There were no defense contracts at Skoltech either.”
Now there will be. Otherwise it will be impossible to maintain Skoltech’s exceptional financial position among Russian universities. In the pre-war era, that position was driven by the need to stay competitive on the global academic market. Now different arguments are needed — and the only one that is persuasive is the ability to serve the Russian government’s core survival needs. That is why no one is likely to ask Skoltech’s new rector about the reasons for the sanctions. The answer to that question will be obvious.
The post From Boutique Research Institute to Science Strike Force: How Igor Shuvalov Is Relaunching Skoltech appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
YouTube, TikTok and Twitch are blocking ads en masse for the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which recruits young people to assemble combat UAVs. Yet Tatarstan’s efficient managers have relaunched the recruitment campaign – through the proxy project Stalin’s Falcons, the Dronecon cyber tournaments with million-ruble prizes, and the game Drone Battle: Ukraine. Details in a T-invariant investigation.
Alabuga SEZ CEO Timur Shagivaleev has registered a patent for an “assessment tool in game form: the multiplayer online strategy Drone Battle: Ukraine.” The strategy is available on its website in three languages: Russian, English and Chinese. According to the Whois service, the dronewars.su domain is registered to the Alabuga SEZ.
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Shagivaleev is listed as the author of three more patents for various game-based “assessment tools.” According to Elibrary, all of them have zero citations. Another patent in his name covers software for conducting and analyzing mass assessments – the Alabuga HR platform. Shagivaleev is under sanctions from most countries in the Western coalition and appears on Ukrainian sanctions lists under the category “engineers of aggression.” At the same time, Shagivaleev did not add himself to patents related to UAV technologies that were registered by other SEZ employees or outside engineers (in Russia, the practice of adding a manager to patents and other intellectual-property documents is common).
Shagivaleev’s deputy for new production, Sergey Alekseev, is listed first among the authors of a patent for a “civilian unmanned aerial vehicle.” Less is known about Alekseev than about his boss. Judging by the widely discussed 2023 investigation by Protokol, which exposed the involvement of teenagers in assembling Shaheds at Alabuga, Alekseev appears to be the main advocate of the company’s signature method of motivating students to deliver results: punishing them by shooting them with paintballs. Looking at the outline of this “civilian” UAV, one can easily recognize the shape of the Shahed loitering munition, also known as the Geran-2. Little information is available about the other patent authors; only Mikhail Zavyalov has an obvious connection to the UAV industry. In all of the patents mentioned above, the rights holder is the Alabuga SEZ.
The abstract to Shagivaleev’s patent (for some reason, Alabuga SEZ chief accountant Anastasia Zyryanova is also listed as a co-author) states that “the main purpose of the program is to familiarize users with the situation in the special military operation zone through a training tool in game format, and to develop tactical and strategic planning among participants in game sessions.” Drone Battle: Ukraine is described as “a training simulator in the form of a multifunctional interactive web application with multiplayer support.” The first recorded uses date to 2025.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Who is hacking Alabuga’s production and propaganda machine?
On June 27, 2026, it became known that the Alabuga SEZ website had been hacked. Hackers from Black Spark claimed responsibility and said they had obtained a database of employees and supply chains. For several days, the site displayed a Black Spark placeholder page (what it looked like can now be seen here). By July 1, the site had been restored. In spring and summer 2026, an active campaign was under way to block Alabuga advertising; on June 19, the AlabugaGate project announced that almost no integrations remained on YouTube – nearly all had been removed or blocked. Earlier, in May 2026, information appeared that “Alabuga is Ukraine’s No. 1 target for 2026”; according to the Ukrainian Telegram channel Strategic Aviation, “preparation for the operation to destroy it has been under way for several years and may become one of the largest in the war.”
The active phase of the advertising campaign for Drone Battle: Ukraine began in spring 2026 and is still ongoing. T-invariant obtained a commercial proposal that advertising agencies are sending to YouTubers with million-strong audiences. According to the brief, the target audience for the ads is “men aged 18 to 45, GEO: all of Russia (mainly up to 1,500 km from Tatarstan).”
