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Ukraine needs small drones to combat Russian forces—and is bootstrapping its own industry at home.
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Inside Ukraine’s Killer-Drone Startup Industry
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The Dangerous Rise of GPS Attacks
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The disruption to GPS services started getting worse on Christmas day. Planes and ships moving around southern Sweden and Poland lost connectivity last December 25 as their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea—including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems.
Tens of thousands of planes flying in the region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months amid widespread jamming attacks, which can make GPS inoperable. As the attacks have grown, Russia has increasingly been blamed, with open source researchers tracking the source to Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one instance, signals were disrupted for 47 hours continuously. On Monday, marking one of the most serious incidents yet, airline Finnair canceled its flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month, after GPS interference forced two of its planes to abort landings at the airport and turn around.
The jamming in the Baltic region, which was first spotted in early 2022, is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, there has been a rapid uptick in attacks against GPS signals and wider satellite navigation systems, known as GNSS, including those of Europe, China, and Russia. The attacks can jam signals, essentially forcing them offline, or spoof the signals, making aircraft and ships appear at false locations on maps. Beyond the Batlics, war-zone areas around Ukraine and the Middle East have also seen sharp rises in GPS disruptions, including signal blocking meant to disrupt airborne attacks.
Now, governments and telecom and airline safety experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about the disruptions and the potential for major disasters. Foreign ministers in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have all blamed Russia for GPS issues in the Baltics this week and said the threat should be taken seriously.
“It can not be ruled out that this jamming is a form of hybrid warfare with the aim of creating uncertainty and unrest,” Jimmie Adamsson, the chief of public affairs for the Swedish Navy, tells WIRED. “Of course, there are concerns, mostly for civilian shipping and aviation, that an accident will occur creating an environmental disaster. There is also a risk that ships and aircraft will stop traffic to this area and therefore global trade will be affected.”
“A growing threat situation must be expected in connection with GPS jamming,” Joe Wagner, a spokesperson from Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security tells WIRED, saying there are technical ways to reduce its impact. Officials in Finland also say they have also seen an increase in airline disruptions in and around the country. And a spokesperson for the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, tells WIRED that the number of jamming and spoofing incidents have “increased significantly” over the last four years and interfering with radio signals is prohibited under the ITU’s rules.
On the Upswing
Attacks against GPS, and the wider GNSS category, come in two forms. First, GPS jamming looks to overwhelm the radio signals that make up GPS and make the systems unusable. Second, spoofing attacks can replace the original signal with a new location—spoofed ships can, for example, appear on maps as if they’re at inland airports.
Both types of interference are up in frequency. The disruptions—at least at this stage—mostly impact planes flying at high altitudes and ships that can be in open water, not people’s individual phones or other systems that rely upon GPS.
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Why China Is So Bad at Disinformation
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The headlines sounded dire. “China will use AI to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India, Microsoft warns” one read. “China Is Using AI to Sow Disinformation and Stoke Discord Across Asia and the US,” another claimed.
The headlines were based on a report published earlier this month by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center which outlined how a Chinese disinformation campaign was now utilizing artificial technology to inflame divisions and disrupt elections in the US and around the world. The campaign, which has already targeted Taiwan’s elections, uses AI-generated audio and memes designed to grab user attention and boost engagement.
But what these headlines and Microsoft itself failed to adequately convey is that the Chinese government-linked disinformation campaign, known as Spamouflage Dragon or Dragonbridge, has so far been virtually ineffective.
“I would describe China’s disinformation campaigns as Russia 2014. As in, they’re 10 years behind,” says Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. “They’re trying lots of different things but their sophistication is still very weak.”
Over the last 24 months, the campaign has switched from pushing predominately pro-China content to more aggressively targeting US politics. While these efforts have been large-scale and across dozens of platforms, they have largely failed to have any real world impact. Still, experts warn that it can take just a single post being amplified by an influential account to change all of that.
