Russia is deploying advanced Su-34 tactical bombers to strike Ukraine’s internet infrastructure and even target SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals donated to Ukraine’s besieged citizenry, (Photo by Host photo agency / RIA Novosti via Getty Images)
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Russia is waging the world’s first war aimed at obliterating internet use in the target country—Ukraine—but by many measures the resistance is winning, says one of the globe’s top experts on this ultimate cyber-conflict.
Starting from the earliest days of Russia’s missile blitzes on Ukraine, the Kremlin has targeted central pillars of the internet, including communications towers and data centers, to plunge the besieged democracy into an informational black hole.
And while the internet infrastructure in Ukraine has been pierced by countless rockets and drones, a virtual army of lightning-speed engineers has been remarkable in reviving the system after every assault, says Simon Angus, a world-leading scholar on internet-tracking technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Professor Angus and his team have created an ingenious IP Observatory that remotely and precisely monitors internet connectivity across Ukraine and around the world.
The Internet Protocol Observatory, Professor Angus told me in an interview, “runs 24/7 from five continents and provides continuous measurement of over 400 million internet devices.”
The observatory, which charts the life and death of each of these internet devices in real time, during the ebb and flow of war and peace, is augmented by advanced AI agents, which can speedily track and report sharp “anomalies” in connectivity.
Even from half a world away, Angus’s hyper-tech tracking system has been astonishing in mapping the IP targets in every explosive attack launched from Russian missile brigades, SU-34 fighter bombers and remotely piloted, camera-equipped drones.
As invading rockets first crossed Ukraine’s borders, the observatory chronicled jagged drops in internet connectivity in the blasted cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Just one week into the onslaught, the port city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, had all of its internet connections severed, Angus’s group discovered, just before Kremlin troops razed the entire enclave.
Ukraine’s massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was similarly trapped inside a Russian-assembled Iron Curtain, stripped of internet access, as Kremlin commandos occupied the outpost and cut it off from communicating with the outside world.
These days, Professor Angus told me, his observatory no longer reports the network connections that have been killed across Ukraine in real time because the Russian High Command could use that information to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of each missile fusillade in its war on the internet.
“We have adopted a policy of not publishing updates on the internet situation there,” he says, “unless a particular situation seems to demand it (e.g. see our analysis of the Zaporizhzhia power plant), since this could be used as military intelligence.”
Russia’s battle strategy in destroying internet access across Ukraine in many ways resembles Adolph Hitler’s information warfare during World War II, when the Nazis declared that listening to foreign radio broadcasts could be punishable by death, even as the Führer flooded the airwaves with propaganda on his supreme role in creating a new world order.
Ukrainian university students, lawyers and human rights activists, Professor Angus says, are using the internet as a “liberation technology,” to chart their own heroic resistance and to film the war zone atrocities committed by the Russian invaders, from the mass execution of captured civilians to piloted drone assaults on priests and journalists.
Citizen-created chronicles of the invasion, and of war crimes, have generated waves of support for Ukraine around the world, from legislative leaders across the leading Western democracies to the anonymous hacktivists who have joined Kyiv’s IT Army to fight the aggressors in the World Wide Web war.
Meanwhile, Professor Angus underscores the humanitarian mission of the IP Observatory and its co-leaders: “For some years we have been an internet data partner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.”
He adds his group been channeling reports covering Ukraine’s bombarded internet facilities to the UN rights watchdog across the invasion.
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to force Kyiv into a restored Soviet Union has been accompanied by his takeover of major media across Russia, along with state-ordered blocks on Facebook, Twitter/X, Radio Free Europe and the BBC, likely to crown himself as the tsar of a renewed Soviet-style Department for Agitation and Propaganda.
Yet the missile strikes on Ukraine’s internet outposts might one day be added to the war crimes charges that have already been lodged against Putin in the International Criminal Court.
“Internet access is widely considered now to be a key human rights issue,” Professor Angus says. “Not only for the right to be online, but for the often grave human rights abuses that happen ‘under the cover of darkness’ when the internet is slowed or shut down by an authoritarian regime.”
“Documenting these shutdowns is critical in the ongoing effort to support accountability and justice.”
The chronicles the IP Observatory team provides, he says, can be “used by the UN to verify internet disturbances identified typically on the ground by UN workers and other channels across over 150 countries globally.”
“How they then act on that information,” he adds, always aims to support human rights globally.”
Even as the Kremlin escalates its strikes via expanding squadrons of Russian rockets and Iranian drones, “It has been a remarkable feature of the entire conflict to see the resilience of the internet” in Ukraine, Professor Angus says.
“There are likely several factors which contribute,” he adds, “but especially the incredible work of Ukrainian engineers on the ground — their ability to get damage to cabling and electricity etc. fixed is amazing, in very very difficult and dangerous situations.”
At the same time, the philanthropic missions being staged by SpaceX and Intelsat/SES to beam broadband connections to Ukraine’s embattle citizenry from their satellite constellations is another key factor in this resilience.
Internet from orbit “is certainly a very valuable asset to get a connection when existing infrastructure is blocked or damaged,” Angus says. “It can be incredibly helpful strategically, for both civilian and military applications.”