Wired
April 29, 2022
When Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow’s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling. Two months on, however, Kyiv has not only managed to keep the country online amidst a deluge of hacking attempts, but it has brought the fight back to Russia.
Even Ukrainian officials are surprised by how ineffective Russia’s digital war has been.
“I think that the root cause of this is the difference between our systems,” says Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s 31-year-old minister for digital transformation. “Because the Russian system is centralized. It’s monopolized. And it leads to the scale of corruption and graft that is becoming increasingly apparent as the war continues.”
Speaking to WIRED from near Kyiv, Fedorov says his country has been preparing for this moment since Russia first invaded in 2014. “We have had eight years,” he says.
In recent weeks, Fedorov and the Ukrainian government have deployed the controversial face recognition program ClearviewAI to identify killed and captured Russian soldiers. They have deployed thousands of Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals to keep the country connected, even amid Russian bombardment. They have crowdsourced intelligence collection, letting ordinary Ukrainians report troop movements. And, perhaps most critically, they have beaten back aggressive attempts to knock offline their internet, energy, and financial systems.
Fedorov, who also serves as deputy prime minister, ran Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky’s wildly successful election campaign in 2019, winning by nearly 50 points in the second round against incumbent Petro Poroshenko. He did so, in part, by leveraging authentic selfie videos to market the former comedian as an unconventional politician who eschews the normal trappings of politics. It’s exactly that style of video that Zelensky has uploaded regularly from the streets of Kyiv in recent weeks, offering a stark contrast with Putin’s stiff proclamations inside his palatial offices.
Ukraine has brought the war home to Russia in more cutting ways. In March, Reuters reported that Ukraine had purchased face recognition software from American company Clearview AI to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in action—Kyiv later acknowledged that they were using this information to contact the families of the dead soldiers.
“We are pursuing two goals here,” Fedorov says. “First is: We are notifying their relatives, and telling them, basically, that it’s not a very good idea to go to war with Ukraine. So that serves as a cautionary tale. And secondly, it’s a humanitarian purpose—just telling them where their relatives, or friends, or children are so that they don’t try to get this information from the Russian authorities. Because, more often than not, they can’t.”
That decision hasn’t come without criticism. Contacting the families of soldiers killed in battle could be seen as harassment. Others have pointed out that being deployed in Ukraine is a PR coup for ClearviewAI, which has been embroiled in scandal over its liberal use by police forces across North America.
Fedorov, for his part, says Russia “can spin this whatever way they want. But the fact of the matter is, there are tens of thousands of Russians dying in Ukraine, and we are just providing this information to their families because that serves, among other things, a humanitarian purpose.”
There is a propaganda element to Kyiv’s use of face recognition technology as well.
“This facial recognition plays to our, let’s say, to our advantage in the information space,” Fedorov says. Moscow has projected the image of a professional and volunteer fighting force. “We’re trying to say that, for example, Russia is sending conscripts; we are proving that and justifying that with a lot of factual information. We can give you a list of hundreds of people who are 18 and 19 years old, with their names and with their birth dates and how and where specifically, they were conscripted. So that gives some substance to our claims.”
Fedorov says the utility goes beyond just identifying the dead.
“One interesting case study of how we used Clearview AI,” Fedorov says. “There was a man who was found in a Ukrainian hospital, claiming that he was a Ukrainian soldier who suffered from shell shock or some kind of trauma and that he forgot everything. And he was claiming that he was Ukrainian. So the doctor sent the picture to us, and we were able to ID him in a matter of minutes. We found his social network profile, and we established that he was Russian and, of course, he was brought to responsibility.”
Ukrainian officials have said that the frequency of Russian cyberattacks tripled immediately prior to the war, and they have aggressively targeted critical infrastructure since the war began.
But Viktor Zhora, deputy head of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, says Moscow may have maxed out its ability to launch attacks. “Russian cyber operations likely reached their full potential,” he says.
Zhora told WIRED that years of training, exercises, and cooperation with NATO have made Ukraine far more resilient to cyberattacks. Some attacks are easier to defend against than others—as we spoke, Zhora said he was monitoring an active attack on the state administration of Lviv, which had been publicly announced by Russia hours earlier.
But Zhora stresses that while it is wrong to overestimate how powerful Russia’s cyber capabilities are, it would also be wrong to underestimate its more “sophisticated” operations. “We should continue to observe their potential, like Sandworm, like Fancy Bear, like Gamaredon, many other groups that are still active, and still very dangerous,” he says, referring to a number of Russian government hacker groups.
Brandon Valeriano, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in cyber operations, says offensive cyber operations don’t mesh well with traditional, kinetic warfare. At best, he says, “they’re enabling, they’re complimentary … they don’t transform it.”
Valeriano points to a slowdown in the tempo of Russian-backed cyberattacks targeting the United States as evidence that Moscow’s capacity isn’t as expansive as some have assessed. “They’re not organized for offensive cyber operations in the way that we think they are,” he says