In multiple channels I keep getting updates about a “hidden” cyber war, with “little” visibility” and how “quiet” attacks are when they run over networks instead of roads or through forests.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Ukraine war is the loudest and most obvious integration of cyber (information technology) into conflict I have ever seen.

To be fair, I have studied war for more than three decades and earned two degrees in the topic before spending all my professional life engaged in many forms of hot and cold power disputes related to technology.

Perhaps I see things differently.

It reminds me, for example, of my post about the Allied troops laughing out loud in 1942 about how incompetent Rommel was, versus people today trying to see Rommel as something more than a failure.

Perhaps someday in the future a historian will read the news that I am reading every day now, like I read the news of the past, and wonder who was paying attention.

Let me give an example.

Budanov and I also spoke about the unseen war that is happening over computer networks, and how hackers are now vigorously involved on both sides. This phase of the war began nine days before the invasion, on February 15, when Russian hackers launched an attack on government agencies and Ukrainian banks (“The key issue for the Russians was the disruption of work and the spread of panic”). Recently, he said, Ukrainian intelligence has monitored phishing attacks on his government’s officials by the Belorussian hacking group Ghostwriters, and the Russia-affiliated Fancy Bear group, which also has been blamed for orchestrating the hack of Democratic party e-mails during the 2016 election. Ukraine, he said, has mobilized a large volunteer force of hackers who are targeting their own attacks on Russia’s digital infrastructure.

“Unseen war that is happening over computer networks” is a lot like saying tanks hidden on forested roads.

Did the packet route if no one sniffed it, did the tree fall if no one was there to see? I mean if you aren’t in that forest or standing on that road why would you consider a tank battle anything more than unseen?

Unseen is a word I would use for what is happening in many countries around the world right now being ignored while a very obvious focus is on Ukraine.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this is the regular updates I see where Russian technology and assets are infiltrated by Ukrainian forces.

…hacking some of Russia’s proudest accomplishments (its space program) and most successful technologies (its nuclear research program), the Ukrainian government is sending Putin a message that your cybersecurity systems cannot keep us out, that even your most valuable technological secrets aren’t safe from us, and that if you push us too far, we can do whatever we want to your networks.

Nobody sending such a message wants that message to be unseen, if you get what I mean.

Here is another one.

Anonymous claims it has hacked Russian state TV and streaming services to air footage highlighting the horrors of the war on Ukraine. The secretive vigilante cyber group late Sunday shared footage of channels that are forced to air pro-Kremlin footage instead showing shocking scenes of missile attacks that killed innocent civilians. A message also told Russians, “This war was waged by Putin’s criminal, authoritarian regime on behalf of ordinary Russian citizens.”

Editing content on Russian state TV. That’s huge.

And of course there have been outages as well.

Confirmed: Various #Russia government websites including the Kremlin, State Duma and Ministry of Defense are again down, with real-time network data showing impact to FSO networks consistent with previous cyberattacks.

Even more interesting, in the most controversial and emerging field of cyber conflict (integrity), is how Ukraine has destroyed propaganda and lies of Russia.

In the Russian world, Chechens have the reputation of being particularly effective soldiers. Throughout the invasion, Kadyrov has released videos on his Telegram channel of bearded Chechen troops in Ukraine engaging in brutal firefights and conducting activities on Ukrainian soil. Some Ukrainians have traced locations in these pictures of Kadyrovtsi, as Kadyrov’s men are known, and highlighted that they are in fact in Belarus, far from the front.

Fact checking as a weapon. Integrity can bring a powerful narrative, using geolocation data like a truth bomb that destroys ground oppressors hope to stand upon.

This is Gordon Parks level stuff.

That [weapon] wasn’t no six-shooter. When Gordon Parks had that camera in his hands, that was a bazooka.

The camera was a weapon in the sense it captured knowledge to be seen more widely. Likewise this war is being fought using information captured and disseminated.

The Chechen narrative again was easily unraveled by Ukraine using geolocation and social proximity data.

