ZOLOTE 4, Eastern Ukraine — 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.
The landscape in front of her was a strip of rolling hillside filled with buried landmines, all covered with a fresh coat of white snow. The tracks of a gray fox, stamped into the white overlay, were all that traversed the deadly stretch. The minefield is effectively the front line of a war that has never been declared — but has also been underway, in some form, for almost eight years.
On the far side of the minefield is the redoubt of pro-Russian separatists, currently occupying large swaths within the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, an area of Eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas. On Vita’s side is a warren of trenches 8 feet deep, dug by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and filled with soldiers and sandbags, with window frames forming a rough canopy overhead. To the north and south, the front line stretches a total of 280 miles.
Vita wore digital camouflage, lipstick and a pair of diamond earrings. (Like most of the soldiers I spoke with, she provided only a first name.) She let her thoughts drift from her 16-year-old son, currently living with his grandmother, to the gnawing boredom of patrol, her head rolling back slightly to glimpse the sky above. She’d been on the front for at least two years, serving in the 24th Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and was resigned to the silence of war and the potential for fatal whispers soaring overhead. In the trench beside her, next to a scrappy young Shepherd-mix panting at the sky, was a white antique side table. Vita placed the periscope on the table, inside the cabinet of which sat a hand grenade.
“There are a lot of snipers now, so we try not to go out,” Vita said. “You can’t see them from here. They’re too far away.”
A sign tacked to the trunk of a tree read, in Ukrainian, “Beware of the sniper! The enemy is watching you!” Several yards down the trench, through the muck of a recent snowmelt, across slippery duckboards into a dugout concealed by an ornate rug, two Ukrainian soldiers warmed themselves by a drumfire. Andrei, 21, who had been on the front for the past year and was not yet a teenager when the Russo-Ukrainian conflict began, lit a cigarette and checked his cellphone. “I don’t follow the news. I don’t worry much,” he said. “If there is a war, then there will be a war, and if not, then no.” On a ledge sat two Soviet-era, TA-57 hard-wire field telephones, the cables for which ran into a nest of wires, then out like runners along the trench parapets, spliced at times with electrical tape, curling toward positions elsewhere.
The old-fashioned setup, the soldiers tell me, is intentional. The high-tech Russian military, which has been supporting the Donbas separatists since the start of the conflict in 2014, can interfere with modern radios and cell-phone signals. Without special encrypted messaging devices that can evade Russian interference, the Ukrainians have resorted to cumbersome wires.
The Western world has been increasingly galvanized by the possibility of a hot war in the former Soviet Union. Over the past eight weeks, Moscow stepped up efforts to bring the total number of troops garrisoned at Ukraine's borders to some 140,000, shipping troops from as far away as Siberia. If Russia invades, which American officials warn is possible in the next few days, Putin would be orchestrating Europe’s biggest land invasion since World War II; sources in Washington estimate as many as 50,000 civilian deaths.
But the daily life along the front line and of residents in cities and towns across the country is a clear reminder that the offensive has already begun — in fact it began years ago. The Russians have for nearly a decade used Ukraine as a proving ground for a new and highly advanced type of hybrid warfare — a digital-meets-traditional kind of fighting defined by a reliance on software, digital hardware and cognitive control that is highly effective, difficult to counter and can reach far beyond the front lines deep into Ukrainian society. It is a type of high-tech conflict that many military experts predict will define the future of war. It has also turned Ukraine, especially its eastern provinces, but also the capital, into a bewildering zone of instability, disinformation and anxiety.
The Russians and their proxies have used digital technology on the battlefield not only to assist artillery in rapidly acquiring and engaging targets, but also to disrupt communications and wage psychological warfare, like sending threatening text messages to soldiers. Beyond the front lines, Russian efforts have knocked out government websites and spread damaging disinformation in towns and cities across the country. Digital warfare has threatened more of Ukrainian society since 2021 than traditional munitions.
As they readied for a full-blown invasion, Ukrainian soldiers told me that Russian forces and Russia-supported proxies are better positioned than they have ever been to marry technology with a potential siege. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which deploys some 25 cameras along the contested border region’s front line, has steadily monitored an increase of Russian electronic warfare equipment in Donbas. (OSCE drones, which take flight to monitor ceasefire agreements, have themselves faced a recent increase in signal interference, from 16 percent at the start of last year to 58 percent by that spring, according to the agency’s reports.)
