The Russia-Ukraine War: A Retrospective

just a quick introduction my name is Jared I'm A Cloud Architects help organizations going to Cloud security and I in my SP time I do security research mainly focused on cyber security topics that intercepted National Security and foreign policy issues things like encryption surveillance privacy disinformation and nation state activi I'm also involved in some policy advocacy work you can find me on Twitter and my blog is at critical vo so in this talk we're really going to kind of do a bit of retrospective of the war in Ukraine we'll talk about Russia's bad opset uh the use of drones and radio intercepts um the kind of CLE war that went on disinformation and counter disinformation and then where we go from

here so just a warning um there is some images and videos from the battlefield it's not super graphic but I have been a to include that um so the Russia Ukraine history really goes all the way back to the dissolvement of the Soviet Union and the tensions really started to flear with the annexation of crimeia in 2014 and last year we started to see a buildup of Russian troops at the border which Russia cled was a training exercises however the Sal photos started to show that over 100,000 troops started to uh amass at the portal and Russia kept claiming that this these were training exercises um but this was quickly disproven because they were putting up Hospital tents which they

typically don't do during training exercises and as tension started to increase you know the build up just continued and during this process NATO member count started moving vehicles and other military hardware into uh Ukraine um including ammunition uh ammunitions especially the javelin anti-tank missiles that are very effective against Russian armor and well as other supplies that would be need for example like medical supplies uh Taiwan for example sent 27 tons of supplies uh as well in the process NATO also started picking up surveillance activities in uh around Poland to look at what was going on in berus as well as in Ukraine um and n country started training the Ukrainian military on how to use these weapons

there was Advan training that was done in the UK and on the 24th of February which was the Thursday uh The Invasion started I remember very distinctly being woken up early in the morning um with my phone vibrating with all of the news alerts that were going off and when I logged on to Twitter the very first video that I saw was on the left uh with this missile going into um an airport in eastern Ukraine and through throughout the day we started to see uh you know the first casualties of what was going on um as a Defender was very concerned that we were going to see cyber activity um given that in the buildup to the war

there were a considerable number of GS attacks that against the uh Ukrainian and governments as well as the banking systems and what Russia tried to do was they tried to still fear that they wouldn't be able to access their currencies and then obviously the started there was w m where that was deployed we'll talk about that in a moment but I was really concerned that we were going to see a not fet style attack and given that mon Peta you know was very um impactful in 2007 both in Ukraine and globally um thankfully nothing like that happened um NATO had actually prepared for such an event so they run these annual uh simulations called operation Rock Shield where they

go through these simulations and um you know kind of develop sponsors for some of these activities that could happen thankfully nothing magic did happen um and I don't know why you know this was the case you know is it possible that Russia doesn't have the Cyber capability that a lot of us fear that they do have or maybe they didn't want to risk escalation of the West what did happen though was Russia took out the vi Kad Network um this was done by Russian actors and they managed to do this through a misconfigured Legacy bpn at a provider Network W MW was um uh deployed which destroyed the configuration files that these terminals used in order to get it back to the

network and at the same time a large hos attack took place to kind of distract the security team of what was going on and the impact of this was fairly significant so 30,000 sacom terminals went down uh which affected 5,800 wind turbines in Germany and the communication systems in of Emergency Services in France were also affected by this it wasn't initially clear um why you know the virus that network was targeted but it soon became clear that the real Target was the Turkish made tp2 drone which is used by the Ukrainian military and uh typically these drones operates on line of s so um the active area is fairly small but you can get a

module that you can plug in that connects to the VIS that Network which allows these drones to be uh controlled remotely and especially in the beginning of the war these drones were very effective um the minitary actually made a music video praising the tb2 Drone as well so uh with regards to the Wi mway um wiper mway was actually targeted at the beginning of the invasion on to Target government systems Banks ATM's communication systems uh media including TV and radio as well as uh the Border systems where was most impactful so Ukraine has an identification system called the D system um and this went down as a result of the um the swaer M um Caesar did put out an alert regarding