Alabuga’s management uses this multiplayer game to recruit people as UAV operators, mainly through its proxy project Stalin’s Falcons. The project’s slogan: “Our grandfathers developed and produced the best weapons in the world and used them to beat the fascists. Now it’s our turn.”
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Timur Shagivaleev was born on January 28, 1978. He graduated from MGIMO. Since September 2011, he has served as CEO of the Alabuga SEZ. In 2023, he presented Russian officials and state banker Andrey Kostin with a 25-year, 491-trillion-ruble development project for Alabuga that envisaged colonizing four of Jupiter’s moons and incorporating them into the SEZ. According to the presentation, the colonization of Jupiter’s moon Callisto would include the development of biotechnology for human cloning, genome editing, and extending human life to 700 years. At the ceremonial signing of the plan at Alabuga, VTB head Kostin and Russian First Deputy Finance Minister Irina Okladnikova added their signatures (see T-invariant’s detailed analysis of the megaproject).
In February 2026, Radio Liberty published a major story on Stalin’s Falcons. Its journalists concluded that this Alabuga SEZ project was more likely serving PR and HR goals – attracting people “to the special military operation” and to drone assembly – than directly participating in hostilities. Stalin’s Falcons openly campaign among students. As T-invariant previously reported, on April 20, 2026, HSE University hosted a drone-piloting tournament organized by Stalin’s Falcons. To take part, students had to pass a preliminary selection specifically in the Drone Battle: Ukraine simulator. The university’s social-media groups published instructions (here and below, T-invariant preserves the authors’ spelling and punctuation):
“The procedure is simple:
– register on the platform: dronewars.su/ru
– complete 10 training chapters
– win a single-player game in Real Time mode, playing for the Russian Federation
After that, access to ranked games will open – this is your pass to the next stage.”
The competition took place in the atrium of HSE University’s main building on Pokrovsky Boulevard in Moscow. Interestingly, in the report “A Duel of the New Era” on HSE’s website, the press office removed the word “Ukraine” from the name of the simulator.
“Drone Battle is designed as a tactical simulator in which the player commands a UAV troops unit. The player has FPV infantry, vehicles and support stations at their disposal. The objective depends on the scenario: capture the enemy headquarters and hold it for one day of game time, or occupy a neutral base and hold it for five days. After the competition, representatives of Stalin’s Falcons spoke with students and explained how service in UAV troops works today,” the article said.
The Drone Battle: Ukraine simulator is also a key part of the large Dronecon cyber tournaments held in Tatarstan with support from the Alabuga SEZ and Stalin’s Falcons.
“The cyberbattle of the year: Russia’s largest tournament from Stalin’s Falcons!” is how major public pages, Z-bloggers and war correspondents advertise the event (see 1, 2, 3). So far, at least four large multi-day events have taken place: the tournament on April 11-13, 2025; the tournament on February 23-27, 2026; the tournament on April 11-13, 2026; and the tournament on May 8-14, 2026. Cyber athletes were invited to Tatarstan for these events, with all travel, accommodation, meals and entertainment covered, and the organizers did not stint on major rewards. The prize fund of the first tournament was announced at 18 million rubles, while the following tournaments offered 15 million rubles.
The February tournament made the loudest splash in the media, on social networks and on YouTube. It was won by the esports player “Grisha Putin,” who received a check for 3.5 million rubles. He is Russia’s most popular Z-streamer; his second nickname is “Cyberwarrior of the Special Military Operation.” His real name is Grigory Korolev, and he is a student at St. Petersburg State University (in a recent interview, he said he was on the verge of expulsion for poor academic performance and was considering signing a contract with the UAV troops). Grisha Putin regularly draws huge audiences to cyber tournaments, including with Western streamers, and actively promotes the Z agenda in the global gaming community. The streamer says he raises millions of rubles from sympathetic foreign gamers for combat drones for the Russian army. One of the most popular lots is personalized shells, rockets, mines and UAVs: Grisha Putin arranges for Russian soldiers to write foreigners’ wishes on munitions and send photo and video reports (for example, it was reported that an Arab man allegedly asked them to write about his beloved cat).