Budanov said that his department has tracked a contingent of around 25,000 Chechens since the beginning of the war. “We have many informers inside the Chechen ranks. As soon as they start preparing any operation, we know that from our informants,” he said. “When the war started, Russia underwent lots of casualties, and most of these people didn’t even manage to approach Kyiv.” He pointed out that Ukrainian special forces had engaged with a group of looting Chechens near Kyiv the day before we spoke that was only two strong. “We’ve never seen more 20 or 30 Chechens in one place. The concentration is very low.”

And the reverse also is true. Google Maps disabled detailed information sharing.

In the early days of the invasion, The Washington Post revealed how researchers were using this data to track movements. Road blockages and delays signalled exoduses of people, and potential troop movements. But some fear Google Maps could be used to Russia’s advantage, giving details on how busy certain areas are. Google told Reuters that it had consulted with sources, including “regional authorities”, before making the decision.

This is similar to what we saw last year when Israel was being attacked by Hizbullah, not to mention fifteen years ago.

If anything, Russia is demonstrating to the world that they are ripe for power disruption at every level.

Full of fraud, in-fighting and demoralized looters their troops increasingly are in no position to make sound choices about conflict.

…why would you need a hypersonic missile fired from not that far away to hit a building?

I’ll tell you one good reason Russia would use impractical weapons on a target, I mean besides rank incompetence. Russian systems are being abandoned, going offline or unreliable.

Citing U.S. intelligence, three U.S. officials said the United States estimated that Russia’s failure rate varied day-to-day, depended on the type of missile being launched, and could sometimes exceed 50%. Two of them said it reached as high as 60%.

Nothing about the Ukrainian counter-attacks seem quiet to me. Defense of their country, even using latest technology, is far from being hidden or unseen. I’ve never seen anything louder or more in the open. As much as Russians clearly are incompetent clowns in this war, Ukraine deserves credit for its very loud and successful information warfare.

Two things have come to mind since before Russia invaded Ukraine.

1) It would be an incredibly stupid move by Putin. As much as people were warning me that it was coming and officially the buildup was menacing enough to predict an invasion, I did not believe it would happen because it would be a disaster for Russia.

2) Paper Bear. Despite widespread worry about Russian forces having some residual capabilities, deep levels of corruption inherent to dictatorships meant their logistics and technology was sure to fail. Moreover, I didn’t see much evidence of adaptation or learning. The hard work and feedback needed for success are anathema to dictatorships; strong men are typically extremely weak when tested in conditions they can’t cheat.

Clearly I was wrong on the first count as invasion did happen. Being a terrible mistake for Putin wasn’t enough to deter him from invading.

On the second count I was more right, and I’ve had to resist temptation to say “told you so” especially on channels where Americans wildly overestimated Russian ability to execute on anything other than basic looting.

This has now been documented better by the NYT than I could have ever said it.

… shows the pitfalls of Putin’s top-down governance, in which officials and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.

Even though multiple U.S. officials have for multiple days said they expect Russia to adapt to its failures, I have seen the opposite. The culture is devoid of adaptation by design, in order to ensure fealty to Putin.

That same NYT article goes on to say that Putin’s messaging is now that it is an overabundance of concern for Ukrainian civilians to blame for slow progress, and also that it is going exactly to plan.

Clearly anyone with even the least ability to adapt to a situation and think independently would immediately recognize that as garbage propaganda.

And there’s the rub.

The Russian military death toll is unofficially headed over 10,000, nearing the same number of lives they lost over a decade in Chechnya.

It becomes increasingly difficult to cover that up, not to mention explain away a high death toll even among top Russian military leaders.

The deaths reflect operational security failures as well as the challenges of the Russian military’s top-heavy command structure in the face of a much nimbler Ukrainian fighting force. […] “Continuing to lose senior leaders is not good,” he said in an email. “Eventually, loss of leadership affects morale, fighting prowess and effectiveness.”

When morale and effectiveness starts out so low, it’s now a question of how Russia will keep things going at all. History suggests that there will be increasingly hostile speech and greater war crimes, increasing suffering.

