Russia has attacked Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones for much of the past month, targeting civilians and large swaths of the country’s infrastructure, leaving 40% of Kiev residents without water and triggering widespread power outages across the country on Monday. thursday (31).
On Thursday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of “energy terrorism” and said that some 4.5 million Ukrainian consumers had been temporarily disconnected from power supplies.
The destruction exemplifies how indiscriminate bombing remains the Kremlin’s tactic eight months after its war with Ukraine. Moscow’s esteemed hacking capabilities, meanwhile, play a peripheral rather than central role in the Kremlin’s efforts to dismantle critical Ukrainian infrastructure.
“Why burn your cyber resources when you can achieve the same goals through kinetic attacks?” a senior US official told CNN .
However, experts who spoke to the CNN suggest that there are likely more reasons why Russia’s cyberattacks have not had a more visible impact on the battlefield.
Effectively combining cyber and kinetic operations “requires a high degree of integrated planning and execution,” argued a US military official who focuses on cyber defense. “The Russians can’t even do that among their aviation, artillery and ground assault forces,” he added.
The lack of verifiable information about successful cyberattacks during the war complicates the picture. A Western official focused on cybersecurity said Ukrainians are likely not revealing the full extent of Russian hacking and its correlation to Russian missile attacks.
This could deprive Russia of feedback on the effectiveness of its cyber operations and, in turn, affect Russia’s war planning, the official said.
To be sure, alleged Russian cyber attacks hit various Ukrainian industries, and some of the hacks have correlated with Russia’s military objectives. But the kind of high-impact hackers that take away power or transport networks are largely absent.
This is in stark contrast to 2015 and 2016, when, after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, it was Russian military hackers, not bombs, that plunged more than a quarter of a million Ukrainians into darkness.
*Posted by Daniel Reis
Source: CNN Brasil
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