In press releases from Stalin’s Falcons, Grisha Putin describes his impressions as follows:
“Video games have long been more than youth entertainment. Many countries use them to promote their historical truth, thereby educating young people and giving them their point of view. Russia has begun releasing its own video games with support from the Internet Development Institute. I have already highlighted new domestic games such as the first game about the special military operation, Squad 22: ZOV by SPN Studio, Sparta 2035 by Lipsar Studio, and Gomel Bogatyrs by Playing Cats Studio. As for the Dronecon tournament by Stalin’s Falcons, it is an excellent example of drawing gamers who play popular global strategy games into the latest technologies of warfare. Gamers have skills in strategic thinking, game planning and instant reaction to partners’ actions. This is a unique and already very well prepared contingent for working with real-world projects.”
This is how Stalin’s Falcons describe the rules for participation:
1. You must submit an application on the website and choose a track.
2. Contact the tournament organizers for further interaction.
3. Complete the training in the Drone Battle simulation and play a single-player game for the Russian Federation – https://dronewars.su/ru. Send confirmation of completing the training to the organizers.
4. Collect a package of documents (passport, taxpayer identification number, SNILS) to create a participant card and verify the data. The tournament is held on a closed and guarded site to ensure the safety of participants and guests.
5. Confirm your participation in the tournament after your participant card has been approved.
6. Receive your tickets before the tournament and arrive.
You can expect paid transfer and accommodation; a fair prize fund; and the opportunity to receive an offer from Stalin’s Falcons.
The total advertising campaign has not gone unnoticed. Reviews by participants can be found on review sites. There is also feedback about the “closed and guarded site”:
“The tournament is not a scam, I was there myself. The only thing is that for those seven days you’re basically in prison: there’s almost no connection, you can’t leave the site, you’re supervised, and you sign nondisclosure documents about what you saw. On the plus side, they feed you for free and the food is tasty :), and they also give you their merch (the merch is really cool, in my opinion, but if your size is M, it’s better to try to get into the line first; those sizes are in short supply). There are different disciplines: instead of HoI, I had War Thunder; maybe the next tournament will have HoI. There are several disciplines: War Thunder (in my case), GeoGuessr, Drone Battle and FPV flights (first in a simulator, then on a real one). Points are counted in total. If you win first place in one discipline but are eliminated from all the others, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get prize money. By the way, Alabuga covers the tax on the prize.”
t is difficult to name the exact number of people the organizers managed to attract to their events. Radio Liberty journalists wrote in February 2026 that only a few photographs from Dronecon could be found online: some were taken on the grounds of Alabuga Polytech, and others inside the premises of the Zarnitsa production association in Kazan. At the time, Radio Liberty found only one independent piece of evidence that the tournament had actually taken place: the Higher School of Petroleum in Almetyevsk reported on its website that one of its students had participated in Dronecon. He confirmed to journalists that he had gone to the tournament, called it “cool,” but noted that far fewer than the announced thousand people had taken part in Dronecon. The note is still available today.
[[socialnetworks]]
Radio Liberty also described in detail that many links can be found between Stalin’s Falcons and Alabuga, but no real traces can be found of the Falcons operating as a combat unit, nor of people connected to the unit beyond recruiters and marketers. Stalin’s Falcons have never been mentioned as a combat unit in reports by the Russian Defense Ministry or in federal media. Russian “war correspondents” write about the Falcons only in advertising posts. In addition, Radio Liberty found numerous negative reviews from people who had tried to join Stalin’s Falcons through recruiters.
The Ukrainian outlet 24 Kanal also published a major investigation into the Falcons. Its journalists concluded that Stalin’s Falcons look like “an element of a sprawling network where technology, information operations and controlled PR are combined.”
“In modern war, Russia is building not only combat units, but entire media systems of influence that operate simultaneously in the military, digital and public spheres,” the journalists conclude.
