Russia has pummeled Ukrainian cities with missile and drone strikes for much of the past month, targeting civilians and large swaths of the country’s critical infrastructure.
By Monday, 40% of Kyiv residents were left without water, and widespread power outages were reported across the country. On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of “energy terrorism” and said that about 4.5 million Ukrainian consumers were temporarily disconnected from the power supply.
The destruction exemplifies how indiscriminate bombing remains the Kremlin’s preferred tactic eight months into its war on Ukraine. Moscow’s vaunted hacking capabilities, meanwhile, play a peripheral, rather than central, role in the Kremlin’s efforts to dismantle Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
“Why burn your cyber capabilities, if you’re able to accomplish the same goals through kinetic attacks?” a senior US official told CNN.
But experts who spoke to CNN suggest there is likely more to the question of why Russia’s cyberattacks haven’t made 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 pull that sh*t off between their aviation, artillery and ground assault forces.”
A lack of verifiable information about successful cyberattacks during the war complicates the picture.
A Western official focused on cybersecurity said the Ukrainians are likely not publicly revealing the full extent of Russian hacks and their correlation with Russian missile strikes. That could deprive Russia of insights into the efficacy of their cyber operations, and in turn affect Russia’s war planning, the official said.
To be sure, a flurry of suspected Russian cyberattacks have hit various Ukrainian industries, and some of the hacks have correlated with Russia’s military objectives. But the kind of high-impact hack that takes out power or transportation networks have largely been missing.
That’s a stark contrast to 2015 and 2016 when, following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, it was Russian military hackers, not bombs, that plunged more than a quarter million Ukrainians into darkness.
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