516. Elisabeth Braw - Could Floating Bombs Become Putin's Next Weapon of Mass Intimidation Against West?

Russia’s Shadow Tankers Threaten an Environmental Catastrophe in the Baltic. And now a Maltese-flagged cargo ship filled with 20,000 tonnes of Russian sourced ammonium nitrate in drifting towards the UK coast. This is the same potentially explosive fertiliser that caused a massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, and this ship is carrying 7 times more of this dangerous cargo. Understandably it has been rejected permission to dock by several countries. So, what kind of threats does the Kremlin’s shadow fleet pose to the environment as well as the global maritime order? ---------- Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlanric council. She is also a columnist with Foreign Policy, where she writes on national security and the globalised economy. Before joining AEI, Elisabeth was a Senior Research Fellow at RUSI, where she led the Modern Deterrence project. She is published in a wide range of publications, including Politico, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (writing in German), The Times and The Wall Street Journal. Elisabeth is also the author of highly regarded books – one of which we are discussing today. Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (2024) ---------- ROLES & PUBLICATIONS: - Monthly columnist – POLITICO (Feb 2023 – Present) - Advisory Board Member - GALLOS Technologies Limited (Aug 2022 – Present) - Commissioner – UK National Preparedness Commission (Nov 2020 – Present) - Member of the Advisory Group – Centre for Information Resilience (Feb 2021 – Present) - Senior Fellow – American Enterprise Institute (Oct 2020 – Present) - Columnist – Foreign Policy (Feb 2020 – Present) - Member of the Steering Committee – Aurora Forum (Dec 2019 – Present) - Op-ed contributor – The Times (Dec 2016 – Present) - Non-resident Associate Fellow – European Leadership Network (ELN) (Aug 2017 – Present) - Senior Research Fellow – Royal United Services Institute (Sep 2019 – Oct 2020) - Adjunct Fellow – Centre for European Policy (Jul 2018 – Jul 2019) - Senior Consultant – Control Risks (Jun 2016 – Aug 2018) - Non-resident Senior Fellow – Atlantic Council (Apr 2016 – Jun 2018) ---------- LINKS: https://twitter.com/elisabethbraw https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisabethbraw/ https://rusi.org/people/braw https://www.aei.org/profile/elisabeth-braw/ https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/person/elisabeth-braw/ https://foreignpolicy.com/author/elisabeth-braw/ https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/people/elisabeth-braw https://cepa.org/author/elisabeth-braw/ ---------- ARTICLES: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/16/russia-ukraine-gray-zone-warfare-autocrats-democracy-527022 https://www.ft.com/content/0ac9e1a9-2aad-47d9-83fb-4839e9b31b33 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-is-master-of-grey-zone-aggression-t6z2khp69 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/60291/create-a-psychological-defence-agency-to-prebunk-fake-news https://www.aei.org/podcast/elisabeth-braw-on-gray-zone-warfare/ ---------- BOOKS: ‘God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage (2019) The Defender's Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-zone Aggression (2022) Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (2024) ---------- PLATFORMS: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CurtainSilicon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconcurtain/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4thRZj6NO7y93zG11JMtqm Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finkjonathan/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ---------- Welcome to the Silicon Curtain podcast. Please like and subscribe if you like the content we produce. It will really help to increase the popularity of our content in YouTube’s algorithm. Our material is now being made available on popular podcasting platforms as well, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.