Dan Black
Russian intelligence services have now adapted their thinking about how to optimally integrate cyber and conventional capabilities.
With the main thrust of Russia's anticipated summer offensive underway, it is an opportune moment to take stock of the significant and underappreciated changes that have taken hold in Moscow’s approach to cyber operations in Ukraine.
Much Western analysis to date has fixated on Russia’s highly visible opening cyber offensive, the merits of its approach, and the potential for a renewed destructive campaign of a similar nature against Ukrainian critical infrastructure. This focus is misplaced, however, and has anchored Western understanding of the war’s cyber dimensions to Russia’s countervalue strategy to amass societal pressure via the widespread sabotage of computer networks – an approach that has not seen primacy since the invasion’s first year when assumptions about a short war still guided Russia’s theory of victory.
The harsher reality is that Russia’s intelligence services have adapted their posture in cyberspace to the demands of a long war. Mounting evidence, stretching back to the months preceding Ukraine’s counteroffensive in 2023, indicates that multiple Russian cyber units have shifted their sights away from strategic civilian targets toward soldiers’ computers and mobiles endpoints in order to enable tactical military objectives on Ukraine’s frontlines. This change in operational focus has been cross-cutting, with Russian military intelligence (GRU) and the domestic security service (FSB) – long renowned for rivalry and mistrust – unifying their earlier disjointed cyber efforts and systematising a series of tradecraft adaptations intended to increase their military effectiveness.
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