Thus, Timur Shagivaleev has managed to prove to the Kremlin his important role in supplying the key resource of modern warfare – UAVs – as well as the people who will assemble and then operate them. And while the whole world already knows about Alabuga as a physical point on the map where instruments of death are produced, far less is known about the cyber-Alabuga that Shagivaleev and other “Putin’s Falcons” from the Alabuga SEZ are building in parallel. Given the current shortage of personnel for the combat-drone industry, the task of recruiting young people online looks like no less important a national project than keeping the death factory in Tatarstan running. As T-invariant wrote earlier, “esports players are admitted without competition.” That was the headline of an article published by Tatar-inform at the height of the student recruitment campaign.
The post Putin’s Falcons. Alabuga’s CEO patented a game called Drone Battle: Ukraine, while his deputy patented the war’s main drone appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
By the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s new presidential term in 2030, Russia’s fastest-growing neurotechnology company promises to begin developing solutions for maintaining mental health and cognitive function, as well as technologies for stimulating brain neuroplasticity and managing emotional states — specifically, “fear, happiness levels, and motivation.” Research and development are being handled by scientists at Moscow State University’s AI Research Institute, which is headed by Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. Neiry Group already enjoys substantial support from both state development institutions and private investors, notably from billionaire Vladimir Potanin and other major Russian investors operating through closed-end mutual funds. What is at stake is extending life expectancy and improving quality of life in old age — a topic that deeply concerns the Russian President, though he is certainly not alone in this interest. With such positioning, Neiry expects to secure significantly more funding, according to T-invariant’s sources in the Russian venture capital market.
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From Rats to Humans
The MSU AI Research Institute has become a strategic partner for Neiry Group, which plans to move “from mass microchipping of animals to the first experimental human neurochip implant surgeries.” The institute houses an invasive neural interface development laboratory where joint research with Neiry is conducted. The company and its founder, Alexander Panov, participated actively in the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). In the “Know Our Own” zone, as part of the “Minute of Techno-Glory,” Neiry’s booth operated alongside “The Welder Catherine,” Lapochka lemonade, Infomaximum, and other Russian brands. At the forum, the company announced a new funding round and even more ambitious plans than before (see previous T-invariant article on remote-controlled bio-drone pigeons and “conquering the world with neurotechnology”).
This new phase of active fundraising has shed light on the sources of funding used to consolidate Russian neurotechnology companies around Neiry. Meanwhile, an aggressive PR campaign has revealed what Neiry intends to do next.
“Just so you know, my co-founder of Neiry is Katerina Tikhonova, the idea for an AI-chipped rat came from Mikhail Kovalchuk, and our ambassador is Vladimir Putin!
*according to foreign agents, extremists, and Navalny’s idiots”From the Telegram channel of Neiry founder and CEO Alexander Panov
In its investor presentation on the Aurora platform, Neiry listed six organizations as investors: Interros holding company, the Voskhod Fund, the NTI Fund, JSС Mira AI Capital, SPEC Investment, and the Seed Investment Fund. However, in the presentation on its own website, Neiry has omitted Interros, owned by billionaire Vladimir Potanin. As a reminder, the holding company is under US and Canadian sanctions, while Potanin himself has been on the US sanctions list since 2018, and after 2022 was sanctioned by Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The Voskhod Fund was created by Interros and was sanctioned by the US in 2023.
Neiry raised a significant portion of its capital from state development institutions. Judging by the presentation, the NTI Fund was its first public investor. Among the third-round investors is the Seed Investment Fund (Russian abbreviation$nbsp;— FPI), displaying the old logo of the Russian Venture Company (RVC). Yet back in 2019, RVC announced the closure of its subsidiary funds (including FPI), and in 2021 it was reported that RVC had been integrated into the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF).
Meanwhile, FPI remains legally registered. This is likely due to the administrative peculiarities of RVC’s reorganization and the convoluted nature of winding up legal entities, especially of this type, according to a former RVC employee who spoke with T-invariant. There is no record of any substantive activity by FPI over the last 8–10 years — a fact confirmed to T-invariant by two former FPI employees.
