US intelligence already has evidence that Russia launched a campaign of aggression against Ukraine. Perhaps the 100,000 soldiers deployed on the border have not crossed it, and that finally Vladimir Putin decide against a conventional incursion by land, but as US diplomacy confirmed this week, the Kremlin already has an entire campaign of disinformation Y cyber attacks within what experts in armed conflicts usually call «hybrid warfare». That is exactly the term used by the Ukrainian government on Monday after a colossal cyberattack against its servers that bears the mark of Russia.
regarding the Russian disinformation campaign on Ukraine. “Russian military and intelligence entities engage in these activities throughout Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem, in order to execute malicious operations on social networks, the use of expressly or implicitly allied digital media, the introduction of disinformation in the programming in radio and television media, the organization of conferences designed to influence attendees to mistakenly believe that Ukraine, and not Russia, is to blame for the escalation of tensions in the region.
On the same day, before the American chief diplomat met with his Russian counterpart in Geneva, the White House sanctioned four Ukrainian officials, including two serving lawmakers, for joining a Russian campaign to create a pretext for a invasion from Ukraine. Lawmakers Taras Kozak and Oleh Voloshyn and the two former officials Volodimir Oliynyk and Vladimir Sivkovich are sanctioned for working for the FSB, formerly KGB, to create instability in Ukraine. Kozak in particular is accused of using various media outlets he owns to denigrate members of the Ukrainian president’s inner circle. Volodimir Zelensky and amplifying lies to justify a Russian invasion.
The US Treasury, which is the one who has sanctioned them, affirms that Kozak’s media accuses Zelenski of corruption and of having failed in handling the pandemic, creating a breeding ground for Russian intervention. In addition, Kozak has fueled in his media the false theories of another sanctioned Ukrainian, Andrei Derkach, about electoral fraud in the 2020 US presidential campaign. EE.UU. He has denounced that Russia was running a campaign to benefit Donald Trump and harm the Democratic candidates, who are perceived as less tolerant of the Kremlin.
According to the US Secretary of State, Antony Blink, on Thursday: “Russia has used hybrid tactics, including disinformation and digital control campaigns, to destabilize Ukraine.” Already on January 14, the Government of Ukraine denounced a massive cyberattack against its websites and servers. On the website of the Foreign Ministry, the hackers left the following message in Russian, Ukrainian and Polish: “Ukrainians! Your personal data was posted on the network. The information about you has been made public.” The Ukrainian government denied that it had lost citizen data. As reported later by the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security of Ukraine, there is evidence of a “Russian footprint” hidden behind the cyberattack, with an attempt to “hold Poland responsible.”
infected servers
Microsoft revealed on Monday that dozens of Ukrainian government agency computer systems have been infected with malware, destructive code. Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Development later said that “all evidence indicates that Russia is behind the cyberattack. Moscow continues the hybrid war.
Along with these direct attacks, there is a great war of Russian disinformation, biased and malicious information disguised as viral writings on social networks or news in use on websites controlled directly or indirectly by the Kremlin. According to the State Department report released Thursday, there are a number of consistent narratives in that fake news: That Ukraine and Ukrainian government officials are the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine relationship; that the West is pushing Ukraine into conflict; that Russia defends ethnic Russians in Ukraine, or that the OTAN it has waged a plot against Russia since the Cold War ended, surrounding Russia with forces, reneging on alleged promises not to expand, and threatening Russia’s security with the possibility of Ukraine joining the Alliance.
Those narratives are part of what experts consider a new type of conflict. According to Elina Lange-Ionatamisvili, author of a detailed report on Russian disinformation in Ukraine published by NATO’s Center for Strategic Communications, “the information campaign and related military actions by Russia correspond to the characteristics of a new way of war where the lines between peace and war, the foreign military force and the local self-defense groups are blurred and the main space of battle has moved from the physical terrain to the terrain of feelings and emotions of the populations in question» . That is the definition of hybrid warfare.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism