Maidan Community Sector, Lviv: Dear friends! By annexing Crimea, Russia has carried out an act of aggression against Ukraine. Currently Russia is transferring terrorist and sabotage groups to Eastern Ukraine. Russia aims to prevent legitimate presidential elections from happening. Everyday life in Eastern Ukraine has turned into a continuous nightmare in the middle of Europe. Our country is being destroyed right before our eyes. We therefore take the courage to inform you about current events in Ukraine. This is just another point of view. We will do our best to remain objective. June 10 – Russian terrorists, who present themselves as members of the First Luhansk Cossack Sotnia, have installed a roadblock near Ukrainian-Russian border crossing Dovzhanskyi. Ukraine is unable to control a significant part of the border, allowing for machinery and terrorists to cross over from Russia. Most Ukrainian border crossings posts are surrounded by terrorists. June 10 – Advisor to the President of Russia Sergey Glazyev, is proposing to crush Ukrainian Army in order to hinder its strengthening. We currently have the opportunity to do it, we will not be able to do it in six months, said Glazyev. June 10 – It is planned that twenty fighter aircraft Su-27 will be permanently stationed in Belbek airport (Crimea) by the end of 2014. Instead of any tourists. June 10 – Boris Lozhkin has been appointed as the Chief of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine. Mr.Lozhkin used to be Poroshenkos business partner – together they purchased KP-Media (magazine and website Korrespondent, Bigmir portal) from an American entrepreneur Jed Sunden. Lozhkin was also managing Poroshenkos radio stations. June 10 – Russia is ready to facilitate internal dialogue in Ukraine and is hoping that Petro Poroshenko will provide such an opportunity, stated the Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Lavrov after a meeting with his colleagues from Poland and Germany. At the same time Russias demands havent changed – federalization or outright disintegration of Ukraine, negotiations with Russian terrorists, no NATO membership or cooperation for Ukraine. Thus Russia is going into great lengths in order to keep the conflict in Donbas thriving forever. Russia wants to control Ukraine and halt its development. P.S.: Please spread this appeal as much as possible. Sydney J. Freedberg Jr Russias Information War: Latvian Ambassador, Finnish Strategist Warn On Cyber LATVIAN EMBASSY, WASHINGTON: We are neighbors of Russia and we have always been realists, Ambassador Andris Razans told me. Sometimes we might be characterized as alarmists, troublemakers, etc., but I think we are realists. Even as President Obama exchanges tense words with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of todays D-Day anniversary ceremony, many Americans and Western Europeans still look atRussian aggression in Ukraine with bafflement and ask how can this be happening? For many in the smaller eastern nations with long memories of living in Moscows shadow, the response is more like we told you so. The Latvian ambassador to Washington was too, well, diplomatic to say this out loud, but then he hardly had to: For our interview, he sat directly under the photos of his predecessors – many of whom represented the government-in-exile that kept the embassy open during the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States, 1940-1991. This is a very vivid memory, Amb. Razans told me. For older Latvians in particular, the Russian annexation of Crimea triggers flashbacks to the Soviet takeover of their own country 74 years ago. At the same time, it has been a very different kind of warfare, [including] the unfolding propaganda campaign that we are facing in Europe, he warned. The question is whether NATO is really up to the task to address all aspects of this warfare. Yes, Russia has finally pulled back significant ground forces from the Ukrainian border, the ambassador acknowledged, but Moscow has other means besides conventional military power. You might be moving your troops away, Razans said, but on the other hand if you continues to support activities that... keep the situation unstable, I think we stand very far away from backing off. Thats where Russias cyber and information warfare capabilities come in. An Invisible Red Army Putin has one asset that Stalin didnt: cyberspace. Russia is much more powerful and more skillful in the cyber arena than we know here in the western world, said Jarno Limnell, a former Finnish military officer whos now director of cybersecurity for Intel Security (formerly the independent firm McAfee). While their campaign against Ukraine has kept a lower profile than the so-called cyber war against Estonia (Latvias neighbor) in 2007, theyve been much more active that most people realize, Limnell told me over coffee during a recent visit to Washington. Consider the Snake spyware program found a few months ago in Ukrainian government systems. According