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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A Russian married couple who had refugee status in Poland have been convicted of working as spies for Moscow, including by gathering information on Russian opposition activists and sending a parcel bomb.

The husband, who can be named only as Igor R. under Polish privacy law, has been sentenced to seven years in prison for espionage and the bomb plot. His wife, Irina R., received a three-year jail term for aiding and abetting espionage.

🇷🇺🇵🇱Jest wyrok ws. małżeństwa Rosjan. Sąd w Sosnowcu skazał Igora R. na 7 lat więzienia za szpiegostwo i nadanie paczki z bombą, a Irinę R. na 3 lata więzienia za pomocnictwo w szpiegostwie. Igor R. współpracował z Federalną Służbą Bezpieczeństwa – https://t.co/FN7XLx2uBZ .…

— Radio ZET NEWS (@RadioZET_NEWS) July 9, 2026

Igor and Irina R. were students at the University of Silesia, where they had Polish government scholarships and lived in a dormitory in the town of Sosnowiec, reports the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

Igor R. had been subject to criminal proceedings in Russia for evading military service and had participated in meetings of Russian opposition figures.

However, according to Polish prosecutors, he collected intelligence on Russian opposition activists in Poland on behalf of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), as well as on individuals and institutions that assisted them, including employees of Poland’s foreign ministry.

Igor R. then passed those materials on to Irina R., who sought to transmit the information to the FSB on an electronic storage device.

Igor R. was additionally accused of working as part of a group – also containing another Russian and two Ukrainian citizens – to send a parcel containing explosives and a detonator. It was discovered in a warehouse belonging to InPost, the delivery firm they had used to send it.

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The couple were detained in July 2024 and indicted in October 2025 on charges of espionage. Igor R. was additionally charged with causing a large-scale threat to the lives or health of other people or to property.

Their trial began in January this year at Sosnowiec’s district court but, due to national security concerns, was held completely behind closed doors. Today, the presiding judge, Ewelina Pałgan-Witek, announced that the couple had been found guilty.

Igor R. was sentenced to seven years in jail, and Irina three. The two years they have already been held in detention will count towards their sentences. The ruling can still be appealed by any of the parties involved.

Igor R.’s lawyer, Marta Smołka, told Gazeta Wyborcza that she “fundamentally disagrees with the judgment and will submit a request for its written justification in order to file an appeal”.

By contrast, prosecutor Krzysztof Kuk told broadcaster TVP that they “agree with the verdict issued in this case” and were glad that “the court agreed with the prosecution’s arguments”. However, he added that only once they had reviewed the written justification would they make a final decision on an appeal.

A Russian married couple accused of being spies have gone on trial in Poland.

They are alleged to have passed information to Moscow about Russian opposition figures in Poland, while the husband is also accused of sending a package containing explosives https://t.co/hOZCHprkUD

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) January 21, 2026

Poland has in recent years detained, charged and in some cases convicted dozens of agents accused of carrying out espionage, sabotage and other so-called “hybrid actions” on behalf of Russia.

In May, the Internal Security Agency (ABW) released figures showing that it launched twice as many espionage investigations in 2025 as in 2024. Over those two years combined, there were more investigations than across the previous three decades.

Earlier this year, Polish prosecutors indicted five people – four Ukrainian citizens and one Russian – accused of carrying out a plot on behalf of Russia to plant explosives in packages that were then dispatched by courier services across Europe.

In May, three Polish citizens were charged with working on behalf of Russian intelligence to spread disinformation and conduct reconnaissance of NATO troops. Earlier this month, two men – a Belarusian and a Pole – were charged with espionage on behalf of Russia’s ally Belarus.

Over the last two years, Poland has launched as many espionage investigations as in the previous three decades, new data show.

There has been an "unprecedented increase in threats", especially from Russia and Belarus, says the Internal Security Agency https://t.co/vl5027DnoU

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) May 7, 2026

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Grzegorz Celejewski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

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Since first being introduced for a customized Harley-Davidson, Keanu Reeves and co-founder Gard Hollinger ’s motorcycle company, ARCH Motorcycle , has begun creating bikes that are not only optimized for spectacular and reliable riding but also tailored to their riders. Now, after launching in 2011, the duo is ready to show the world what these bikes are capable of . After establishing themselves in the production of world-class bikes, Reeves and Hollinger made their debut in professional racing at MotoAmerica, the premier motorcycle road racing series, documented in Samsung TV Plus’s new six-part docuseries, Hooligans: The ARCH Racing Project .

