When it comes to the actual war on the ground, Russian forces have been astoundingly incompetent.
Some of it is due to extraordinary bad planning that was made on the assumption that Russia would simply roll into Kyiv and enjoy the parades. Russian intelligence was bad, their logistics were miserable, and the performance of their military overall has just been staggeringly poor. Yes, as the pundits at the U.S. War College once said, “quantity has a quality all its own,” and Russia enjoys a large numerical edge over Ukraine, but so far that quantity-quality hasn’t made up for a military that seems intent on doing everything wrong. It’s been over 70 years since the last time the Russian army had to face a significant fight against an opposing convention force, and they seem to have spent that time watching the own propaganda rather than making plans.
It’s not just the boots-on-the-ground end of the war where Russian inefficiency has been surprising. So far, Russia hasn’t demonstrated any particular use for what was supposed to be one of their signature strengths—cyberwarfare. Yes, close to a million people in Ukraine are currently without power, but that’s because of blunt force trauma to their power supply, not any sort of clever hack. Even if Russia has been able to slide some of their bot armies to servers in India and elsewhere, the extent of their power seems to be getting Tucker Carlson and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie to repeat their talking points. And really, they didn’t need any magic to pull that off.
But Russia may be doing better in this fight that we might assume.
As The Washington Post reports, Russia’s cyber-warriors were clearly preparing for this event months in advance. Last September, agents from various post-KGB agencies threatened Russia-based executives from both Google and Apple, bullying them into removing apps with physical threats. By limiting access to information that failed to reflect the party line, they were laying “the groundwork for the Soviet-style suppression of free expression.”
What’s the outcome of the digital conflict? From the Western side, all may appear peaceful, but that’s not the point of this particular fight. Russia’s cyberwar is being conducted against Russians. In particular, it’s goal is to sever connections between Russians and the rest the world, preventing them from accessing any social media or online news that isn’t singing the glories of Vladimir Putin and praising the victories of the Russian — no, make that Soviet — military.
Years of experience with China’s Great Firewall shows that such efforts are never perfect. However, they can be more than sufficient. Most people are not going to hack their phones or risk prison just to get unfettered access to Twitter or Facebook. The Silicon Curtain is a key element to assuring that Putin’s War retains majority support in Russia. Which it currently enjoys.
“I don’t think it’s an over dramatization to say that Putin is longing for a return to Soviet Union times,” said Institute for Modern Russia founder Pavel Khodorkovsky, “not only in geopolitical power but in terms of total control inside the state.”
That would be the same kind of control that insisted Ukraine was happy and healthy, even as the area was in the middle of the Holodomor, a man-made famine in which millions of Ukrainians were starved to death. Putin’s cyberwar doesn’t seem all this effective from this side of the curtain, but there’s no doubt he hopes to use it to hide a new generation of horrors from those he nominally leads.
Saturday, Mar 12, 2022 · 6:59:43 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
With excellent timing (for me, in any case) the Wall Street Journal has this article on how a group of Polish programmers created a tool that allows anyone to bypass Putin’s cyberwar on his own people to send text messages and emails to people inside Russia.
However, it’s unclear if the people on the other end of this tool will regard these message as anything more than spam or Western propaganda.
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