Ukraine at the front lines of election interference and cyber warfare
Country: Ukraine
After 2014, Russian interference in Ukraine went from supporting pro-Kremlin candidates to a scorched-earth campaign against democratic legitimacy and stability—an attack that seems to be working. The same tactics can be expected in the United States going forward.
Lessons:
Russia appears to be using Ukraine as a testing ground for cyberattacks, disinformation, and other forms of electoral and political meddling.
New investments in information/cyber security, as well as media literacy and anti-disinformation education, are needed to counter these attacks.
Fighting disinformation, in particular, requires clear and honest national conversations, as in Ukraine, about how to protect democracy without unduly infringing on free speech or enabling new authoritarian forms of censorship.
Ukraine is on the front lines of Russian election interference efforts, and an indicator for Moscow’s intentions around the world, including in the United States. Ukraine’s experience can help predict what Russian interference could look like in a post-Trump era.
According to Daniel Twining, president of the International Republican Institute, “Russia has interfered in every election since Ukraine’s independence—supporting pro-Kremlin candidates, propagating fake and misleading news, and more recently through cyberattacks that threaten the integrity of the election process.”[1]
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s interests in Ukrainian politics were clear and partisan. The country was roughly divided between more traditionalist political factions sympathetic to Russia and Western-looking groups eager for closer ties to the rest of Europe.[2] The Kremlin, in turn, openly supported pro-Russian candidates and parties.
That changed in early 2014 when mass protests forced President Victor Yanukovych—widely reviled for “over-the-top corruption” and as a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin—from office and into exile.[3] Yanukovych is now in exile in Russia, fleeing Ukrainian treason charges . Russia, in turn, responded to his ouster first by annexing the Crimean Peninsula by force. Putin then secretly moved Russian troops into areas of eastern Ukraine historically sympathetic to Russia, fueling an ongoing armed conflict.
Russia’s de facto invasion was widely condemned by governments around the world. More importantly, the image of Russian tanks and soldiers crossing the border struck a nerve for most Ukrainians, even those previously sympathetic to Russia. In 2009, only one-quarter of Ukrainians saw Russian influence as negative. By 2014, two-thirds would say the same.[4] According to Harley Balzer, an associate professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University, “As a result of Putin's aggressive policy, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians now view Russia as their enemy and perceive affiliation with Europe as necessary.”[5]
Accordingly, intervening to support explicitly pro-Kremlin politicians was no longer an option. So Russia changed its strategy. First, election-meddling tactics became far more aggressive and hostile, openly attacking election infrastructure and other critical systems. In 2014, Russian malware successfully crippled the Central Election Commission’s network on two different occasions.[6] In 2015, attacks took down the electrical grid for up to six hours. In 2017, the most damaging attack to date—known as “NotPetya” took down utilities, banks, airports, shipping, and other major corporations.[7] The hacks cost an estimated $10 billion to clean up.
Then, in the 2019 election, the Russian cyberwarfare and disinformation machine went into full gear—not to bolster a specific candidate, but to attack all of them. Tactics included the classics (e.g., social media trolls spreading false or exaggerated stories about the candidates) as well as more aggressive cyberattacks, including unsuccessful attempts to gain control of Central Elections Commission servers and manipulate vote counts.[8] More importantly, the narrative of Russian intervention drove a wedge into existing fissures, with much of the actual disinformation coming from genuine supporters of one candidate—usually alleging that an opponent had some nefarious ties to Russia.[9]
According to Twining, Russia’s strategy was “to sow enough doubt in the electoral process to challenge the legitimacy of the incoming president and corrode the Ukrainian public’s faith in the democratic process.”[10]
Russia’s strategy was “to sow enough doubt in the electoral process to challenge the legitimacy of the incoming president and corrode the Ukrainian public’s faith in the democratic process.
For the United States, this is a grim omen. President Donald Trump’s pro-Russia leanings are clear and consistent (if both unexplained and at odds with longstanding U.S. policies[11]), but U.S. voters’ perceptions of Russia are sour and worsening. As of 2019, 73 percent of survey respondents had a mostly or very unfavorable opinion of Russia, up from 50 percent in 2013.[12] To date, this has not translated to U.S. politics, with Republican leaders generally hesitant to discuss Russian meddling or election security for fear of undermining the Trump Administration. But presumably, in a post-Trump world, even Republicans--just like the previously pro-Putin factions in Ukraine--will follow public opinion, returning to their previous party line of hostility to Moscow. This would leave the Kremlin with no friendly candidate in any given election. Should that happen, as in Ukraine, Russia’s disinformation and meddling will become even more chaotic, intent only on destroying democratic (and perhaps literal) stability.
According to Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Ukraine is “a proving ground for possible solutions, where officials… struggle to walk the line between defending democratic discourse and trampling freedom of speech.”[13]
But even Ukraine’s proposed solutions are a red flag. One-half of the reforms, funding media literacy and critical thinking education programs, are clearly and unequivocally commendable, and follow Finland’s successful and proven model (See “Inoculating against misinformation” case study. The other half of reforms—criminalizing the “dissemination of false information” and empowering the government to block websites—have rightly raised free speech and civil liberties concerns. (See “The threat of disinformation-fueled violence” case study.) Censorship and powerful anti-disinformation laws, which could in the future be used against political opposition, risk responding to a democratic threat with the weapons of authoritarianism.
Recommended Reading:
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-cyber-war-frontline-russia-malware-attacks/
End Notes:
[1] Daniel Twining, “Ukraine’s Election Will Test the Strength of Its Democracy,” Foreign Policy (blog), March 29, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/29/ukraines-election-will-test-the-strength-of-its-democracy/.
[2] Henry Olsen, “Opinion | Old Fissures Reemerge in Ukraine. That’s a Big Problem.,” Washington Post, April 2, 2019, sec. Opinions, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/02/old-fissures-reemerge-ukraine-thats-big-problem/.
[3] Andrew E. Kramer, “Ukraine’s Ex-President Is Convicted of Treason,” The New York Times, January 24, 2019, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/world/europe/viktor-yanukovych-russia-ukraine-treason.html.
[4] Marjorie Connelly, “Ukrainians Favor Unity, Not Russia, Polls Find,” The New York Times, May 8, 2014, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/world/europe/ukrainians-favor-unity-not-russia-polls-find.html.
[5] Harley Balzer, “The Ukraine Invasion and Public Opinion,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 16, no. 1 (2015): 79–93.
[6] Laurens Cerulus, “How Ukraine Became a Test Bed for Cyberweaponry,” POLITICO, February 14, 2019, https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-cyber-war-frontline-russia-malware-attacks/.
[7] Cerulus.
[8] Yuras Karmanau, “Ukrainian Official: Hacking Intensifies as Election Nears,” AP NEWS, February 13, 2019, https://apnews.com/5b22d3cf90b24a19ba03d82fe91329e0.
[9] Nina Jankowicz, “Ukraine’s Election Is an All-Out Disinformation Battle,” The Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/russia-disinformation-ukraine-election/587179/.
[10] Twining, “Ukraine’s Election Will Test the Strength of Its Democracy.”
[11] Amy Mackinnon, “Trump May Like Putin. His Administration Doesn’t.,” Foreign Policy (blog), April 29, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/29/trump-may-like-putin-his-administration-does-not-russia-policy-rapprochment/.
[12] “Russia,” Gallup, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1642/Russia.aspx.
[13] Nina Jankowicz, “Ukraine’s Election Is an All-Out Disinformation Battle,” The Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/russia-disinformation-ukraine-election/587179/.