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Rousing seafaring anthems are as vital to Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced as they are in the original, but sea shanties do not exist in isolation. Waves crash rhythmically against the hull as birds join the chorus of voices on-deck. Wind snaps the large black sails to and fro, a meditative drum beat as The Jackdaw journeys across Dry Tortuga. It's everything I remember from Black Flag, only better.

"I think that's one of the good things about a remake: that there was a blueprint that we could follow." Sitting down with Ubisoft's Erik-Jon Evangelista, audio director for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, it's clear this is a blueprint he knows intimately. He's been with Ubisoft since 2012, having served as an audio designer for the original Black Flag and 10 others among the best Assassin's Creed games , but Resynced is a very different beast.

"It's an iconic game, so we had to be faithful and familiar, but not necessarily the same. So I tasked my team with three different things – three different pillars: to recreate, elevate, then innovate."

One more, with keeling

(Image credit: Ubisoft) Drink up, me hearties

(Image credit: Ubisoft) Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced review: "Far from smooth sailing, even though I love the original"

The first of those three pillars – recreation – is where it all starts. Presented in the brand new Anvil engine, much of the original sound assets had to be remade for Resynced.

"It really wasn't a cut and paste job, something that we could just port over," Evangelista says. "It was showing its limitations based on the current hardware of that time, so we wanted to make sure that we leveraged and took advantage of [Anvil]" – for example, in creating realistic spatial soundscapes using physics-driven Doppler effects – "while at the same time being faithful to the original. So, one example was with music.

"I'm not going to change Brian Tyler's music – it's iconic, it's familiar," Evangelista says, meaning elevation was off the table here. Rather, Evangelista sought to work around the limitation of some tracks being "short and possibly repetitive, depending on the difficulty level you play at." I'm reminded of the combat stings of Assassin's Creed Unity, how frequently (and sometimes comically) the combat music would stop and start after the most minor scuffle.

(Image credit: Ubisoft) "I wanted to make sure that we modernized it and innovated in a way that was still familiar, and that was to implement a system that had the music react to gameplay animations or stabs, in this case." This responsiveness is clear in game; at the end of my first boss battle, I hear the music growing louder, more urgent, desperate to reach its crescendo as I hurl smoke grenades at Templar Du Casse's feet. When my Hidden Blade hits home, the backing track mirrors that instant relief.

It makes for incredibly cinematic encounters, more immersive than anything I remember hearing and feeling in the original Black Flag. "It was a time before John Wick," Evangelista reflects. "Now, you can't not think of action being tagged to music, so I wanted to be able to try to do something like that because of how dynamic it is. This makes very familiar music have a very different experience per player."

Many unique actions are tagged to specific character actions and movements, including stealthy Hidden Blade takedowns. "If you played without ever doing takedowns, you'll just hear the music as it was, but if you do a lot of takedowns, you may never really hear the music in the same way."

The sound of pirates

(Image credit: Ubisoft) We're usually like quiet ninjas in the background.

Erik-Jon Evangelista

Returning to Black Flag, Evangelista brought more experience to its all-important sea shanties. "My team here was in charge of making the shanties on the long ship for Valhalla," Evangelista says as an example. "I'm definitely leaning on the experiences that I've had previously, and I think part of what we do is being able to make a sonic signature for the game, regardless of whether it's a remake or it's a new game."

Everything from the Spanish songs of the Havanaean NPCs to the more Euro-centric language and subject matter of the sea shanties – and Evangelista's favorite track "at the end of Stede Bonnet's questline" – point to a specific historical context in the 1700s West Indies. But it's the subtle layers of environmental texture that root players in a specific time and place.

"Sound that is tied to gameplay, whether it's by player input or from something that happens in the world that the player can hear, tends to have the highest value," Evangelista says, with the goal being to "create the illusion of you being in a very specific geographical position." Think again of the wind whistling past the Jackdaw as the crew breaks into song, one sound complementing the other to achieve a far more powerful scene-setting effect than either in isolation.

Method and the madness

(Image credit: Ubisoft) But with all the recreation, elevation, and innovation on the table in Resynced, some things stay the same. Like, the sound of Edward drowning.

