The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

Author:Timothy Snyder [Snyder, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

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Russia’s war against Ukraine was called a “hybrid war.” The problem with phrasings in which the noun “war” is qualified by an adjective such as “hybrid” is that they sound like “war minus” when what they really mean is “war plus.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a regular war, as well as a partisan campaign to induce Ukrainian citizens to fight against the Ukrainian army. In addition to that, the Russian campaign against Ukraine was also the broadest cyber offensive in history.

In May 2014, the website of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission was rigged to display an image showing that a nationalist (who had in fact received less than 1% of the vote) had won the presidential election. Ukrainian authorities caught the hack at the last moment. Unaware that the hack had been spotted, Russian television transmitted the very same graphic as it announced, falsely, that the nationalist had been elected president of Ukraine. In autumn 2015, hackers attacked Ukrainian media companies and the Ukrainian railway system. That December, hackers brought down three transmission stations of the Ukrainian power grid, knocking out fifty substations and denying power to a quarter million people. In autumn 2016, hackers attacked the Ukrainian railway, seaport authority, treasury, and the ministries of finance, infrastructure, and defense. They also carried out a second and far more sophisticated attack on the Ukrainian power grid, bringing down a transmission station in Kyiv.

This cyberwar made no headlines in the West at the time, but it represented the future of warfare. Beginning in late 2014, Russia penetrated the email network of the White House, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and multiple American nongovernmental organizations. Malware that caused blackouts in Ukraine was also planted in the American power grid. Only in 2016, when Russian hacks entered American presidential politics, would Americans begin to pay attention.

The most remarkable element of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine was the information war designed to undermine factuality while insisting on innocence. It, too, continued in the United States, with greater sophistication and more impressive results than in Ukraine. Ukraine lost the information war to Russia in the sense that others did not understand Ukraine’s predicament. In general, Ukrainian citizens did. The same cannot be said of Americans.

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