By Wyatt Reed, The Grayzone, 3/19/26
Israeli military spokeswoman Anna Ukolova has drawn outrage in Moscow after threatening that Russian authorities who “wish Israel ill” could be subject to “elimination,” while suggesting Israel could hack into Russian closed-circuit television cameras to identify and track targets.
Asked by a journalist with Russian radio broadcaster RBC whether Israel had access to Russian traffic cameras, Ukolova declined to answer directly but warned that “Khamenei’s elimination shows our capabilities are serious” and that “no one who wishes us harm will be left aside.”
She added, ominously, “I hope Moscow does not wish Israel ill right now – I’d like to believe that.”
In response to a post by Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who wrote that the IDF spokeswoman threatened that “Russian authorities [will] be killed if they take [an] anti-Israel position,” Ukolova claimed Dugin was spreading “fake news.” But she declined to clarify how her remarks had been incorrectly interpreted.
Ukolova’s statements came just days after it was revealed that a large number of Russian CCTVs were potentially using BriefCam – an Israeli video analysis software that closely matches the description of a program the Netanyahu regime reportedly deployed to track Iranian movements outside the home of Iran’s Supreme Leader before they assassinated him during their February 28 sneak attack.
On March 12, Russian outlet Mash revealed that the Israeli software BriefCam “has been used in Russia by private providers since the 2010s.” Founded at Israel’s Hebrew University in 2007, BriefCam uses AI to let users “review hours of video in minutes” and “make [their] video searchable, actionable and quantifiable.” In 2024, BriefCam was absorbed by a Dutch subsidiary of the Canon Group named Milestone Systems, which publicly pledges to “amplify what organizations of any size can see, do and achieve with video.”
“Our patented VIDEO SYNOPSIS® technology condenses hours of surveillance into a short summary by overlaying multiple events—each tagged with its original timestamp—onto a single frame, letting you filter them by object type and attributes,” the company’s BriefCam page crows. An analysis by Al Jazeera revealed those attributes include “gender, age group, clothing, movement patterns and time spent in a given location.”
Originally deployed by Israel’s Ministry of Housing and Construction to safeguard illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, BriefCam has been used by governments all over the world, including those in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Pakistan, Israel, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, India, Spain, Taiwan. It’s also been deployed in the US, with police in Hartford, Connecticut adopting the software in 2022. In 2025, a French court found the government’s use of BriefCam was illegal, citing multiple violations of French and European privacy laws.
As of publication, BriefCam appears to be incorporated into dozens of so-called “video monitoring systems,” including Milestone’s own VMS XProtect surveillance system.
According to the Russian outlet Mash, a number of prominent Moscow businesses, institutions, and buildings use VMS XProtect surveillance system, including the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a 72-story skyscraper named “Eurasia,” and a huge exhibit space known as the Zotov Center. Though Milestone officially ended operations in Russia in 2022 amid the war in Ukraine, Mash reports that some software distributors in Russia “still offer to install the hacked software and hide this in the documents.”
hmmm this parallel is interesting…
From the outstanding Chomsky Archive which I can only recommend a text from 1991. This part concerns the Samson Option and its origin and potentials:
“(…)
If US interests are reassessed and Washington decides to press Israel beyond what its leadership would accept, Israel does have certain options, despite its extreme dependency on the United States. The nature of these options has been the topic of considerable discussion within Israel. Writing about the matter almost 10 years ago, I quoted Aryeh (Lova) Eliav, one of Israel’s best-known doves, who deplored the attitude of “those who brought Samson complex’ here, according to which we shall kill and bury all the Gentiles around us while we ourselves shall die with them.” Others too regarded the greatest danger facing Israel as the “collective version” of Samson’s revenge against the Philistines, recalling Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s diary entries from the 1950s, in which he recorded the “preaching” of high-level Labor party officials “in favor of acts of madness” and “the diabolical lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire” with “acts of despair and suicide” that will terrify the world as “we go crazy,” if crossed. Israel’s nuclear power, well-known to US authorities for many years, renders such thinking more than empty threats. Writing in 1982, three Israeli strategic analysts observed that Israel’s nuclear capacity included missiles able to reach “many targets in southern USSR,” a threat — real or pretended — that may well be aimed primarily at the United States, putting US planners on notice that pressures on Israel to accede to an unwanted political settlement could lead to an international conflagration. The reasoning was explained further in the Labor party journal Davar, reporting Israel’s reaction to the Saudi peace plan of August 1981, with the “signs of open-mindedness and moderation” that the government of Israel regarded as a serious threat. Israel’s response was to send military jets over the oil fields, a warning to the West of Israel’s capacity to cause immense destruction to the world’s major energy reserves if pressed towards an unwanted peace, Davar reported.37 The world has changed since, but Israel’s “Samson option,” as Seymour Hersh calls it in a recent book, remains alive.
(…)”
The entire piece is worthwhile:
“Middle East Diplomacy: Continuities and Changes”
Noam Chomsky
Z Magazine, December, 1991
https://chomsky.info/199112__/
Kill, kill, kill and bomb, bomb, bomb are the words of Israeli, Russian and American(anti-)political philosophy in our era.