this and due to that system being offline as people were fly uh fleeing from The Invasion um they weren't able to cross the border between Romania and a Ukraine um eventually given the humanitarian crisis that was developing at the border uh both mova and Romania started allowing people to cross um The Border even with that system being down and further on Microsoft CEO actually stated that he considers this attack the first contention of the Geneva Convention using digital means now there are some people that disagree with that but that's just what you know he said and what we need to really ask ourselves is is the activity that we've seen really a cyber War so the media and um

you know and companies have been you know throwing their ter around very Loosely um there are a lot of government sponsored groups on both sides that are attacking one another um on the Ukraine side there's an activist group called the Ukraine itti Army um which uh were they started organizing their events um uh on Telegram and in my opinion this is textbook activism right this isn't like sub Warfare and in my opinion I think we need to be very careful when we use term C Warfare and yes it is a bit of an academic discussion but when something isn't a war we shouldn't be calling it a war so if we go around and say everything is fascism when real

fascism actually happens um it actually loses its impact so um what we have seen is it electricity and power uh generation uh facilities going down not because of cyber attacks but because of uh uh kinetic activities involving Conventional Weapons so uh kind of talking about Ukraine it Army so they attack the Moscow Stock Exchange the largest back in Russia Uh Russian CRM systems mercenary group that Russia is using as well as several government institutions were compromised including police stations uh border control customs and train stations and the leak data from these institutions were published onto d secrets when you can actually go download them um in September a traffic jam was caused uh by a collective effort

to order a whole bunch of taxis on yandex's taxi service to the middle of Moscow and you can see that on the right of course quite a bit of the the traffic jam in mosow and again the question comes up you know is the cyber warfare no it's activism in 2015 uh Russia did attack the Ukrainian power git using the black energy 2 malware that abused automation uh systems uh that were connected to SC and ICF systems um and as a result of this um the recovery took about 4 hours um for most areas however they actually had to send people on trucks to certain substations uh in order to turn those substations back on and what we saw in April um was

Russia attacked again uh Ukrainian p uh Point um with the indestro and in controller M which used a lot of the same tricks that the previous um ICS uh malw has used um due to the previous attack Russia was actually able to um oh sorry Ukraine was actually able to kind of you know yes that it took down P shortly but they were able to recover very quickly and in this case this is cyber warfare right so you have a country attacking another uh country with Kinetic with connectic Conventional Weapons and then they are also using cyber capabilities to actually attack them and therefore that is like prop Warfare um just something I would like to point out so

on the photo on the left of the screen this is a photo that was shared widely on social media uh during the um Nota um you know outbreak back in 2017 and on the right uh you can see a photo 5 years later where the same schore was actually hit by artillery and I think it's the first time that this kind of thing has ever happened um I had up to Meo for pointing that out um and then moving on to kind of Russia's bad obsc and the use of insecure communication so Russia has been found to be using Chinese um M radios that operates on the UHF VHF frequencies and these are not encrypted so anybody with the signal

information can listen into what's going on um and there were several groups in Ukraine that were actually doing this so they were listening to what was going on Gathering that intelligence and then passing that on to the Ukrainian military and as as a result uh the Ukrainian military was able to get the upper hand on the battlefield as well as make important strategic and tactical decisions um on uh you know on the battlefield what we saw with the radio intercepts is that the Russian military is really disorganized his very poor leadership um and what activist groups also started doing is they started trolling uh the Russian soldiers so um in in this case somebody asks for a

retreat Ro and then the Jammer replies uh you know go home it's better to be a desserter than [Music] fertilizer the same activist groups also started jamming Russian radios so they started putting high pitch noises on the radios that creat troll faces big faces and Among Us characters when you put them through a spectrograph and you can imagine if you're in a tank with these high pitch noises in the tank on the on the radio it could be very very annoying and this was very interesting to many intelligence analysts because um Russia does actually have secure capability they have the as of frequency hopping radios um however significant corruption took place uh during the procurement of

these uh radios um and the manufacturing of these radios was given to the lowest Bild so a lot of them have faulty Parts but the real reason why we haven't seen a lot of these radios in use is because in the beginning of the war it was a training exercise rout so um not enough ke was actually pulled down to order to support these radios in the battlefield what did happen at the beginning of the war a specialist group of Russia soldiers were actually captured um with both maps and other equipment um including uh weapons as and in this example you can actually see the asol frequency those radios there um and yes they have been found on the battlefield