At the same time, cyberattacks on Ukrainian government websites are growing every quarter, according to Ukrainian officials. The Ukrainians “need to put focus on preparing for hybrid warfare to include cyber-attacks … and the use of social networks to undermine morale and confidence of their forces,” James Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was the supreme allied commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told me recently. “What I worry about the most is Ukrainian reliance on trench warfare in the face of a 21st century Russian force.”
Many in the U.S. military also worry about its own ability to go head-to-head with Russia’s style of hybrid warfare. The Russian government’s digital-savvy capabilities are nothing like that which the U.S. military contended with during the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Syria.
Standing in a trench on a frigid day in February, along with the field telephones and periscopes, I found sticks with strips of cloth tied to their end to snuff out fires, brand-new collapsible stocks on early-model Kalashnikov rifles and handcarts with wire straps for hauling firewood: anachronisms that felt odd in the face of this new kind of warfare. As the soldiers waited for a possible invasion, the forward positions were quiet and largely devoid of rifle and artillery fire. Yet a digital incursion was ongoing, the war already unfolding in silence.
At a billet set a few yards back from the trenches outside a mining town in the Luhansk province, soldiers gathered behind a building, its windows blown out and replaced by mattresses and duvets crammed into holes in the shattered glass. The group laughed and talked, sliding on sheets of ice into mud beneath a camera tower perch raised several stories into the air. One man strutted between the buildings in olive thermal underwear and flip-flops. The mercury dipped below freezing.
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.
Another soldier added: “There was a situation recently. A dude gets a call from his mom and dad saying they got a message that, ‘Your son is dead.’ So people get scared. It happens a lot.”
The 24th Brigade first learned about the danger of carrying cell phones on the front lines years ago. On July 11, 2014, in the town of Zelenopillya, roughly five miles from the Ukrainian border with Russia, the brigade had planned to sever the supply line of the Donbas separatists when electronic warfare caught them by surprise. Witnesses described the scene to me: First there came the humming of an unmanned aerial vehicle able to clone cellular networks to locate active cellphones, followed by cyberattacks against Ukrainian command and control systems. Their communication systems disabled, Ukrainian forces were unable to coordinate with one another. Then, short-range rocket systems from inside Russia disabled two battalions, including T-64 tanks and amphibious tracked vehicles. Three trucks carrying troops exploded. Stumbling from the transport, one soldier clutched his entrails, and shouted for his mother. The attack killed 30 Ukrainians and wounded hundreds and lasted roughly two minutes.
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.
“Soldier go home.”
“Soldier kill your commanding officer.”
“Surrender, we will defeat you anyway, this is our land and you are Ukrainian fascists.”
That was the last message Rymaruk received in spring 2016 while standing on the outskirts of Horlivka, a coal-mining, coke-producing city in Donetsk along the front line. By then Rymaruk was anticipating the end of his service. A few days after he received the message an endless fusillade tore through the unit. It was the first time Rymaruk saw his fellow soldiers killed. “I went around collecting their body parts in a blanket, tying them up and putting them in the car trunk and taking them to the morgue,” he recalled in an interview. “The medics couldn’t get there.”
Russian-supported forces could deploy such personalized propaganda and location tracking thanks to its use of UAVs but also its control of cellphone towers and the cellular companies that provide coverage to much of Ukraine. While Ukrainian officials and soldiers said they have tightened the security of their internal communications since 2014, like with the incorporation of L3Harris secure handheld radios sent by NATO and the U.S., vulnerabilities remain.
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.
The Ukrainian military has little equipment that can replicate or fight back against these attacks. Troops have for much of the conflict relied on generous volunteer donations and the efforts of non-government organizations for everything from tactical body armor to drones and anti-drone weapons and advanced reconnaissance camera systems. Without major government investment in equipment, Ukrainian service members and Western analysts doubt the military, and Ukraine more broadly, will be able to withstand sustained digital attacks that come with a Russian invasion.
“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.”
Not needing to hack anything may be part of Russia’s military strategy, but hackers are also hard at work. Moscow has grown sophisticated in the seamlessness with which it incorporates cyberattacks into its military and social disruption tactics, stirring panic while occasionally causing serious damage that leads to infrastructure and financial losses. In 2014, as Russia illegally annexed Crimea, cyberattacks targeted communication and control elements of the Ukrainian military; on a larger scale, Ukraine’s voting system was hacked and hard drives fried. In 2017, a series of attacks orchestrated through a virus known as NotPetya inflicted $10 billion in damages. It first started as an attack against Ukrainian businesses before going global.
