When Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February, the world expected Moscow’s cyber and information operations to pummel the country alongside air strikes and shelling. Two months on, however, Kyiv has not only managed to keep the country online amidst a deluge of hacking attempts, but it has brought the fight back to Russia.
Even Ukrainian officials are surprised by how ineffective Russia’s digital war has been.
I think that the root cause of this is the difference between our systems, says Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s 31-year-old minister for digital transformation. Because the Russian system is centralized. It’s monopolized. And it leads to the scale of corruption and graft that is becoming increasingly apparent as the war continues.