Mike Eckel

5 days ago | rferl.org | Mike Eckel

A couple hours after midnight on June 22, a small mountain range about 200 kilometers southwest of the Iranian capital erupted in a series of earthshaking explosions. The mountain range was Fordow, where Iran has spent years building a sprawling facility deep underground to enrich uranium for use in civilian power plants – or, as Israel insists, for use in a nuclear weapon.

1 week ago | rferl.org | Mike Eckel

The email arrived in inboxes -- thousands possibly -- around the world on January 15, 2020, billed as the latest update from international observers monitoring the situation in eastern Ukraine. The bullet-pointed summary, identical to those from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was followed by a note “Full Report In Attachment,” along with a password to access the attached report.

1 week ago | rferl.org | Mike Eckel

Azerbaijan’s president stood before cameras of the state TV broadcaster, grinning alongside an Israeli attack drone newly acquired for his country’s growing arsenals. Ilham Aliyev then petted it like a dog. The Israeli unmanned aircraft was part of an extensive fleet of Israeli and Turkish-built drones that Aliyev’s military used to devastating effect against Armenia in its successful campaign to regain control of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023.

2 weeks ago | rferl.org | Mike Eckel

A former Russian diplomat who was charged with conspiring to evade sanctions by working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska pleaded guilty to a lesser count of lying to FBI agents. Sergei Shestakov, a naturalized US citizen, had previously pleaded innocent to multiple charges related to work he did for Deripaska, a Kremlin-connected billionaire who's been under US sanctions since 2018. His trial was set to begin on June 17 in Manhattan federal court.

2 weeks ago | rferl.org | Mike Eckel

When one of the FBI's top counterintelligence agents was arrested in January 2023, charged with doing illegal work for sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the US national security community was stunned. Retired by then, Charles McGonigal, who had spent the latter part of his career investigating Russian spies and oligarchs, ultimately pleaded guilty, and was sentenced that December to more than four years in prison.