While large-scale attacks make headlines, smaller attacks contribute to a sustained disruption of municipal and government services and infrastructure. Ukraine was the victim of roughly 288,000 cyberattacks in the first 10 months of 2021, according to Ukrainian government official estimates. (As a comparison, traditional munitions were exchanged an average of 67 times each day in the Donbas region last year, according to the OSCE.) It’s unclear whether the attacks originate from the Kremlin, or Russian-backed hacker syndicates, or elsewhere, though many attacks have been attributed to Russia. Between January 13 and 14 this year, Ukrainian government websites were attacked, displaying nothing but a message from the hackers warning residents of Kyiv to “expect the worst.”
“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.
The government’s security service, which struggles to ward off these attacks, wants to centralize internet security in a push to shore up the country’s cyber defenses. But Ukraine’s private sector, which tends to pay more for talent and have more cyber expertise, is reluctant to collaborate on security with a government that has proven so vulnerable to incursion. It also hasn’t helped that Hungary has blocked Ukraine’s requests to join NATO’s cyber defense center. (Both countries have business interests with Russia.) Meanwhile, the country is preparing for a major cyber offensive in the event of a physical Russian invasion. In February, the White House sent its top cybersecurity official to NATO to prepare for disruptions by Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine.
It was breakfast at a house in the grey zone, the traditional space between war and peace, out of immediate danger but close enough to see shelling and rockets from time to time. A bottle of half-drunk Hankey Bannister whiskey was nestled among the condiments on the table, where a group of fighters from the Right Sector, a far-right Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary movement, gathered to eat a meal of boiled pork fat from a glass jar. Sandwiches were crushed in a panini press, then passed around. A man chopped raw onions on a countertop.
Everything in the room had been donated by volunteers: bread, boxes of cookies, microwaves and condiments. The radiator was turned off and the heater contained no fire. Above the refrigerator sat a radio with a Post-it note which read, “105.1 ALWAYS TURN ON.”
Igor Yaschenko, a former Soviet Army officer in his 50s, took me upstairs to a small closet-sized room off the main staircase that tripled as his bedroom, a dentist clinic and a rudimentary radio station. It’s here that he spends his days dispensing pro-Ukrainian messaging and anti-Russian propaganda from station 101.5.
Yaschenko smoked a cigarillo as he showed me the station equipment and broadcast No More by STINX to between 10 and 11 radios early that morning. In the Soviet Army, he had commanded a radio station for transmitting conversations, a mission once reliant on three vehicles: one to carry the station equipment, another to secure the communication channels and a third to transport the antennas and a diesel backup engine.
“Now it all fits into a cell phone,” he said as a cat purred at his feet. “My profession was unnecessary.”
When hostilities began in Ukraine in 2014, Yaschenko would hear separatist radio stations from beyond the front line on that radio above the refrigerator. “It was impossible to listen to it. There were so many Russian radio stations. It made me very sad.” Serendipitously, the Ukrainian military sent an FM radio team to send short broadcasts to troops along the front. Shortly afterward, Yaschenko set up a transmitter, a new antenna, a computer, some of it donated, some of it purchased, and soon he was broadcasting music and notes of encouragement into the Russian-held regions of Donbas.
But music was not enough. “I realized that our radio is not a toy,” Yaschenko told me as he stood by the transmitter. Snow fell from tree branches outside. Red Red Rose by FRAM played on the radio next. In 2016, Yaschenko invited Iryna Dovgan, a prisoner of war who had been held and tortured by Russian insurgents in her home in Donetsk in 2014, to speak on the radio. “She spoke simple words about her home, where a family of militants now lives and has a baby. This baby is lying in the same crib where her baby used to be.”
After that broadcast, Yaschenko says, separatists “burned” his transmitter. “This was done by electronic warfare professionals, who sent an overpowering signal to the transmitter. They did this for a week, two or three times a day, and we lost a signal. That’s when I realized our radio station was a weapon, and it was up to us how far that weapon could shoot.”
He bought an even bigger antenna and a more powerful transmitter. But Yaschenko admitted there were limitations, both material and philosophical.