Sources say it is difficult to explain why FPI appears in the “Neiry Group’s Capital” section of the investor presentation. “Perhaps it refers to some earlier investments in one of the neurotechnology companies that became part of Neiry, or maybe it’s somehow connected to RDIF, which now holds what used to be called RVC or was part of it,” suggests a former RVC employee. T-invariant sent an inquiry to Neiry Group to clarify this information, but no response has been received yet.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND INFO
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) is a sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 by the Russian government to attract foreign capital into the Russian economy and co-invest in key projects. RDIF and its CEO, Kirill Dmitriev, were added to all major sanctions lists within days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (February 28, 2022, by the US; March 1, by the UK; and shortly after by the EU). Kirill Dmitriev has headed the fund since its founding. Today, he is one of the key Russian negotiators in economic and political dialogue with the US under the Trump administration.
During these active negotiations, a project for a tunnel across the Bering Strait (Chukotka–Alaska) was proposed. The fund and its founder have always been inclined toward mega-projects. In 2016, the fund invested in Hyperloop One, a company developing a high-speed vacuum train based on Elon Musk’s design. The deal’s value and terms remain unknown (though after the project collapsed, all investments were lost). In 2017, Kirill Dmitriev announced that RDIF would invest in the construction of Neom, the “city of the future” in Saudi Arabia. Dmitriev’s wife is Natalya Popova, a friend of Katerina Tikhonova and her deputy at Innopraktika (for more details, see the article “The ‘Single Perimeter’ State Corporation: How Putin’s Daughter and Her Fashion-Model Friend Decided to Turn Innopraktika into an Integrator for All High-Tech Companies”).
The remaining two public investors are JSC Mira AI Capital and SPEC Investment. These companies have not been included in sanctions lists. Alexey Mariza, the founder and former CEO of Mira AI Capital, also serves as the chief operating officer of Neuroroga. In 2025, during its third funding round, Neiry acquired a 50% + 1 share stake in Neuroroga. Consequently, Mira AI Capital’s investments now flow into both the parent company (Neiry) and its subsidiary (Neuroroga). The founder of SPEC Investment is the Minerva-Capital closed-end mutual fund with a 99.93% stake; this fund is managed by JSC AF Capital Management Company (known as JSC Veter Management until January 10, 2025).
The strategic partnership with Katerina Tikhonova’s institute serves as a signal of political priority and provides access to the largest pools of capital. Potanin’s funds provide financing, while VTB Bank — represented by its Deputy Chairman of the Management Board, Vadim Kulik — gives Neiry prominent visibility at the major Data Fusion conference (hosted by the state bank in collaboration with Tikhonova’s Innopraktika foundation) In 2025, Kulik personally moderated a panel titled “Neurotechnologies: The Race for the Future.” Judging by the list of participants, Neiry is the company driving this race — specifically, Neiry founder and CEO Alexander Panov, Chief Scientific Officer Mikhail Lebedev, and laboratory head Vasily Popkov (both scientists are key figures at the MSU AI Research Institute). Such high-level PR support is not even available to Russia’s largest and longest-established neurotechnology companies, such as Motorika, which specializes in functional cybernetic limb prostheses, neuroimplants, and medical device distribution (Motorika has received direct investment from RDIF and has completed a pre-IPO round).
“The development of neurotechnologies, which Neiry is engaged in, can be viewed as a tool of geopolitical competition, and the state’s current position regarding limited regulation of AI development allows for growth in all directions,” stated VTB Deputy Chairman Vadim Kulik.
The new, fourth funding round was split into two parts: a “public” round and one for professional investors. The round for retail investors ran from March 10 to April 24. The price per share was set at 5,250 rubles [~$70]. The minimum investment for retail investors was 152,250 rubles [~$2000], equivalent to purchasing 29 shares. On his Telegram channel, Panov said that over 200 individual investors became shareholders within three weeks of the campaign. In another post, he mentioned that Neiry “raised 100+ MILLION [~$1,3m] in funding” within five days of targeting individual investors — this is currently the only public information available on the financial results of the 2026 funding round. Looking ahead, he noted that from May through the end of 2026, participation in the round would be restricted “only to strategic partners and institutional funds with a minimum investment size of 100 million rubles [~$1,3m].”