"Edward's drowning voice is me!" Evangelista exclaims, to mine and our Ubisoft PR's surprise. "We were in charge of the underwater [environments] back then, so all the swimming sounds and everything was done by myself and another audio designer.

"When it came to drowning sounds, I clearly didn't drown, right, but it's more of the fact that we had to make sure that it sounded like I was struggling." For this, Evangelista stuck his head in a barrel of water and choked. "I could only do like three max [gulps] before I had to come up for air and go down again. We used hydrophones to be able to record those, but they needed to be at like a depth of at least like two meters-ish, so that at least you don't hear the bubbles pass by and pop [on the surface]" – which would shatter the illusion of Edward drowning in more than a few inches of water.

"Back then I recorded it as an audio designer, and as audio director now, I'm keeping it!"

(Image credit: Ubisoft) It's subtle sound design choices like these that make a game feel grounded in reality, and if drowning for your art was commitment personified back in 2013, it's almost expected of game developers in 2026.

"I think there's a lot more appreciation for not just music, but how sound also makes people feel in games these days," Evangelista notes. It does feel like every month another touring video game concert is announced, from Death Stranding: Strands of Harmony to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Painted Symphony. How does it feel to see game audio design finally having its moment just as Resynced drops anchor?

"What a time to be in," Evangelista laughs. "I'm used to people not noticing audio. Like, 'no news is good news,' and if they mention it, it means that you've been found out, or you've been noticed. We're usually like quiet ninjas in the background. We teach the player a language that helps them to comprehend gameplay feedback – setting, size, scale. I'm glad we have an audience that appreciates that nowadays."

What's next for the publisher? Here's all the upcoming Ubisoft games we know of right now.

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We’ve talked plenty of times here about the infeasibility of launching a mirror big enough to directly image exoplanets using current rocket fairings - at least as long as we’re not sending them 500+ AU away to a gravitational lensing point. We’ve also talked at length about the potential solution to that problem - interferometry, where multiple smaller satellites link up precisely, but are spaced far enough apart to act as one gigantic mirror. The problem is, from a technical standpoint, it’s really hard to build these kinds of systems. But the field has taken another step forward with a new paper from researchers at Xidian University and the Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, published in Space: Science & Technology, which describes a system to both control and calibrate a free-floating interferometer.

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Do you remember the metaverse ? If you don’t, don’t worry. In 2026, four years into the AI revolution that’s changing the world forever, you could easily be forgiven for thinking it was a strange fever dream you had back in 2021. You might even have odd memories of seeing a blocky version of Mark Zuckerberg floating about in a Minecraft-inspired hellscape, conducting meetings with people who could walk with no legs , while the real Mark Zuckerberg was looking at the whole thing through VR goggles. At least, that’s my memory of it.

I could be suffering from the Mandela effect , but I distinctly remember something off about the legs. They fixed that in a later version, but that’s my overriding memory — no legs. Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg assuring us that this was the future. He’d spent tens of billions of dollars on it, even changing the company name from Facebook to Meta, just to let us know he was really serious about the metaverse. Even if the legs didn’t work.

The problem was, it looked laughable. While everything in the technology world to do with games and special effects was moving in the direction of hyper-realism, the metaverse was moving in the opposite direction, towards the sort of blocky graphics that small children enjoy. But even that didn’t really answer the most basic question about the metaverse. Why? What possible advantage was there for us all to meet in a VR space where clunky avatars of ourselves could interact… badly?

Then AI happened and Meta abruptly forgot about the metaverse and pivoted towards the mission of putting personal superintelligence in all our hands instead, which sounds as terrifying and dangerous as it actually is, but we are where we are. At least when Zuckerberg was obsessed with the metaverse, we could ignore him. It existed somewhere “over there”, in Meta-land, where we could let him get on with it. Now he’s right up in our business again.

Careless People , by Sarah Wynn-Williams. (Image credit: Future) The rise of a bad idea

I’ve always been fascinated by how Zuckerberg got into the metaverse and why he became so obsessed with it. The origins of the metaverse go way back. In March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus, the VR company, for about $2 billion. This was where his passion for VR started. Think of it as the seed, not the full obsession.

