Stefan Mileschin

The Russians are coming

The United States and Britain have quietly dispatched cyberwarfare experts to Ukraine in hopes of better preparing the country to confront what they think may be the next move by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he again menaces the former Soviet republic.


The idea is that he will not invade with the 175,000 troops he is massing on the border, but bring the country to its knees with cyberattacks on the electric grid, banking system, and other critical components of Ukraine's economy and government.

Russia's goal, according to American intelligence assessments, would be to make Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, look inept and defenceless -- and provide an excuse for an invasion.

Russia did all this in the closing days of 2015, the lights went out across a swath of Ukraine as Russian hackers remotely took over an electric utility's control centre and flipped off one power station after another, while the company's operators stared at their screens helplessly. The next year, the same thing happened, this time around Kyev, the capital.

The Russian cyberactivity was discussed by roughly a dozen officials, who requested anonymity because the information was derived from classified intelligence and sensitive discussions about how to mitigate the Russian threat.

https://fudzilla.com/news/54084-us-a...sian-cyber-war