In Chechnya and Syria dominance manifested in ruthless scorched-earth campaigns against civilians.

Ukraine however is rolling differently as Russia attempted a complex and rapid mobilization without having much of a clue.

“Even Stalin had an idea,” she said…to underscore Putin’s failure to articulate a reason for invading Ukraine.

Fukiyama’s March 10th prediction is most interesting to me because he suggested morale weakness may cause an abrupt end to Russian force.

The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.

It may already be coming true, according to the latest reports.

“We shot at the first vehicle, and when it exploded the column stopped,” he says. “(Russian soldiers) ran away and we took their military equipment.” According to Golodov and his men, this is a common occurrence on the battlefield. “Russian soldiers are frightened, demoralized. They are afraid to part with each other, because they are being shot at from every bush,” he says. He says some seem to be very young and inexperienced: “Most of them do not know or understand why they are here.”

However, this doesn’t seem to take into account that Putin may attempt to boost morale by engaging in ever more destructive war crimes.

The intelligence report says Russia intends its ‘total destruction’ of Mariupol to ‘serve as a warning to other cities’. It said: ‘The pattern of destruction of food and water supplies, targeting of civilians, indiscriminate use of firepower to advance, is already being repeated elsewhere. This is based on effective lessons learned [by the Russians] in Syria.’

I don’t believe Russia is in any position to learn, but instead are prone to repetition and mysticism/fear. Thus dehumanization of people and targeting civilian areas is likely to increase as a form of desperation to demonstrate power (e.g. give demoralized troops a “reason” to be there), given how a paper bear has been blown away by any real resistance.

Not only is there mounting evidence that Russians didn’t think Putin would actually invade Russia, but that Putin is actively trying to censor obvious words used to criticize his failures.

Since March 4, 2022, censorship has been introduced in Russia : for anti-war statements, you can get up to 15 years in prison. It is also forbidden to call a war a war.

On March 10-13, we conducted a nationwide telephone survey, in which 1811 respondents took part (full data is available in the public domain). What did we see?

Respondents increasingly refuse to answer direct questions and give their place of residence, explaining that they do not want to go to prison.

This means that opinion polls no longer reflect real opinions. But thanks to them, you can find out the degree of intimidation of the respondents.

A country was called not a country and now it has become even more impossible to discuss Ukraine publicly in Russia because it now is a crime to call a war a war.

Much of the analysis I have seen so far about this misses the three points that (1) the Russians didn’t think Putin was so stupid he would go to war with Russia (given Putin claimed forever that Ukraine wasn’t a thing), (2) that Putin is necessarily surrounded by sycophants and incompetence (due to corruption and fraud inextricable from dictatorships that centralize power), and (3) that Russians aren’t happy about it, especially as their country looks more and more like Venezuela, but have limited methods or means for opposition.

More to the point perhaps is that Russian military intelligence has clumsily been trying to position a war they started as something right out of a white supremacist meme.

They want people to believe that Russia is a victim and its invasion of a neighboring state was “forced” upon them. This is similar to “pre-emptive” thinking of Nazi Germany, which allowed Hitler to advocate invasion of neighboring countries to stop a future attack that was completely fictionalized.

Also they want people believe that Russia is on a mission to destroy the “world-order” that is conspiring against them. This is similar to the racist thinking of Nazi Germany, which emboldened Hitler to perpetrate war crimes and genocide.

These two memes are variations of the theme that Russia is ready to go to extreme measures and ignore boundaries because it is “preserving” something and so fearful it must act out of desperation.

A counter-message narrative that comes from inside Russia thus has to be exceptionally careful to acknowledge the closed minds, closed borders of an insecure and fearful state.

Not only can broad swaths of messages be criminalized by Russia, as if it’s 1830s America trying to stop abolition of slavery, it might also have a problem of friendly-fire.
Recently I wrote about “protestware” so incredibly stupid that it blindly targeted Russian systems based on IP address alone and destroyed their files. In doing so, such un-intelligent acts of malice are likely to destroy systems necessary to help Russians trying to speak out against Russian abuses of power.