Ultimately, according to the investor presentation, Neiry Group’s valuation is projected to reach 8 billion rubles [~$100m] by the end of 2026. Following that, an IPO is planned for 2028.
On-Demand Happiness
It is expected that 50% of the funds raised will be allocated toward accelerating research and developing invasive neural interfaces to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders, as well as enhancing cognitive abilities. This will culminate in the mass production of PUSIN — the “Personal Universal System of Invasive Stimulation.” Another 30% of the investment will be used to acquire other neurotechnology companies, with the remaining 20% dedicated to international market expansion, clinical trials, and related overhead costs.
The company’s website states that Neiry operates four proprietary surgical units, has performed over 500 successful animal surgeries, and is slated to begin human trials in 2026. The company has already announced recruitment for a study on deep brain stimulation (DBS) for patients with treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This procedure involves implanting electrodes into specific brain regions to deliver stimulation, thereby mitigating symptoms. This is not a novel development — neuromodulation and neurostimulation techniques have long been used worldwide, for instance, in treating Parkinson’s disease. These routine procedures will likely serve as a “warm-up” for future, more invasive and complex devices — namely, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Neiry’s flagship development is PUSIN. According to the company’s investor presentation, it will enable users to control gadgets using thoughts alone, as well as modulate their emotional state — for example, inducing feelings of happiness and improving sleep quality. Neiry expects practical applications of neurointerfaces to materialize around 2030–2035. During 2026–2027, the plan involves refining surgical procedures using Medtronic neurostimulators, for which proprietary clinics will be launched, alongside upgrading PUSIN following animal trials. The period between 2027 and 2030 will see the first human PUSIN neuroimplantation and technology optimization. Following this, the company plans to develop and roll out technologies for maintaining mental health and cognitive functions, alongside managing emotional states like fear, happiness, and motivation.
“Even though Neiry is probably ALREADY THE LARGEST PRIVATE PROJECT in the country by number of investors, valuation, and growth rate, I predict that our deep tech fan club will add several hundred more investors over the next three weeks. This means we will be able to do more, go deeper, and chip everyone even more aggressively, advancing our scientific, engineering, and product development all in the name of profit margins and saving human civilization.”
From Alexander Panov’s Telegram channel
Overall, according to Neiry’s strategy, the company’s primary focus areas include developing BCIs (such as PUSIN), invasive stimulators for psychiatric disorders, and non-invasive neurodiagnostic devices (wearable EEG units, psycho-emotional monitoring systems, etc.).
The company believes that neurotechnology development in Russia is hindered by numerous legislative loopholes, outdated regulations that require overhaul, an obsolete educational framework for training personnel, and rigid device testing requirements — arguing that special rules should be established for the development and testing of “breakthrough” devices.
On his channel and at other events (such as a strategy session NeuroNet — an industry association of neurotechnology companies) Panov’s rhetoric has become increasingly hardline. He argues that to outcompete the US and China, which currently lead the industry and can deploy massive capital, Russia needs to win on the regulatory front: “Designate a few regions in the country where ANY neuroimplantations are permitted based on an agreement with the patient/user. This simple fix would provide a massive boost to neuroscience and neurotechnology, and startups from all over the world would start moving here. Zero budget expenditure, massive benefits. We already have a huge list of clients ready to go.”
“We are making filthy money by cutting back on marketing, just because everyone writes about us (for free!)”
From Alexander Panov’s Telegram channel
Erection Subscriptions
While CEO Alexander Panov handles PR promotion personally, the entire team follows closely in his wake. Neiry initially began communicating its results by leaning into blatant clickbait. For instance, in 2024, a press release titled “Introducing a rat that is smarter than most people” circulated across media outlets. This referred to the presentation of the first results of Project Pythia — where scientists and developers claimed to have connected a rat’s brain to artificial intelligence “for the first time in the world.”