but definitely not in in what use Russia uses a diff a whole bunch of different Radio Systems um the older systems are not interoperable with one another um however the newer ones are um and they form part of a large system so they've got vehicles that can do um rebroadcasting as well as a relaying of the signals and they also have vehicles that can do digital trunk lines uh for sorry can do trunk lines for digital traffic one of the interesting findings is in the radios that have been captured they've actually found usma chips um from ZX um integrated telecon solution Analog Devices and Texas Instruments and um it seems that a lot of these radios

were actually newly made which would actually be a sanctions violation so there's actually investigations currently going on to actually see you know what happened there there um there are also vehicles in Russia's electronic warfare unit um that have the capability to relay messages but also to do radio and GPS jamming um so the vehicles that you see on the left are part of that unit and this jamming was tracked by various third parties um and GPS is a very important thing for marine and Aviation traffic so um you know they were able to track that a map that and correlated very well with Russian troop movements uh the Ukrainian military actually managed to capture a lot of these

vehicles as well as actually destroy some of them using artillery and the general that looks after electronic warfare was also killed in the battlefield so looking at the Ukrainian radio systems um they have a a bunch of different Radio Systems including systems from aselin Motorola al3 Harris and Balin um and these radios were provided by the US Aid package that was ped eara uh this year on the motella side um they typically give the higher models to commanders and the lower models to soldiers uh because they don't need to be on as many frequencies as the uh commanders need to be on and at least for the motella systems um as well as the others but on the motor system

specifically um they are secure because they use DMR for protection uh it's encrypted with rc4 which is vulnerable to the flipping attacks um but because the keys are relatively short they can easily be broken with modern computers however it's not necessarily always technically possible to do this on the battlefield um next I wanted to look at how president seninsky is communicating so he has three different phones including um you the phone on the top right which is a old style phone which has uh speed dials to different government departments which is not encrypted and then the phone to the below that and to the left is um a Soviet Area phone that operates on a

peer-to-peer Network um it's not encrypted but it is run on a secure network so um you pick it doesn't have a keypad so you pick up the one side and then the other side Rings Russia uses the same set of phones you can see in this photo taken in 2012 and then a more recent photo taken in September you can see those funds on Vladimir Putin's desk um when President seninsky communicates to other foreign leaders he typically uses a commercial web phone like the V b149 and then when he speaks to the president of the United States um he typically uses a Cisco unified phone and you can see a photo of the White House there um and this is likely

connected uh to the US defense redwitch network um which is relate through a local US Embassy in Ona Ukraine um the US has also provided uh president zinski with a satellite fir as well and this has allowed him to address the nation as well as EU Parliament which has had a moral boost in the country especially during um the beginning of the war uh keeping Internet up and running in Ukraine has really been a whole challenge you know with all of uh you know these weapons being used um and what some internet service providers did like cun um they actually put kill switches on on their Network so on in their network devices so when um the

Russians started claiming territory um they would trigger the kill switch and then the Russians wouldn't be able to use the equipments afterwards during the first weeks of the war there were several Internet outages and as um the this affected the internet quite a lot and as repair started to happen uh the internet traffic started to return back to normal um in this photo which was actually one of the most striking photos um of the war for me U is this photo of H technitions you know on the front lines in a battlefield actually repairing f um this was quite striking to me and this is another um photo you know kind of showing us and these

telecommunication uh you know capabilities have really exposed some of the war crimes that have been going on for example in this case where uh Russian armor attacks are un on which actually is a war CR as well as the atrocities in buer where uh you know hundreds potentially thousands of people um were killed in execution St and because of social media again with the Telecommunications um there are several investigations by different organizations looking at the war crimes that are currently going on in Ukraine and this has also been investigated by the international criminal uh Court um

yeah um so as Russia started to get more territory um they also wanted to start re-rooting that traffic through Russia using bgb hijacks so um they performed a number of large uh bgp hijacks um which had a a significant impact on lat and uh some of these attacks were actually successful however some of them were not due to the use of rpki so many internet service providers were using rpki which requires that bgp requests be signed and as Russia started doing these attacks more ISP started to adopt um op as result of that um and despite the work being done to keep uh these T Telco systems up up and running um there were some dead spots Ukraine asked SpaceX for

