Reuters investigated the strange thing that happened when Russia’s invading armored vehicles reached Chernobyl, “a key staging post on the approach to Kyiv,” on February 24th. “In less than two hours, and without a fight, the 169 members of the Ukrainian National Guard laid down their weapons.”

The fall of Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, stands out as an anomaly in the five-month old war: a successful blitzkrieg operation in a conflict marked elsewhere by a brutal and halting advance by Russian troops and grinding resistance by Ukraine. Now a Reuters investigation has found that Russia’s success at Chernobylwas no accident, but part of a long-standing Kremlin operation to infiltrate the Ukrainian state with secret agents….

One source with direct knowledge of the Kremlin’s invasion plans told Reuters that Russian agents were deployed to Chernobyl last year to bribe officials and prepare the ground for a bloodless takeover. Reuters couldn’t independently verify the details of this assertion. However, Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation has said it is investigating a former top intelligence official, Andriy Naumov, on suspicion of treason for passing Chernobyl security secrets to a foreign state…. A review of Ukrainian testimony and court documents and an interview with a local official show that Kyiv is conducting at least three investigations into the conduct of people who worked at Chernobyl. The investigations have identified at least two people suspected of providing information to Russian agents or otherwise helping them seize the plant, according to these documents….

For Russia’s war planners, seizing Chernobyl was just a stepping stone to the main objective: taking control of the Ukrainian national government in Kyiv. There, too, the Kremlin expected that undercover agents in positions of power would play a crucial part, according to four sources with knowledge of the plan.

It’s been said that journalism is a first draft of history. And Reuters is already wondering how this affected the invasion’s ultimate outcome:

Five people with knowledge of the Kremlin’s preparations said war planners around President Vladimir Putin believed that, aided by these agents, Russia would require only a small military force and a few days to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration to quit, flee or capitulate…. At a national level, sources with knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans said Moscow was counting on activating sleeper agents inside the Ukrainian security apparatus…

Though Russia captured Chernobyl, its plan to take power in Kyiv failed. In many cases, the sleeper agents Moscow had installed failed to do their job, according to multiple sources in Russia and Ukraine…. People the Kremlin counted on as its proxies in Ukraine overstated their influence in the years leading up to the invasion, said four of the sources with knowledge of the Kremlin’s preparations. The Kremlin relied in its planning on “clowns — they know a little bit, but they always say what the leadership wants to hear because otherwise they won’t get paid,” said one of the four, a person close to the Moscow-backed separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine.

Putin now finds himself in a protracted, full-scale war, fighting for every inch of territory at huge cost.

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Source: Slashdot – Prior to Invasion, Russian Agents May Have Infilitrated Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Site

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, Analogue announced that it’s launching Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on the Pocket as a part of its larger strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era. The original Spacewar! was created in 1962 by a cadre of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft duke it out in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons that were designed to be quiet when pressed so your opponent couldn’t hear when you were firing missiles.

To bring Spacewar! to the Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code from the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! itself, both of which are in the public domain, alongside OpenFPGA software. Emulating 60-year-old software came with some interesting challenges. “The PDP-1 had some unique characteristics about it, having a 1024×1024 vector display with a unique way of generating the image,” said Analogue CEO Chris Taber in an email to The Verge. “It was a bit tricky to accommodate this.” Alex Cranz of The Verge had the opportunity to play Spacewar!: “Spacewar! looks a little different on the Analogue Pocket. Lines are crisp and clean with none of the ethereal glow the original green CRT provided. The AI for your opponent is nonexistent, but there’s still something really fun about accelerating toward a star and then using its gravity to whip around it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still really feel like you’re fighting some war in space.”

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Source: Slashdot – Analogue Releases Video Game From 1962 On the Pocket

Nokia Oyj will provide equipment to connect AST SpaceMobile Inc. satellites to the global telecommunications network, creating a crucial link in a planned space-based broadband network designed to work with standard mobile phones, the companies said in a statement Thursday. Bloomberg reports: In addition to AirScale base stations, Espoo, Finland-based Nokia will provide its NetAct network management systems and technical support, the companies said. Terms of the five-year deal with Austin, Texas-based AST SpaceMobile weren’t disclosed. AST’s BlueWalker 3 test satellite, an array of antennas that measures 693 square feet (64 square meters), is planned for launch in early to mid-September. Eventually the network will consist of 168 satellites, the company told investors in a March 31 filing.

With BlueWalker 3 aloft, AST plans to conduct testing on five continents in coordination with mobile network operators such as Vodafone Group Plc, Rakuten Mobile and Orange SA. AST and Nokia said the network is intended to offer connections to people and places without digital services. “Connectivity should be considered an essential service like water, electricity or gas,” said Tommi Uitto, Nokia’s president of mobile services. “Everyone should be able to have access to universal broadband services that will ensure that no one is left behind.” Unlike the offerings from Elon Musk’s SpaceX or OneWeb and Eutelsat, which recently announced plans to merge in the hopes of becoming a stronger competitor, is that SpaceMobile’s service is designed to connect to “standard, unmodified cellular phones without the requirement of special software, ground terminals or hardware,” says the company in its annual filing.

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Source: Slashdot – Nokia, AST SpaceMobile Join Forces For Broadband From Space