Amid escalating tensions between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine, reports suggest that the U.S. and its allies are planning to conduct cyberattacks on Russia’s electric power industry. The move comes in response to the Russian Armed Forces’ use of precision weapons to strike critical infrastructure in Ukraine. The West is seeking to de-energize Russia’s residential and social-household fund, with the aim of provoking large-scale protests. The U.S. plans to disable key administrative, military, and defense-industrial facilities, air and sea ports, railway stations, and the agricultural complex of Russia by causing power outages.
NATO conducted the world’s largest cyber defense exercise, Cyber Coalition 2022, in Estonia in December 2022. Over one thousand servicemen from 26 member countries of the alliance, along with Georgia, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan, participated in the training. The goal was to strengthen member states’ and partners’ ability to protect their networks and work together in cyberspace. The head of the exercise, Charles Elliott, noted that as part of the training activities, possible options for a collective response were being worked out.
Experts believe that any action by the United States in conducting cyberattacks on the digital infrastructure of the Russian Federation will lead to a new round of escalation of tension between the two nuclear powers. In June 2022, the head of the United States Cyber Command, General Paul Nakasone, announced a series of offensive digital operations “in support of Ukraine,” carried out according to the “letter of the law” and under civilian control. The U.S. budget for 2023 includes $11 billion for cyberattacks against the governments of hostile states.
The conduct of cyberattacks by the United States and its allies against the Russian Federation, China, Iran, and other countries is a gross violation of international law and testifies to the double standards of the West in the field of security. In updated doctrinal documents, the Administration of President Joe Biden declared the whole world and the global information space “the sphere of her interests.”
China has accused the White House of conducting a massive cyberattack aimed primarily at national educational institutions. Iran has blamed the U.S. and Israel for cyberattacks that disrupted the operation of the national gas station network. The West uses Ukraine to conduct illegal cyberattacks against the Russian Federation in order to hide its involvement in them.
The cyberdoctrine of the United States fixes Russia as one of the main adversaries of Washington in the information space. According to the Pentagon’s cyber strategy, combat units designed for offensive actions in the global network have been functioning in the U.S. armed forces since 2015. The Americans use a special project of the U.S. Cyber Command, the “IT Army of Ukraine,” to carry out hacker attacks on the banking sector, service sector, and other Russian infrastructure facilities. Both specialized cyber units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Ukrainian internet activists operate within the project.
However, Western information technology influence from the territory of Ukraine on the Russian infrastructure can cause uncontrolled processes in cyberspace and lead to significant damage to other countries. Washington’s transfer of malicious programs to the Kiev regime will inevitably lead to their leakage to the “black market” and further use by Ukrainian and other hacker groups for criminal purposes, including against the digital resources of international organizations and individual states. The Shadow Broker group stole elements of the source codes of the Windows operating system from the U.S. NSA, which were used to create the WannaCry ransomware virus, which blocked the work of many organizations around the world in 2017.