um a bunch of stalling terminals which were delivered to them um but what was interesting to point out is that one of the executives of ISAT actually publicly criticized stalling and SpaceX last year um for their constellation calling it irresponsible and then given that their Network went down they kind of had a bit of IG on their face um I do want to point out that Len had a really good talk at Defcon kind of doing reverse kind of the you know reverse engineering and security analysis on the stalling terminal which is he found to be really good you know these things have really been battle hardened um and in his uh kind of research he wanted to get access

which he managed to do uh through the uat port um he disclosed this to spacex's product security ENT response team and they basically um pushed out new firmware which blew the eusers um on the on these port um and then just to mention he's doing quite a bit of other cool research um looking at various voltage and glitching attacks uh including building his own s so to achieve some of these attacks so moving on to Russian disinformation so in the Russian Doctrine the uh Russian military is organized into five different uh kind of units um or divisions including the military Oceanic Aerospace nuclear forces and strategic operations for itical targets and as part of this

Doctrine Russia wants to use information Warfare um to plant and spread false narratives to mislead misdirect and confuse people so in the lead up to the Crimea the annexation of Crimea and following that um Russia had several disinformation campaigns that they were using and then when the invasion stopped there were over 300 um different false narratives that Russia was putting I'm not going to go through all of them and that will quite quite a some but there really what I'm trying to show you is like the amount of false narratives is is very very false um one of these false narratives is the uh history of Russia and the Soviet Union so the Russian government

especially Vladimir Putin is really working hard to try and rewrite the history and Memorial which is Russia's oldest human rights uh organization um was actually ordered by a Russian judge uh to be liquidated at the beginning of the as war and Memorial keeps uh documents and artifacts that show the atrocities that occurred under Stalin memorials that were created to uh you know remember those Rost to stolin actions are also been taken down and new memorials have been created on several buildings like the one on the right which is actually created uh on a building opposite the Kremlin so it's not even like SLE what they're trying to do and then obviously uh the use of

social media for these disinformation campaigns you know has been um you know used quite widely um I tried to do very rudimentary analysis so in July I actually managed to identify at least 8,000 accounts that were involved in this kind of disinformation campaign um I should mention that the data is not like 100% clean um these are just observations that I made and then the second time I did this analysis I was able to identify 12,000 accounts but unfortunately I lost my first data set because I didn't change that output file name when I ran my scripts like a blond um but nevertheless uh what I also observed was that Bots um would engage with uh content posted by Russian

government officials as well as other influencers um and unfortunately since Elon has taken over the Twitter API is not um behaving as it has in the past because I went to to take some inspiration from rol talk that he did at hexon um to kind of you know see if I could see anything else um unfortunately not so one of the narratives as well is this uh thing of Russian aggression so last year Russia was putting pushing this narrative that they're not aggressive and then this year they want to go liberate uh Ukraine which obviously requires aggression but the um Ukrainian military also found they uh confiscated 10,000 sorts that were part of five Russian platforms to spread this

information um and the use of telegram is also quite pervasive so um there are literally hundreds of telegram channels where uh this this information has being posted for Russian citizens um and because uh of the fact that it's on telegram it can't be censored right have do on Twitter um like sort of could take action against that and the these these channels have enormous followings like um I've seen some with 10 100,000 even millions of followers and the average post gets around 500,000 views as a result of that um one of the other campaigns that happened was is the EU announced um a a package for uh to provide additional assistance to Ukraine and within one day of this announcement

there was already um a Russian disinformation campaign targeting um the validity of this assistance and of course then posted over 100 telegram channels and as well as social media accounts of various Russian uh diplomats uh and diplomatic channels as well um when volunteer Fighters went to Ukraine to fight for Ukraine um there was a disinformation Target uh campaign targeting them as well as um a disinformation campaign that uh launched when um the Embassy in New York City was actually vandalized um and one of the counter narratives There Was You know the building wasn't vandalized it's just blushing that there's an embassy inside of it and when similar attacks happened in Germany and uh Ireland uh Russia very