In a recent interview, Panov discusses another acquisition: the company Neuroroga. In his words, a cow is a milk-producing machine that should yield as much as possible, but this machine has its own agency — for instance, deciding when to eat. To yield more milk, a cow needs to eat more. The management of a dairy farm approached them with a request: design a button that forces the cow to start feeding when pressed. Panov calls this a “cow subscription” — the technology works on a subscription basis: the cow has a neuroimplant installed in its brain that remains active as long as the farm pays the subscription fee. When payments stop, the stimulator shuts off, and the cow reverts to being a normal cow.
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According to Panov’s speculation on his Telegram channel, these smart cows yield 15% more milk. Yet the same smart cows, featured in the investor presentation, are claimed to yield up to 30% more.
It is likely safer to rely on the 15% figure — as that was the percentage that ultimately ended up on the label of the milk bottle designed by Artemy Lebedev Studio.
In the spring of 2026, Neiry’s bio-drone pigeons generated such intense blowback that the company now refrains from mentioning the topic altogether; Panov did not breathe a single word about it even during his most extensive and detailed interview with the business outlet Inc. The “cow subscription” and spy pigeons have been left behind. The PR focus has shifted entirely to human enhancement. In the interview, Panov talks at length about how he intends to sell a “happiness subscription” and an “erection subscription.” The only thing left is to officially put that human’s name in the project roadmap.
In that same interview with Inc., Panov mentions — whether jokingly or seriously — that certain products of the company are vetted by an “assigned officer from the Russian Orthodox Church.” Whether the journalist is genuinely surprised or just playing along is unclear. Either way, the desired effect was achieved: The Edinorog [Unicorn], a Telegram channel covering business, is seriously seeking confirmation of this from investor companies and ROC officials.
“I want to emphasize something very important: the 21st century will be the century of neurotechnology. Globally, it will mirror how the 20th century was defined by nuclear tech. It will spark a similar scientific race. Nations will compete in neurotechnology to make their citizens’ lives longer, better, and more efficient. Initially, this will be a matter of safeguarding public health, not through pharmaceutical means, but electroceutical ones. It will assist individuals with treatment-resistant depression, Parkinsonism, epilepsy, and several other conditions… But soon after, states will begin competing to have more upgraded people… The world will witness a race for a new kind of human. We call it homo superior — a human integrated with computers on a fundamentally new level. Such individuals will have the capacity to interface with computers and artificial intelligence in real time,” Alexander Panov says, outlining these prospects in his interview.
Twenty years ago, using a similar line of reasoning, Mikhail Kovalchuk secured roughly 180 billion rubles [$2,4b] from Vladimir Putin to develop nanotechnology. The objective was clear — leapfrog the West through fast-paced nano development. The funds were spent on various needs with varying degrees of efficiency, yet a domestic nanotechnology industry never materialized in Russia. The new visionary, Panov, outlines a far more ambitious goal — outliving the West via neurotechnology. And, judging by how the PR campaign is unfolding, there is every indication that it will meet the same fate as the grand “nano-project.” That said, few experts surveyed by T-invariant expressed any regret over this, arriving at a consensus: “It’s better they blow money on a happiness button, an erection lever, flying cows, and milk-yielding pigeons than on the war.”
T-invariant was unable to find scientists willing to offer a substantive evaluation of Neiry’s prospective plans or its investor presentation. One typical reaction was: “There was a major neurotechnology science conference recently. Throughout the entire event, I didn’t hear a single soul discuss their developments or anything related to them,” an interlocutor told the editorial team. As T-invariant previously pointed out, no peer-reviewed scientific papers detailing the mechanisms of Neiry’s neuroimplants in either animals or humans have been published. In the most famous video of the trials, the bio-drone pigeons merely fly left or right upon receiving a command, and nothing more. Perhaps an “assigned ROC officer” has no need for verified data published in peer-reviewed journals, given that the R&D outcomes are evaluated not by venture capital experts, but the main patient himself and his inner circle.
The post PUSIN for Putin: Who is selling the “happiness button” and how? appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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