“Spamouflage is like throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they are throwing a lot of spaghetti,” says Jack Stubbs, chief information officer at Graphika, a social media analysis company that was among the first to identify the Spamouflage campaign. “The volume and scale of this thing is huge. They’re putting out multiple videos and cartoons every day, amplified across different platforms at a global scale. The vast majority of it, for the time being, appears to be something that doesn’t stick, but that doesn’t mean it won’t stick in the future.”
Since at least 2017, Spamouflage has been ceaselessly spewing out content designed to disrupt major global events, including topics as diverse as the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, the US presidential elections, and the Israel-Hamas war. Part of a wider multi-billion-dollar influence campaign by the Chinese government, the campaign has used millions of accounts on dozens of internet platforms ranging from X and YouTube to more fringe platforms like Gab, where the campaign has been trying to push pro-China content. It’s also been among the first to adopt cutting edge techniques such as AI-generated profile pictures.
Even with all of these investments, experts say the campaign has largely failed due to a number of factors including issues of cultural context, China’s online partition from the outside world via the Great Firewall, a lack of joined-up thinking between state media and the disinformation campaign, and the use of tactics designed for China’s own heavily controlled online environment.
“That’s been the story of Spamouflage since 2017: They’re massive, they’re everywhere, and nobody looks at them except for researchers,” says Elise Thomas, a senior open source analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who has tracked the Spamouflage campaign for years.
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Russia Vetoed a UN Resolution to Ban Space Nukes
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Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution Wednesday that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit, two months after reports Russia has plans to do just that.
Russia’s vote against the resolution was no surprise. As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia has veto power over any resolution that comes before the body. China abstained from the vote, and 13 other members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution.
If it passed, the resolution would have affirmed a binding obligation in Article IV of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says nations are “not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction.”
Going Nuclear
Russia is one of 115 parties to the Outer Space Treaty. The Security Council vote Wednesday follows reports in February that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.
“The United States assesses that Russia is developing a new satellite carrying a nuclear device,” said Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security advisor. “We have heard President Putin say publicly that Russia has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space. If that were the case, Russia would not have vetoed this resolution.”
The United States and Japan proposed the joint resolution, which also called on nations not to develop nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction designed to be placed into orbit around the Earth. In a statement, US and Japanese diplomats highlighted the danger of a nuclear detonation in space. Such an event would have “grave implications for sustainable development, and other aspects of international peace and security,” US officials said in a press release.
With its abstention from the vote, “China has shown that it would rather defend Russia as its junior partner, than safeguard the global nonproliferation regime,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN.
US government officials have not offered details about the exact nature of the anti-satellite weapon they say Russia is developing. A nuclear explosion in orbit would destroy numerous satellites—from many countries—and endanger astronauts. Space debris created from a nuclear detonation could clutter orbital traffic lanes needed for future spacecraft.
The Soviet Union launched more than 30 military satellites powered by nuclear reactors. Russia’s military space program languished in the first couple of decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, and US intelligence officials say it still lags behind the capabilities possessed by the US Space Force and the Chinese military.
Russia’s military funding has largely gone toward the war in Ukraine for the last two years, but Putin and other top Russian officials have raised threats of nuclear force and attacks on space assets against adversaries. Russia’s military launched a cyberattack against a commercial satellite communications network when it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Russia has long had an appetite for anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. The Soviet Union experimented with “co-orbital” ASATs in the 1960s and 1970s. When deployed, these co-orbital ASATs would have attacked enemy satellites by approaching them and detonating explosives or using a grappling arm to move the target out of orbit.
In 1987, the Soviet Union launched an experimental weapons platform into orbit to test laser technologies that could be used against enemy satellites. Russia shot down one of its own satellites in 2021 in a widely condemned “direct ascent” ASAT test. This Russian direct ascent ASAT test followed demonstrations of similar capability by China, the United States, and India. Russia’s military has also demonstrated satellites over the last decade that could grapple onto an adversary’s spacecraft in orbit, or fire a projectile to take out an enemy satellite.
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The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem
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These incidents occurred as security experts were increasingly criticizing Microsoft for failing to promptly and adequately fix flaws in its products. As by far the biggest technology provider for the US government, Microsoft vulnerabilities account for the lion’s share of both newly discovered and most widely used software flaws. Many experts say Microsoft is refusing to make the necessary cybersecurity improvements to keep up with evolving challenges.