quickly pulls the victim card um to kind of combine that with the disinformation campaigns that they are doing the Ukrainian military also runs Army FM um this is a way to broadcast the correct like what's happening in the correct information especially in some of the captured areas Russia has been trying to Jam these radio stations um but Ukraine military that's on the front lines is actually rebroadcasting some of these um signals to try get you know that across into the captured areas um Russia has had heavy losses on the battlefields um and before the war the Army was you know significantly larger than Ukraine I mean even if you take into consideration the weapons that

were divided by native countries um they really should have won the war but I think this was a massive miscalculation on behalf of Putin um and I think the bad leadership uh you know as we'll show in a moment like really shows the you know the reason why they haven't seen the success that they probably should have seen um Russia's useful idiot Alexander lucenko who's the president of Belarus actually went on live TV and actually literally like put the plan of what they were trying to do like how stupid can you be and then this famous photo that you know was also shared on social media quite a lot where you just see Russian uh AR and uh other vehicles you know in

this massive uh lawn um this really shows the PO Logistics of on of the um Russian military um and this was the result of miscommunication as well as lack of leadership and I should mention that uh this was actually due to a Cyber attack uh that was on the B R system um it wasn't the only reason that it like it did play into this and what we also saw is um you know just the failure of Russian to be able to supply its troops so NATO uses a bull based system so units on the battlefield can request items and then it sent to them Russia uses a push BAS system so um they average what people need uh you

know what items they need and they send that to them and what this leads to is both over Supply and under the supply of items um which is not great and recently Russia hasn't been able to provide socks to um its soldiers um and they have to used these pieces of cloth score penis um and you know what does it say about your military when you can't even provide socks to your um you know your your soldiers and there's this like kind of fan is saying you know amateurs think about tactics professionals think about logistics we've also seen a bad behavior and put discipline on the uh r on the uh you know from the Russian military you

see a tank you know driving into Street poles um each time it does this obviously it affects the accuracy of the the turret um as well as you know Ukrainian Farmers Towing away Russian armor that has been captured and this hasn't gone down very well in in Russia so there's a Russian saying um which translated into English which says s is good boers are bad boers are the tallest vessels you know doesn't really trans that well into English but effectively what that's saying is you don't criticize s which is President Putin you criticize the people who are in charge of implementing his decision which are the Russian Med um generals so what has happened on

telegram with a lot of these uh you know influences they've been pushing this you know narrative that the Russian generals are doing a really bad job and a linguistic analysis on this is actually shown that um these people are not actually writing uh this this this is actually coming from the Kremlin so the Kremlin is passing this message along and then the influencers are are passing that along what also um happened was uh the memes are starting to be used in in the war um and this has you know been a way to kind of fun at Russia and hutin and um I'm showing English memes here but they are memes in Russian as well

typically the memes are created in both English and Russian um for for at least some of them um and this is very effective when uh to highlight the achievements on the battlefield so in this case you see uh Russia um so when the Ukraine attacked Crimea you know there's a me making fun o was probably you know accident um when they attacked in Air Base you know the same thing when Russian soldiers started diing trenches at Chernobyl which is radiologically active you know making fun of that situation as well when the UK prime minister visited as well it's like you know I D you to send the missile to UK ke when I'm there um there was also a

Russian Serv to air missile that misfunction and landed from one side and then I another me making fun of that and when Ukraine um got you know liberated chess on you know it's like well this is the worst day of the war it's like well no it's the worst day of the year so far um as Russia started to retreat they left a lot of ammunition uh around um and Ukraine was able to use that ammunition to actually Target Russian uh soldiers and you now again making fun of the fact that Russia is probably Ukraine's larest B suppli and this is one of my uh favorites um this is a non-traditional soldier that shot down a helicopter um

and then a whole bunch of memes were posted as a result of this but the reason why it's my favorite is because so many Russians like absolutely lost their mind with this mem um so yeah and then there was another video from a Russian State journalist who was reporting you know from the the front lines and then get got knocked over from the Bloss when the artillery went off um several Uh Russian generals were actually killed both one star and two Star General en and as I mentioned at the beginning of the talk um the uh the the general that's in charge of uh electronic warfare was also killed uh as well and then again mes making fun of