By July 2021, Zuckerberg gave a long interview to Casey Newton at The Verge about Facebook becoming a “metaverse company” and described it as an “embodied internet”. Then, on October 28, 2021, his obsession became the company identity. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook the company was becoming Meta at Connect 2021 , saying the new company brand would focus on bringing the metaverse to life.

I can see the logic. As a business strategy, that made sense. As a product ordinary people were expected to use, it was much harder to understand. Zuckerberg did not want Meta/Facebook to be trapped inside someone else’s platform again. Facebook had won on social, but on mobile it remained dependent on Apple and Google for distribution, privacy rules, app-store policies and hardware. The metaverse looked like a chance to own the next operating system of social life: hardware, avatars, identity, payments, meetings, gaming, work, commerce — the whole stack. In his 2021 founder’s letter, he framed the metaverse as the “next chapter of the internet” and said Meta would become “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”

Facebook had obviously had its problems — it was scandal-ridden. It had let advertisers target vulnerable teenagers, helped fake news spread, and enabled the spread of hate speech linked to atrocities in Myanmar. Perhaps Zuckerberg was looking for a way out of Facebook, and the metaverse offered that.

What I still didn’t understand was why he didn’t see what the rest of us saw — that it looked terrible and offered no real benefit to users. Then I read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ tell-all book about Facebook, Careless People , and it all started to make sense.

To say the book made my jaw hit the floor on several occasions would be an understatement. It’s an absolute page-turner, and your reactions grow from mild amusement to shock, then disbelief, then absolute outrage the further through the book you get. I’m aware of the criticisms of Wynn-Williams: that it is a book written by a disgruntled employee, and that she dodges a lot of personal responsibility for her part in the various misdeeds of the company. However, in another perfect example of the Streisand effect , the fact that Meta obtained a legal order in the United States to prevent her from saying anything negative about the company — at all — made me want to pick it up, and I’m glad I did.

Because now I get it — Zuckerberg seems to have spent years in an environment where too few people were willing to tell him when his ideas weren’t good. According to Wynn-Williams, he was surrounded by sycophants. When he had bad ideas, like the ill-fated Internet.org, he wouldn’t let them go and persisted with them, even when they were obviously going to fail. The people around him enabled him because he was simply too powerful. They even let him win at the board games he liked to play with them at his house or on his jet, and — crucially — he didn’t notice that they were letting him win. I can imagine that in that environment, nobody inside Meta would want to tell Zuckerberg that his metaverse was the equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, especially if they wouldn’t even risk beating him at Settlers of Catan .

Wynn-Williams only mentions the metaverse in her epilogue. It happened after she was brutally fired from Facebook. Perhaps selfishly, I wish she’d been there for the metaverse period, because I would love to read firsthand accounts of how and why Zuckerberg persisted with such an obviously bad idea.

An avatar of Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., rides a hydrofoil during the virtual Facebook Connect event. (Image credit: Getty Images / Bloomberg) The fall of the metaverse

Maybe I’m being too harsh on Zuckerberg. The metaverse graphics did get better over time and Apple ventured slightly into the same territory with its Apple Vision Pro , even after the metaverse had turned into a smoldering wasteland. The fact is, people don’t enjoy wearing VR goggles for extended periods of time, and for normal people, VR lacks that one killer app. There doesn’t seem to be anything you can do in a VR space that you can’t do elsewhere much more easily.

The metaverse didn’t really die with a bang, but with a whimper. It faded through layoffs, spending cuts and the AI pivot. If I had to put a date on it, I’d say early 2023 was when Meta’s narrative moved on. In February and March 2023, Zuckerberg started talking about Meta’s “year of efficiency” and announced huge layoffs and cost-cutting. OpenAI had launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and by early 2023, generative AI had swallowed the oxygen that ideas like the metaverse need to survive. Every tech company was talking about AI now, not virtual offices and avatar legs.

The metaverse was over. We all forgot about it and moved on.

I’m glad I read Wynn-Williams’ book, because now I can understand how Facebook let the metaverse happen. And if there’s one thing I learned from reading it, it’s that money and power can bring you a lot of things, but common sense requires neither.

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While the AI data center boom is undoubtedly an opportunity for the fiber industry, it also presents something of a challenge.

Sure, investment in network infrastructure is rarely a bad thing. I can’t help, however, getting flashbacks to the early 2000’s - operators pouring billions into fiber, without proven demand.

This resulted in stranded assets, empty capacity, and ultimately, a bust that hampered telecoms for nearly a decade.

