Introduction The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been undergoing a far-reaching transformation with strategic implications for the military balance in the region and beyond. Starting in 2015, the PLA has been undertaking historic reforms that have involved extensive restructuring of the force. [1] The... MORE

Myrotvorets, a controversial independent Ukrainian website that claims to track persons threatening Ukraine’s security, has called on the authorities in Kyiv to investigate Russia’s alleged use of cryptocurrencies (via the WEX digital currency exchange platform) to fund subversive activities potentially in support of one of... MORE

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov talked with Russian journalists on Wednesday, February 27, following news reports in the United States claiming that US Cyber Command had actively hacked and briefly taken offline the St. Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency. The US cyber strike on this entity, often... MORE

Introduction The December 1, 2018, arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟) in Vancouver—an arrest made by Canadian officials pursuant to a warrant issued in the United States—touched off a three-way diplomatic firestorm between China, Canada, and the United States. However, in the... MORE

The deadly October 31 bombing of a local Federal Security Services (FSB) office in Arkhangelsk by 17-year-old student Mikhail Zhlobitsky, a member of an online anarchist community (Meduza.io, October 31; Crimerussia.com, November 1), underscored two serious threats facing the Russian authorities. First, the bomber’s identity... MORE

Over the past eighteen months, major Western media outlets have followed every step of Facebook’s slow and painful fall from grace, including the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, while the stories focus heavily on Trump and Putin, it is CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping who... MORE

The long-running legal conflict between the Federal Security Service (FSB) and Telegram Messenger Limited, a cloud-based instant messaging service created by Pavel Durov, finally seemed to come to an end on March 20. That day, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and... MORE

Despite having banned its contract soldiers (kontraktniki) from using online social networks (VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, in particular) (see EDM, October 20, 2017), the Russian Ministry of Defense has not dismissed the idea of using social networks for its own purposes. These policies are driven both... MORE

Russian telecommunication experts paid close attention to the February 22 announcement of the launch into orbit of two experimental micro-satellites by the private space exploration company SpaceX (Vedomosti, February 22). The main goal of the launch of SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket was advertised as the deployment... MORE

Since January 2016, bitcoin (比特币) has skyrocketed from less than $1,000 and nearly peaking at $20,000 in December—a 2,100 percent increase. Despite its volatility, euphoria over bitcoin along with other cryptocurrencies (加密数字货币) has spread across the globe and nowhere has this been more evident than... MORE