that fact um a lot of old weapons from World War I and World War II have been observed on the battlefield including the MP 40 as well as various rifles um the maximum machine gun from World War I was found on the battlefield um by Ukrainian soldiers so these are Russian weapons found by Ukrainian soldiers and then in this video you can kind of see the the kind of contrast between um the 21st century weapons that Ukraine is using versus The World War I weapons that some Russian soldiers are using and despite all of the weapon systems provided to Ukraine from NATO um they they still needed funding to get other equipment that they needed so they

started a project called s Javin um which was was uh able to raise funds to get this um and obviously praising the Chan system which has been very effective against Russian armor so they put this on merch they painted it on buildings they sold sold artwork for up to $7,000 um they put that on t-shirt which they gave to president sininsky as well as the um the defense minister of Estonia and a Russian uh sc34 Jets were actually shot down um so what they did is they um made key holders size thees from the the skin of the aircraft and then started sing that um and I love the T you know made in Russia recycled in

Ukraine and and what they also did is they had a website where you could actually pay to have uh messages put on munition so for $200 you can have a a message written on the show for $700 you can have TT Goode one ancable weapon um and these are just some examples of that for $30,000 you can put stickers on an Su 24 jet um and there was even a marriage proposal so somebody paid to have Tex put on and thought is a little bit threatening you know what said no that's a bit and then this is a bu system so um for those of you that don't know a butil system was used to shoot down um uh air

plan in uh Malaysian Airline uh plan was are kind of making you know lots of that situation they raised over a million dollars of screenshots as all um and they've received you know you know a lot of funding as a result of this and it has also boosted the moral of the soldiers because obviously they see that you know other people are supporting them and with that funding they were able to purchase cars drones H Fest sleeping bags uh beds power bands radios and warnings and as well as drones which they spent most of the money on um so what they've been doing is instead of using the conventional drones they've been using consumer drones like the djl

mavic and then putting a special harness under the Drone to actually release grenades from the air um the way that they do this is they put a sensor from The Landing lot so um because the landing line can be controlled remotely via the smartphone app on the controller um they can put the the Theus underneath it and then uh use the light to remote your Tri to fall down so that's an example of what that looks like um this was first used in Iraq in 2017 um where they actually put bird feathers at the at the back of it to add a bit of stability um and this has proven to be very useful at disabling a

Russian tank so in this situation you have you know a few hundred a drone taking out a multi million a tank um I'm not showing the more graphic uh videos but um there are videos of these uh drones flying over Fox hols and then they drop it and then obviously a whole bunch of Russian soldiers are killed in the process so the Ukrainian military has asked for donations of these drones and have received them and then these are just some uh pictures of the various deliveries um if anybody knows why they prefer the orange drones as opposed to to the gray Zone uh drones I would love to hear your opinion I spend so much time trying to get the

answer but have been unable to do so um and in this photo you can see at the bottom the the Honors that they use to release these drones um and these drones uh you know kind of complement the higher end drones that they have which are used for a condence and there also compliments their existing drones that they have as well as the drones provided to them from the US um and Russia has also starting to take notes and is using the same drones in this uh footage you actually see a Russian drone trying to knock out a Ukrainian drone and you know obviously is not very successful uh Russia has also purchased a suicide DRS from Iran

um so they can put a few uh few kilograms of explosives on these DRS and then they fly them into the targets that they want to um you know Target and um they for found us chips on these drones which would actually be a sanctions violation and in response EU sanctions have actually additional EU sanctions have been added um as as a result of that um the Ukrainian military has had a lot of success at taking down Uh Russian uh um reconnaissance drones uh using various Jammers to mess with the frequencies um and they're also using their own V munition so in this example you see russan ran Laing mition attacking a Ukrainian tank and then

obviously that you know takes that out and then kind of the last thing I wanted to talk about is nefo which is kind of a play on NATO so instead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization we have the North Atlantic Fellers organization and this is a group specifically uh you know designed to kind of counter some of the disinformation that Russia is actually pushing out so what they do is use anthrop Pi uh she in your dogs uh to make memes and then then make fun of what's actually going on so for this example you know they fighting NATO like actually know you're losing to our separate stores and you know tearing the stuffing out of vnic for those of you

