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Keir Giles Profile picture
Keir Giles
@KeirGiles
Striving to drive forward progressive social change. Passionate about diversity, equality and inclusion. Pronoun advocate. “Woke” just isn’t enough.
5 subscribers
Apr 1, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
One of the few things that startled me when researching the book 'Russia's War on Everybody' was not the scale of Russian violence against diplomatic, military and intelligence staff of the US and its allies - but the extent of US efforts to conceal it.
1/
 theins.ru/en/politics/27… Russia's bugbear, the 'Anglo-Saxons', seem unsurprisingly to be the prime target. US, Canadian staff have been hit by 'Havana Syndrome'. What about the UK? In a 2021 BBC interview @BillEvanina challenged the suggestion no UK personnel have suffered.

2/
bbc.co.uk/news/world-583…
Feb 9, 2024 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
OK, I watched as much of it as I could. A thread with some thoughts.

Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin was good news for everybody involved. The only problem is, everybody involved is an enemy of the United States, of the West, of democracy and of genuine journalism.

1/ As so often, Vladimir Putin has found a willing helper in exploiting the self-harming behaviour of Western media outlets. The media frenzy around the interview in the West will provide an enormous boost to Carlson's new outlet, and bring him many more viewers.

2/
Jun 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Always keen to get the paperwork in order when planning acts of barbarism, Russia passed a law a week before blowing the Kakhovka dam in order to say “sorry, we can’t investigate what happened there, that’s against the law”. ALSO: Russia passing legislation in preparation for blowing the Kakhovka dam was prominent in Ukrainian media from day one - but not in English-language coverage that today is still insisting “we don’t know who did it”.

pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2023/…
Jul 14, 2022 • 14 tweets • 8 min read
Did you know some people have been watching the Russian military since a lot longer ago than January 2022? And they've been arguing about it for much longer too. @ChathamHouse have pulled together 10 top experts to tackle some key confusions.

🧵...

chathamhouse.org/2022/06/myths-… This leads on from the 2021 @CHRussiaEurasia project tackling "Myths and misconceptions in the debate on Russia" - the wrong ideas about Moscow and how to deal with it that got us all in this mess in the first place.

chathamhouse.org/2021/05/myths-…
Apr 17, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Quite a few people have pointed out flaws in this idea, some of them perfectly valid - so to save everybody else time and nervous energy this Easter Sunday morning, here's a thread summarising the three (for now) counter-arguments:

1/ 1) Germany, not the EU, is the problem; other countries haven't had to coordinate arms shipments with EU MS so the UK wouldn't have had to either (ex German weapons blocked by Berlin fitting this pattern); instead it's sanctions not weapons where Brexit has freed UK policy;

2/
Aug 19, 2021 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
30 years ago today on the streets of Moscow. A short thread of no-context images. Not taken or developed by me. Credit unknown.
Jun 14, 2021 • 31 tweets • 5 min read
I stumbled across something we wrote in 2008 about where Russia was going. It's aged reasonably well. Mainly as a historical curio, I offer some of the things we said that were deeply unfashionable 13 years ago.

A long series of excerpts. FOREIGN RELATIONS
1.In international cooperation, Russia is not playing the same game as the West, let alone by the same rules, and so does not judge successes or failures by the same criteria.
Sep 22, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
How should we read the performative Russia-Belarus activities today - the Tu-160 flyby along borders with NATO and Ukraine and the para drop 4 km from Poland? And tomorrow's plans for much more extensive show of force, with bigger troop numbers and a wider range of aircraft?
1/ Image For sure, you can see flying Tu-160s along the borders as a response in kind to more assertive US bomber flights. But what is the rest supposed to prove? Is it to frighten NATO off because Russia and Belarus believe their own propaganda about eFP in Poland and Lithuania?
2/ Image
Aug 1, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I hate to mention it, but it's an age thing. Let me explain.

[1/5] About this time last year, I stumbled across a clump of Cold War re-enactors at Duxford. Lightweights, puttees, DPM, 58 pattern webbing, the lot.

I thought all fine, no real harm in grown men (yes, all men) playing fancy dress if it's among consenting adults. But...

[2/5]
Jul 24, 2020 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
In which @paperghost (with help from @MuniraMustaffa and a nod to @razhael) dons UN beret and wades into the tiny but toxic feud over deepfake nomenclature. When is it a deepfake and when isn't it?