This time around, as serious AI momentum continues to grow, with megawatt campuses, GPU clusters, hyperscaler capex announced seemingly every week, the temptation to ‘follow the boom’ is rearing its head again.

I’m optimistic, however, that the industry has learnt its lesson. Not just to avoid overspend, but to be far more targeted about where fiber actually gets built, what kind of fiber is needed, and which partnerships can make new routes commercially viable.

AI demand is real, but discipline will be crucial

There’s no denying AI demand is there, but it's important operators don’t get caught up in the hype and assume it will be everywhere.

It may sound basic, but the industry needs to read the tea leaves carefully. Data centers have never had the luxury of a ‘build it, and they will come’ approach. The strongest sites tend to sit where demand, power, fiber and customer ecosystems can all be brought together. Things are changing however; data centers are on the move.

Fiber investment therefore, should focus on solid signals, from AI Growth Zones and established data center corridors to cloud on-ramps, internet exchanges and emerging compute clusters. While the latter two have traditionally centered around London (particularly the London Docklands and Slough), the Government’s proposed AI Growth Zones point to a broader regional shift.

Sites in Oxfordshire, the North East, North Wales, South Wales and Lanarkshire in Scotland aim to spread AI infrastructure development away from the capital, bringing data center demand closer to new regional power, land and connectivity ecosystems.

Beyond the Government initiatives investors are also placing bets on other development opportunities outside of the traditional areas.

AI hyperscalers want platforms, not just physical fiber

But even if you do invest in fiber build in all the right places, that’s no longer a guarantee. While location is one aspect (and admittedly, not a ground-breaking one, pardon the pun), there’s a new, arguably even bigger factor that network operators can’t ignore - consumability.

Hyperscalers, neoclouds and AI infrastructure businesses are not always buying connectivity in the same way as traditional telecoms customers. They expect capacity to be identifiable, orderable and scalable at speed. In other words, they want the fiber market to feel more like a platform than a slow procurement exercise.

AI workloads are also pushing future rack-density designs towards 1MW, which places extreme demands not just on power and cooling, but on fiber density and the speed at which capacity can be provisioned.

As these companies scale, providers that can offer API-driven ordering, rapid provisioning, clear visibility of available routes and flexible rerouting will be in the strongest position when capacity decisions are made.

Having fiber in the right place may secure a place in the conversation, but making that fiber easier to consume will increasingly determine who wins the work.

Compute is useless without connectivity

There’s another major factor, however, one that is often overlooked and missed in the media conversation around UK AI infrastructure - backbone connectivity.

As a call back to the opening of this article, AI infrastructure is often viewed as a hardware arms race. With much of the focus falling on megawatts, GPU clusters and hyperscaler capex, with data center capacity treated as a shorthand for infrastructure readiness.

This view missed the wider systems those facilities depend on. Without the right infrastructure backing up development, the UK risks repeating old DC patterns, where new sites sit underutilized due to a lack of customers, or are delayed entirely due to missing fundamental backbone infrastructure. This concern is already starting to bite. According to recent research, 82% of UK DC operators have already delayed new facilities or expansions because of limited access to high-capacity fiber infrastructure.

Take the UK government’s compute ambitions. The UK has said it will need at least 6GW of AI-capable data center capacity by 2030 to support the growing demands of AI. That is a serious statement of intent, but the gap between ambition and deliverability is still understated. The UK’s AI ambitions are often framed in terms of compute capacity, rather than the connectivity and required to make those investments viable.

None of this makes the UK’s AI ambitions unrealistic. But it does mean fiber can’t be treated as an afterthought. Data-center operators, hyperscalers and network providers need to plan connectivity earlier. Developing a clearer view of where capacity exists and where new resilient routes are needed, particularly in more regional locations outside of London or where the landscape is more challenging for development. Alongside how quickly they can be made commercially available.

Interestingly, in recent months we have seen a change in the approach to fiber emerging. Much earlier engagement from the DC developer/operators on fiber availability and timeline to deliver, along with a significant increase in the capacity required from day one, with a much steeper ramp in uptake.

This tells us two things, the forecast in uptake and data movement has shifted, as has the move to further de-risk a development by getting assurance on fiber/connectivity at a much earlier stage.

Check out our guide to the best business cloud storage services .

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