that don't know that ni of people who believe Russian propaganda this is just a few additional um examples and even the uh defense minister of Ukraine was actually seen wearing the t-shirts whether she Inu and I just want to point out that she Inu is actually wearing the T-shirt of a St Javin so that Circle was nice to see CL um a lot of artwork has also been created to counter uh you know some of these false narratives for those of you that are good with history um you might recognize some of the uh sayings on these artworks um yeah and memes I guess and what also happened was is they started putting she in new stickers on Russian

on Ukrainian um you know weapon systems you know like the super B on the the turet um as well as the Napa baseball bats of turet as well um and the US uh governments also provided uh Ukraine with 16 High Mobility artillery rocket systems or hos um which have been very successful at taking out Russian targets for example ammunition Depots um and other critical uh targets and I can assure you that these assets are like probably the most well protected Assets in Ukraine because of how successful they are um Ukraine actually created deep various Deo um to actually draw out some of Russia's more expensive cruise missiles because of the important Target and then obviously they deplete Russia's

um Christmas Al in the process um and as a result of the effectiv of the horos um you know a lot of memes uh come about and if you look on social media what you'll see is whenever you see a false russan narrative being pushed like somebody from NAA will actually respond typically with this mean but there's a lot of others um when a whole bunch of uh Vehicles were actually donated to Ukraine um they actually put the NAA sticker on the vehicle um when I first saw this video I couldn't believe it but it's like I just like I you know I just you know found found funny um and obviously the Russian trolls really don't like this um they

you know have been complaining on Twitter and um what this led to was a US intelligence account actually tweeting uh you know that you know of this activity and if you had told me at the beginning of the war that um you know a US intelligence account would be tweeting that uh you know sheep in DOS or like making Russian trolls mad I probably would have led in your face there have been allegations by certain charlatans in the community like him.com that this is a c information operation which is not true um NAFA was actually created by a Ukrainian with the goal of uh you know countering this this information campaign I'm sure Western intelligence is probably contributing to

nafo and is probably creating these mes themselves um but I don't believe that it's a you know Western intelligence operation from the beginning and then to kind of close off a little bit um I do think what is very clear is that Russia has lost its information War uh to a bunch of continent dogs and then in closing you know where do we go from here so Russia invaded Ukraine with up to 180,000 troops they've lost at least 85,000 trips including a lot of Fighters and Equipment uh currently Russia controls about 20% of Ukraine which is about a 900 by 85 km area and um a victory for Ukraine or Russia is probably not going

to be possible um and the Ukrainian Victory which is defined as then kicking out Russia from the country uh is very unlikely and what this will probably require is a political solution because I don't think weapons are going to end the war um maybe I'm wrong but this is you know kind of what many analysts are kind of saying um and then to close off I would like to say a massive thank you to all the researchers journalists and activists and institutions that put out their research um this presentation would not be possible with the without their research um and you know I like the say that we like to build our work on the shoulders of giants and that's

when we can really do good things and then just a special thanks to M Demitri Ryan and Steven and Joseph uh for you know helping to form some of my views and answering my questions and with that that is the end of my presentation and happy to take any questions

[Music]

question well this is probably a simple question but you mentioned with the phones that they have an unencrypted secure telecoms Network and what does that mean because in my end secur is encrypted so so the the way that I understand it is that the phones themselves uh the signals are not encrypted but the network that it runs on is encrypted so they might be I don't know the full technical details but there's probably be like Layer Two lineing Crypts on the network and it's probably being protected I mean you see this a lot with icsw SH where they aren't they aren't cive but they are wel test so sorry where I understand that is that it's actually just a direct line S

it doesn't have to be encrypted line it's like you're not connected with your laptop but my laptop conect that's essentially the difference that's Tel up this the side yeah but because you know it's potentially long distances um I do think there is like ler to uh you know I don't know the technal so yeah uh the the grenade releases on the drones do you have any information as to where the design came from no IDE [Music] do actually dro I heard like I have heard rumor sourcing of there's a saying that in any War the first casualty is the truth so the question that I have to you is do you believe that Ukraine is totally

innocent in this whole exercise so there have been allegations of war crimes made against the you know Ukraine military um and you know like it's possible and very likely that they have you know committed war crimes um the evidence and you know of that is you know not really clear um I think it's absolutely possible I wouldn't say you know 100% one on that Co thanks

CL to