Enlarge / Viktor Zhora from Ukraine’s information protection service, says cyber has become a major component of hybrid warfare. (credit: Dragonflypd.com/Black Hat)

Viktor Zhora, the public face of Ukraine’s success against Russian cyber attacks, received a hero’s welcome earlier this month on stage at Black Hat, the world’s biggest cyber security gathering, in Las Vegas.

“The adversary has trained us a lot since 2014,” the year that Russia annexed Crimea, said the deputy chair at Ukraine’s special communication and information protection service. “We evolved by the time of the full-scale invasion [in February last year] when cyber became a major component of hybrid warfare.”

At an event where IT professionals asked for selfies and one man cried on his shoulder, Zhora also shared a fist-bump with Jen Easterly, the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency. “We take a huge page out of Ukraine’s playbook,” she said. “We’ve probably learned as much from you as you are learning from us.”

Enlarge / How Soviet-era Russia looks inside Atomic Heart , at least at the beginning. (credit: Mundfish / Focus Entertainment)

Ukraine's Digital Ministry has said it will ask Steam, Microsoft, and Sony to remove Atomic Heart from their gaming platforms in Ukraine, and possibly elsewhere, pointing to its retro-Communist aesthetic and reported "Russian roots."

As reported by the Ukrainian tech news/job site Dev.ua ( Google translation ), Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation (which also provided a statement in English to PCGamesN ) writes that Atomic Heart "has Russian roots and romanticizes communist ideology and the Soviet Union." The Ministry cites the game's "toxicity," "potential data collection of users," and use of funds from the game "to conduct a war against Ukraine." The statement asks for an outright ban on the game in Ukraine but calls on other countries to consider "limiting distribution" of the game.

The Ministry also cites "media reports" regarding development funds coming from Russian enterprises and banks under sanction and "systematically important for the Russian government" (according to Google translation).

Enlarge / Local residents access the Internet from the Starlink network, set up by the Ukrainian army on November 13, 2022 in Kherson, Ukraine after the city was liberated from Russian occupation. (credit: Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images )

The list prices of Starlink communications devices have nearly doubled in Ukraine, as mobile networks have started failing under Russia’s assault on the country’s electricity grid and increased demand for the SpaceX-manufactured satellite communication device.

Starlink terminals, which are made by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, will increase in price to $700 for new Ukrainian consumers, according to the company’s website. This represents a rise from about $385 earlier this year, screenshots of past pricing data shared by users inside the country show.

The consumer cost of the monthly subscription to Starlink has fluctuated recently, dropping from about $100 to $60 on Ukraine’s Independence day on August 24 to “reflect local market conditions”, and will now rise to $75.

Enlarge (credit: Evgen Kotenko/Getty Images)

Yurii Shchyhol doesn’t have a lot of time to spare.

The head of the Derzhspetszviazok, Ukraine’s version of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, can be forgiven for working speedily. His country is under attack—and with it, the world order. “This is the first time ever in history that we’ve had such a full-fledged cyberwar happening right now in Ukraine,” says Shchyhol, who’s tasked with keeping Ukraine’s cyber territory safe in the same way president Volodymyr Zelensky oversees the country’s physical armed forces.

Skirmishes on the internet against Russian hackers weren’t new to Shchyhol, nor to the people he oversees as part of the Derzhspetszviazok, also known as the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection. Before invading Ukraine on February 24, Russia had been testing the defenses of Ukraine’s cybersecurity. Mostly it was persistent, low-level attacks, but one larger attack was launched on January 14, when Russia targeted more than 20 Ukrainian government institutions. The attack, designed to disrupt government-linked websites, leached out into the wider Ukrainian internet. “We also identified that around 90 websites were not accessible as a result of that attack,” says Shchyhol. “The goal of the Russian hackers was to sow panic among the Ukrainian population, and to demonstrate to the outside world that Ukraine is a weak state that couldn’t handle the attacks,” he says. This is why the Derzhspetszviazok rushed to relaunch the sites affected. “The longest it took us for one site was close to one week,” he says. “No data was lost, and the outcome of this attack was more psychological warfare.”

