Written by: David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes
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 center 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 Kyiv, the capital.
Now 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: Not an invasion with the 175,000 troops he is massing on the border, but cyberattacks that take down the electric grid, the banking system, and other critical components of Ukraine’s economy and government.
Russia’s goal, according to US intelligence assessments, would be to make Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, look inept and defenceless — and perhaps provide an excuse for an invasion.
“It’s a widespread campaign targeting numerous Ukrainian government agencies, including internal affairs — the national police — and their electric utilities,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a leading investigator of Russian cyberactivity and the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a new research group in Washington.
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. Those conversations have focused on whether Putin thinks that a crippling of Ukraine’s infrastructure could be his best hope of achieving his primary goal: ousting the Ukrainian government and replacing it with a puppet leader.
The calculus, one senior intelligence official said, would be that such an attack would not require him to occupy the country — or suffer as many of the sanctions that would almost certainly follow a physical invasion.
US officials declined to describe the cyberteams that have been inserted into Ukraine. In a statement, the Biden administration said only that “we have long supported Ukraine’s efforts to shore up cyberdefenses and increase its cyberresiliency.”