“We don’t take information warfare as seriously as we should,” Yaschenko told me. “This is a big blunder from our side. We put a transmitter in Avdeevka to jam their radio station Sputnik … but two weeks later they blew our mast off with a missile.” Yaschenko said he is now focused on jamming enemy radio stations along the front line, and could not imagine why the task had been left only to him.
I left the Donbas just as the airspace around the Black Sea became a virtual no-fly zone and traveled to the western city of Kramatorsk, from where I caught a train to Kyiv, the capitol.
Even this far back from the front line, the effects of the digital war were still visible. Misinformation and disinformation have driven wedges in Ukrainian society. One woman in Kyiv told me she fled her home in the Donbas after the separatists took over, but could not find work or assistance in the capitol due to rumors that those in the Donbas had not contested the Russian takeover. People in Kyiv cast her as a “thief” and a “stranger.” Conspiracy theories run rampant in the country: On a walk through a small city near the front line, an older man told me, “Jews and Masons divided us.” Among Ukrainian soldiers, I heard rampant disinformation about the current Ukrainian president and witnessed wide divisions over the cause of the current conflict and whether or not Russia was a friend or an enemy. During one car ride, soldiers discussed “the Jewish issue.” In the same breath they then went on to blame the country's woes on the Azerbaijani diaspora.
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 outlets or Twitter bots or other means. Some of Ukraine’s most trafficked websites have alleged ties to the Kremlin and regularly print pro-Russian propaganda.
“Information and non-kinetic means of warfare are really changing the conflict landscape,” said Justin Sherman, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative. “You’ve seen across the board, whether it’s the Russians or U.S. intelligence, a leaning into the fact that all these different tech mediums are a way to help achieve traditional battlefield ends.”
Combating Putin’s “firehose” is “a challenge for [the U.S.],” a career U.S. intelligence official told me, asking to remain anonymous to discuss internal deliberations and analysis on Putin’s intentions. “Because our logic is not his logic.” And while the U.S. has historically used what it called “public diplomacy,” its own flavor of propaganda, to further its foreign policy agenda abroad, many claim trying to go toe-to-toe with Putin’s information warfare is antithetical to democracy.
Still, because the Kremlin operates on a shaky ground of lies and distortions, the official told me, it is vulnerable to its own techniques and tactics.
Recently, the Biden administration has proven itself able to adapt, rapidly declassifying intelligence information to prevent Russian misinformation. U.S. intelligence and security officials, for example, quickly made public plans by Russian operatives to create a video of a staged atrocity and warned of “saboteurs” sent into the Donbas as a pretext for war. So effective was this new tactic, U.S. intelligence services have intercepted communications between senior Russian military officials frustrated by the continuing disruption.
“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.” There remained little consensus among the current and former government officials and analysts I spoke with on whether a strategy of preemptive information warfare helped to reduce tensions or goad Putin further.
On Friday, the U.S. and United Kingdom told its citizens to depart Ukraine, warning that a preface to a Russian attack would be a staged event to destabilize the country and spark armed conflict. By the time I left on Saturday, on the last KLM flight out of Kyiv, I had personally been feeling the impact of the ongoing hybrid conflict for more than a week. I had switched out one of my SIM cards to a local number when the problems began. They came as minor frustrations first — a slow connection, an unplanned reboot, a dropped phone call. Then I began receiving a slew of phishing emails on a scale I have never before experienced. I received a call from a Ukrainian number (no one but the photographer I worked with had the number) and a two-minute voicemail of faint clicking sounds. Maybe I was just being paranoid. But no fewer than four individuals from Ukraine, and a handful of people I spoke with abroad, began our phone calls by greeting the Russians who, they said, were no doubt listening. One woman in Donbas, reached by phone, quickly hung up, citing her fears over Russian interception.
Whether on the front lines or not, Ukrainians live with the constant knowledge that their systems and technology and borders are under siege, that at the moment of a military action against their country, the internet will likely go dark, their connection to the world severed.
“I have a feeling, a surrealistic feeling,” Oleksandra Matviychuk, who lives in Kyiv, told me. “On one hand, you try to continue your work, but on the other hand you go to medical training in order to learn to stop bleeding and how to make the go bags and do a lot of other things” — things like how to protect personal data and information. “We try to pretend we have a normal life,” she said, “but our normal life is ruined.”
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By: Kenneth R. Rosen
Title: 10 Days Inside Putin’s Invisible War With Ukraine
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/15/10-days-inside-putins-invisible-war-with-ukraine-00008529
Published Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2022 04:30:00 EST