1/4
blog.malwarebytes.com/social-enginee… In the red corner: "GAN-generated images of non-existent people are deepfakes. Because they are deep-learning-enabled fakes. Simple."

2/4 Image
Jun 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
For anybody in the UK still seriously asking if any other country has a functional contact tracing app - here’s a short video showing what Singapore’s well-established app looks like.

A thread of screenshots for the further edification of BoJo ensues. First encounters when stepping outside on the morning... Image
Jun 24, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
You have to feel sorry for the employees of "Barclays Bank of Dubai". For so many years now their clients have been regularly dropping dead while leaving very large amounts of money in their accounts, which the staff then have to tidy up. Image And they almost always seem to leave just under $27m. In this case, the dearly departed is my good old Uncle Weimin. (Who by the way has the same surname as mine.) Image
Jun 6, 2020 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
I've waited almost 24 hours for some clarity to emerge over the supposed Trump plan to remove US forces from Germany. It hasn't. Whatever may be really going on, that speaks to a massive failure of strategic communications.

Thread.
bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-… The news that the Trump administration is to order the removal of almost one-third of US military personnel from Germany has sparked alarm and dismay among friends of European security, who point unanimously to the encouragement it will offer Vladimir Putin.
2/
May 9, 2020 • 27 tweets • 6 min read
A thread about Russia, history, VE/Victory Day, trolls and genuine discussion, and hiding replies on Twitter.

This morning I posted this, with as @jonnytickle has very politely pointed out, my finger poised over “hide reply”.
/1
That’s because I knew very well that as well as genuine engagement, it would draw an onslaught of default, scripted Russian responses to inconvenient history; not just from professional trolls but also from what may well be real and sincere people.
2/
May 8, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
A #VEDay75 mini-thread à propos nothing in particular.

My grandfather’s Indian passport, issued in lieu of one “said to have been lost by enemy action... not to be renewed without further proof”. This always puzzled me as a child. Why Indian? Why the doubt?

1/ He spent almost all of WWII at sea, and had plenty of stories as a result, all of which gripped me as a kid. Signing up with a Norwegian shipping line in Sydney in 1939 hoping to get to the UK, but not actually getting there until early 1944.

2/
Apr 11, 2020 • 24 tweets • 14 min read
On UK academia and Russian disinformation. Over the last 24 hours, reactions to @RUSI_org's defence of @ReframingRussia have similarly been "mostly negative", not least in response to @JEyal_RUSI's signal boosting retweet. It's worth considering why.
/1 (An important exception that should be noted is @MarkGaleotti, who knows these issues well but considers the @ReframingRussia report to be sound) -
2/
Apr 9, 2020 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Profoundly disappointing, but no longer surprising, to see @RUSI_org endorsing this deeply flawed hit piece on @EUvsDisinfo - so packed with straw men, misconceptions and implicit bias that it completely devalues any genuine findings it contains.
1/ If there are flaws in @EUvsDisinfo reporting, they should be pointed out constructively and would surely be welcomed. Here, instead, is an attack on StratCom East overall based on highly selective selection not only from its own output, but also from Russian media as a whole.
2/
Feb 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
If you're in Helsinki on 25th March, come along to the launch of 'Moskovan opit' - the Finnish edition of 'Moscow Rules'. Image This fella (unrecognisable as me, far too serious and well-dressed) will be pontificating about whether the book has been proven right on target in the year since the English edition was published. (Spoiler alert: yes it has.) Image
Oct 22, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
When (some) people said things were getting a bit wild in Hong Kong, I didn’t realise they meant wild boar in the city. But, apparently, that’s a new HK feature these days.

A small selection of pics of feral pigs out on the town tonight. Image
Oct 5, 2019 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Worlds, in fact centuries, apart.

Compare and contrast the following. (A short grumpy thread about banking, and transferring money between currencies and countries.) Image 2/ Country A, where parts of government think that hand writing a check in your own currency and sending it internationally by FedEx is a sensible and efficient way of remitting funds to people in foreign countries; Image
Sep 9, 2019 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
There are so, so many reasons why this seems a deeply misguided initiative. Where shall we start.

#France #Russia #RollOverForPutin

en.rfi.fr/europe/2019090… 2/ Resets don't work if you ignore the underlying deep differences in world view and strategic priorities between Russia and the West. Trying to patch up a fundamentally flawed relationship is no substitute for an honest conversation about what is wrong with it.