to a BAE study, Snake, aka Turla, has hit Ukraine more than any other country, with attacks increasing 14-fold since 2010. (Incidentally, the second most-targeted country is Lithuania, Latvias other Baltic neighbor). No one can prove Snake comes from Russia, but the match-up between the malwares target list and the Kremlins is awfully suggestive – as is the fact that no Russian system has ever reported being compromised by Snake. Its been called the most sophisticated spying malware thats ever created, Limnell said. But if we started getting reports on Snake in 2010, then, allowing for development time before that, its five to six years old, he said: Russias current cutting-edge software must be much more sophisticated – and we probably havent seen it yet. Limnells best guess – This is estimation and speculation, I have to emphasize that, he said – is that Russian malware is sleeping in all sorts of Ukrainian critical infrastructure, ready to wake up on command and wreak havoc with the electrical grid, financial system, and so on. I believe preparations for these kinds of strategic cyber attacks are being made, he told me. But the Russians have held back because they dont want to escalate the conflict in such a blatant, uncontrollable, and precedent-setting way. Theyve savvy strategists as well as skilled technologists, Limnell said, and know full well it would open Pandoras box. So instead of resorting to scorched-cyberspace tactics, Russia is using the Internet in subtler ways. First of all, the Russians – or perhaps its best to say some patriotic hacker groups – are launching DDOS [distributed denial of service] attacks [and] some cyber espionage, Limnell said. Those activities I would call business as usual, he added: Theyre the kind of things Russian hackers with unclear links to the Kremlin do all the time, its just that Ukraines now experiencing them at a much higher rate. Second and more important is the information war, a central tenet of modern Russian military doctrine. When we think about cyber in the western countries, we usually think about DDOS attacks or cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure, Limnell told me. Cybersecurity is too often treated only as a technological problem... but from the Russian point of view cyber is primarily the information sphere – what the Soviets would have called propaganda. Winning The Online Propaganda War Just like their Soviet predecessors propaganda, however, the Putin regimes information warfare can be ham-handed. While the Kremlin and its allies have traditional, domestic media well in hand – Russian television stations for example – they are faring less well online with Ukrainian and western audiences. Looking at how unprofessional[ly] they are acting for example in social media, with their pictures, with their videos, with their words. I have to say that has been a little disappointing, Limnell tut-tutted. Theres no comparison, he said, to the Israeli Defense Forces cadre of 400 social media soldiers, who move quickly to counter pro-Palestinian messages. Amb. Razans was less sanguine. What does it mean for freedom and openness and the right of people to receive uncontrolled information [when] this open information space is penetrated by clear propaganda instruments, instruments of modern warfare? he asked. (With the largest percentage of ethnic Russians of the Baltic states, Latvia has particular cause for concern about incitements coming form the Kremlin). The West relies on market-driven private media, he told me, but against a propaganda campaign orchestrated by a national government, that may not be enough. Whats the alternative? I think the West in general possesses the answers [already], Razans told me. As a small boy in the Soviet Union, I remember vividly my father listening each and every evening at seven pm, turning on the radio for the Voice of AmericaLatvian broadcast... That was extremely popular and I think that was great success. Today, of course, people get news in a different way, the ambassador said, but that simply means we need to reassess Soviet-era successes and update our information warfare methods for the online age. Of course, propaganda and counter-propaganda are not terms most Americans are comfortable with. Theyre not activities most American pundits even consider part of cyberwarfare, in all its different, disputed definitions. But maybe they should. I hate the word cyberwar because we should never separate the cyber dimension, Limnell told me. Cyberspace isnt some high-tech fairyland separate from the physical world, nor are cyber conflicts mere technical matters to treat in isolation from the strategic context. Clausewitz famously said that warfare is merely the continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means, Limnell said: Cyber is one of those other means. breakingdefense
Posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2014 13:58:02 +0000
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