For years, the Russians have waged a new type of digital warfare against Ukraine. They've sent threatening texts to soldiers, knocked out government websites and spread harmful disinformation.
On Wednesday, a few days before the U.S. pulled nearly all its diplomats from Kyiv from fear of a Russian attack, a 47-year-old Ukrainian soldier named Vita pulled back from the eyepiece of a Soviet-era periscope. Standing in a trench in ankle-high mud, she hugged an old Kalashnikov to her chest and stared out ahead.filled with buried landmines, all covered with a fresh coat of white snow.
Top: Vita, 47, an active-duty Ukrainian Armed Forces soldier from Khmelnitsky, holds a Kalashnikov and a Soviet-era periscope at her post in the trenches. Bottom: Equipment in the Ukrainian trenches. A Ukrainian soldier and a camera look out over no man's land, toward the area occupied by Russia-backed separatists.
Another man approached in digital camouflage, his hands bundled into the kangaroo pocket of a sweatshirt. He was part of a reconnaissance team. He ordered the soldiers who had their cell phone location turned on to switch it off, immediately. “Separatists radio devices are tuned into the units and are locating phones,” he said.
Andri Rymaruk, 41, who served for 18 months in 2015 and 2016 as a private in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, had a few days earlier told me about how, during his active duty, he had received text messages from the Russian-backed separatists across no-man’s land.“Surrender, we will defeat you anyway, this is our land and you are Ukrainian fascists.”
Meanwhile, the Russian military has relocated more electronic warfare equipment to the borders with Ukraine, such as the Leer-3 RB-341V, a drone-based system that can monitor cellular and data transmission networks, suppress wireless communications, locate electromagnetic emission sources and even send text messages to front-line soldiers.that can replicate or fight back against these attacks.
“You can’t separate the military from the economy from the technology. That’s why they call it hybrid warfare. Russia, they own or operate Ukrainian cellular companies, banks, electricity,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told me. “They don’t need to hack anything. It’s a secret war conducted by agents of influence.”
“Ukraine is on the front line of cyber aggression,” Victor Zhora, deputy chair of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, told me as he ran between meetings with parliament officials. He said the number of attacks grows by ten percent every quarter. Top: Igor Yaschenko, founder of the Trizub FM radio station, enjoys his morning coffee in a house in the grey zone in eastern Ukraine. Trizub FM is one of the few pro-Ukrainian stations broadcasting in the front line area and the Russian-controlled territories. Bottom left: Yaschenko shows his first radio controller and the frequencies his station has had to change to in order to evade Russian signal-blocking technology.
Yaschenko broadcasting from his home. The former Soviet Army office also runs a free dental clinic for Ukrainian soldiers. He bought an even bigger antenna and a more powerful transmitter. But Yaschenko admitted there were limitations, both material and philosophical. To spread division in Ukraine, the Kremlin relies on what some experts have called a “firehose of falsehood,” a propaganda technique that bombards the public with reams of lies and conspiracy theories, whether through pro-Russian media outletsalleged ties to the Kremlin and regularly print pro-Russian propaganda.
“This administration has shown quite a remarkable degree of flexibility in getting inside Russian information loops and interfering with them in a really good way. At least when it comes to fighting hybrid wars we do seem to be catching up a bit,” Frederick W. Kagan, a former professor of military history at West Point, told me. “We haven’t seen that before. And the Russians haven’t seen that before. The Russians weren’t ready for that.
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