As Cyber Strikes Mount, What Happens in Ukraine Doesn’t Stay in Ukraine
The scale of Russia’s cyber-attacks in Ukraine swelled in the first quarter of 2023, a top Ukrainian official told a gathering of top cyber security experts at the Cyber Initiatives Group Spring Summit on Wednesday; part of a new phase of the war to accompany an apparently stalled Russian ground campaign.
“Conventional warfare and cyber warfare are integrated things,” said Col. Ivan Kalabashkin, Acting Deputy Head of the Cybersecurity Department in the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), who detailed the nature of simultaneous Russian missile and cyber strikes against Ukrainian military positions and critical infrastructure, including recent strikes at a nuclear facility near Kyiv.
In 2022, Ukraine reported 4,500 such strikes and related incidents. That number is already at nearly 1,200 in just the first three months of 2023, Kalabashkin said. Ukraine is also dealing with around 1,000 Russian psychological and disinformation operations every month, he added.
Many of these propaganda campaigns now orient around the battle for Bakhmut, a small eastern city that has been a focal point of recent fighting. Russian forces have encircled the city but have been unable to force a Ukrainian withdraw.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar addressed those operations on Wednesday, saying Russia is currently focused on three principal tasks in mass media: 1.) the undermining of civil-military trust, 2.) the discouraging of the Ukrainian army, and 3.) attempting to provoke battlefield mistakes.
“Our military command, not the Russian psychological operations, will determine how long Bakhmut will be defended,” Maliar added.
And yet as the battle for Bakhmut rages, broader security questions are also being raised, not just about the evolving nature of hybrid warfare, but also about the level of public and private sector preparedness in the U.S. That preparedness includes evolving regulatory and law enforcement frameworks that govern and protect the comparably more digitally-connected societies in the West.
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