The war in Ukraine is the largest military conflict of the cyber age and the first to incorporate such significant levels of cyber operations on all sides. For scholars, theorists, and practitioners of cyber conflict (and combat generally) this war provides precious material for study. Studying this war can be especially interesting and perhaps instructive because its course thus far has been unexpected to many: Russia, one of the most powerful cyber nations, has fared poorly despite facing a much inferior Ukraine, operating in a familiar environment, having much time to prepare, and recruiting agents on the ground who might facilitate physical access to systems.
Scholars in Carnegie’s Technology and International Affairs Program for years have been quietly convening working groups on cyber strategy, building on our publication in 2017: Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press). As the Ukraine war has stretched on, we have decided to sequentially publish a series of papers assessing its conduct and potential implications.
We emphasize “potential” to acknowledge several important considerations. The war is not over. The facts of its conduct, including attempted and achieved cyber operations by aggressors and defenders of all sorts, will never be completely known, especially by those who rely on unclassified sources, as we do. Many facts that are known will be disputed, and their interpretations and implications will be constructed and debated for years to come.
Recognizing these realities, most of the summary observations and apparent conclusions about the cyber aspects of this conflict are hypotheses intended to fuel analysis and debate. Such deliberation can benefit scholars and practitioners around the world and, less importantly, help us revise and improve our own work to make it more beneficial in the future. For stylistic reasons, we do not constantly repeat our heuristic intentions and bracket every sentence or paragraph with caveats. But readers should understand that we are offering propositions to be considered more than conclusions to be accepted.
The first paper in the series, “Evaluating the International Support to Ukrainian Cyber Defense,” by United Kingdom-based non-resident scholar Nick Beecroft, investigates how international tech companies and governments have extensively assisted the defense of Ukrainian cyberspace and suggests some of the deeply interesting and tricky political-economic implications for governments and companies in the future.
In the second paper, Senior Fellow Gavin Wilde fuses his regional expertise on Russia and Ukraine with insights on cyber competition to assess why Russian operations to date have not met the expectations held by many observers before the war. “Cyber Operations in Ukraine: Russia’s Unmet Expectations” challenges assumptions about Russia’s conceptualization of this domain.
Senior Fellow Jon Bateman, in “Russia’s Wartime Cyber Operations in Ukraine: Military Impacts, Influences, and Implications,” draws on a wide range of public data to systematically assess Russian cyber operations in military terms, and to evaluate the many proposed explanations for why their overall impact on the war has been limited. Bateman then considers how other militaries can draw useful lessons from Russia and Ukraine without losing sight of their own distinct circumstances.
Ariel (Eli) Levite’s paper—“Integrating Cyber into Warfighting: Some Early Takeaways from the Ukraine Conflict” (forthcoming)—will heuristically compare the conduct and effects of cyber war in Ukraine thus far with assumptions or predictions that scholars had articulated about cyber warfare before February 2022, capturing lessons for offensive and defensive actors in the future. Whereas Bateman’s paper moves from the inside out (building a picture of the current war and then considering its broader lessons), Levite moves from the outside in (assembling general principles of cyber conflict and then testing them in Ukraine).
These four papers represent Carnegie’s first offerings in what will be a long, global effort to understand and learn from the cyber elements of the Ukraine war. We welcome queries from other authors interested in contributing to the logic of this endeavor by having us publish their work.
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