Enlarge / An Aeroflot Boeing 777-300ER aircraft is preparing to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation in June 2022. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty )

An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014.

For eight years, YU-APH flew without any issues—until it landed at 10:37 pm on May 25, 2022, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. It had flown in from Belgrade and was due to take off again on a late-night return within the hour. But there was a problem: The pilot had reported an issue with the plane’s engine casing that needed to be fixed. The supplier of the broken part, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, reportedly refused to fix the problem, citing sanctions against Russia resulting from its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plane was stuck. (Collins Aerospace did not respond to a request for comment.)

Enlarge / A placard seen being displayed during a 2019 protest against state internet control in Russia. Displaying the placard now would likely land its wielder in prison. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty )

Web pages in the city of Kherson in south Ukraine stopped loading on people’s devices at 2:43 pm on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone connecting to the Internet with KhersonTelecom, known locally as SkyNet, couldn’t call loved ones, find out the latest news, or upload images to Instagram. They were stuck in a communications blackout. When web pages started stuttering back to life at 3:42 pm, everything appeared to be normal. But behind the scenes everything had changed: Now all Internet traffic was passing through a Russian provider and Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.

Since the end of May, the 280,000 people living in the occupied port city and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as Internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections through Russian infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast surveillance and censorship network, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis viewed by WIRED.

The Internet companies have been told to reroute connections under the watchful eye of Russian occupying forces or shut down their connections entirely, officials say. In addition, new unbranded mobile phone SIM cards using Russian numbers are being circulated in the region, further pushing people towards Russian networks. Grabbing control of the servers, cables, and cell phone towers—all classed as critical infrastructure—which allow people to freely access the web is considered one of the first steps in the “Russification” of occupied areas.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the Moscow Urban Forum 2018 on July 18, 2018 in Moscow, Russia. (credit: Getty Images | Mikhail Svetlov )

Not long after Russia steamrolled into South Ossetia in 2008, effectively annexing the territory of its southern neighbor, a group of Georgians banded together to set up a new Russian-language television station, a voice independent of the Kremlin: Kanal PIK.

With the help of Georgia’s public broadcaster, they signed a five-year deal with French satellite operator Eutelsat to beam their station into the Caucasus. Just two weeks after they launched in 2010, Eutelsat notified PIK that they were dropped. Their space on the satellite had been promised to Gazprom Media Group, a chief pillar in Moscow’s tightly controlled media system .

Kanal PIK said in a statement at the time that the saga “leaves Intersputnik and Gazprom Media Group—both of which adhere to the Kremlin's editorial line—with a de facto satellite transmission monopoly over Russian-language audience.” Kanal PIK would acquire a spot on another Eutelsat a year later, but the station struggled and went dark in 2012.

Enlarge (credit: Petro Zadorozhny | Getty Images)

In the snowy streets of the north Ukrainian town of Trostyanets, the Russian missile system fires rockets every second . Tanks and military vehicles are parked on either side of the blasting artillery system, positioned among houses and near the town’s railway system. The weapon is not working alone, though. Hovering tens of meters above it and recording the assault is a Ukrainian drone. The drone isn’t a sophisticated military system, but a small, commercial machine that anyone can buy.

Since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of February, drones of all shapes and sizes have been used by both sides in the conflict. At one end of the scale are large military drones that can be used for aerial surveillance and to attack targets on the ground. In contrast, small commercial drones can be flown by people without any specific training and carried around in a suitcase-sized box. While both types of drones have been used in previous conflicts, the current scale of small, commercial drone use in Ukraine is unprecedented.

Drone videos shared and posted to social media depict the brutality of the war and reveal what has happened during battles. Drones have captured fighting in the destroyed Ukrainian city of Bucha , with lines of tanks moving around streets and troops moving alongside them. Commercial drones have helped journalists document the sheer scale of destruction in Kyiv and Mariupol , flying over burnt-out buildings that have been reduced to rubble.