Microsoft hasn’t “adapted their level of security investment and their mindset to fit the threat,” says one prominent cyber policy expert. “It’s a huge fuckup by somebody that has the resources and the internal engineering capacity that Microsoft does.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s CSRB endorsed this view in its new report on the 2023 Chinese intrusion, saying Microsoft exhibited “a corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.” The report also criticized Microsoft for publishing inaccurate information about the possible causes of the latest Chinese intrusion.
The recent breaches reveal Microsoft’s failure to implement basic security defenses, according to multiple experts.
Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at the security firm CrowdStrike, points to the Russians’ ability to jump from a testing environment to a production environment. “That should never happen,” he says. Another cyber expert who works at a Microsoft competitor highlighted China’s ability to snoop on multiple agencies’ communications through one intrusion, echoing the CSRB report, which criticized Microsoft’s authentication system for allowing broad access with a single sign-in key.
“You don’t hear about these types of breaches coming out of other cloud service providers,” Meyers says.
According to the CSRB report, Microsoft has “not sufficiently prioritized rearchitecting its legacy infrastructure to address the current threat landscape.”
In response to written questions, Microsoft tells WIRED that it’s aggressively improving its security to address recent incidents.
“We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats,” says Steve Faehl, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal security business.
As part of its Secure Future Initiative launched in November, Faehl says, Microsoft has improved its ability to automatically detect and block abuses of employee accounts, begun scanning for more types of sensitive information in network traffic, reduced the access granted by individual authentication keys, and created new authorization requirements for employees seeking to create company accounts.
Microsoft has also redeployed “thousands of engineers” to improve its products and has begun convening senior executives for status updates at least twice weekly, Faehl says.
The new initiative represents Microsoft’s “roadmap and commitments to answer much of what the CSRB report called out as priorities,” Faehl says. Still, Microsoft does not accept that its security culture is broken, as the CSRB report argues. “We very much disagree with this characterization,” Faehl says, “though we do agree that we haven’t been perfect and have work to do.”
A Security Revenue ‘Addiction’
Microsoft has earned special enmity from the cybersecurity community for charging its customers extra for better security protections like threat monitoring, antivirus, and user access management. In January 2023, the company touted that its security division had passed $20 billion in annual revenue.
“Microsoft has shifted to looking at cybersecurity as something that’s meant to generate revenue for them,” says Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, associate vice president of research at security firm SentinelOne. His colleague Alex Stamos recently wrote that Microsoft’s “addiction” to this revenue “has seriously warped their product design decisions.”
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Apple Chip Flaw Leaks Secret Encryption Keys
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The next time you stay in a hotel, you may want to use the door’s deadbolt. A group of security researchers this week revealed a technique that uses a series of security vulnerabilities that impact 3 million hotel room locks worldwide. While the company is working to fix the issue, many of the locks remain vulnerable to the unique intrusion technique.
Apple is having a tough week. In addition to security researchers revealing a major, virtually unpatchable vulnerability in its hardware (more on that below), the United States Department of Justice and 16 attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, alleging that its practices related to its iPhone business are illegally anticompetitive. Part of the lawsuit highlights what it calls Apple’s “elastic” embrace of privacy and security decisions—particularly iMessage’s end-to-end encryption, which Apple has refused to make available to Android users.
Speaking of privacy, a recent change to cookie pop-up notifications reveals the number of companies each website shares your data with. A WIRED analysis of the top 10,000 most popular websites found that some sites are sharing data with more than 1,500 third parties. Meanwhile, employer review site Glassdoor, which has long allowed people to comment about companies anonymously, has begun encouraging people to use their real names.
And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we don’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Apple’s M-series of chips contain a flaw that could allow an attacker to trick the processor into revealing secret end-to-end encryption keys on Macs, according to new research. An exploit developed by a team of researchers, dubbed GoFetch, takes advantage of the M-series chips’ so-called data memory-dependent prefetcher, or DMP. Data stored in a computer’s memory have addresses, and DMP’s optimize the computer’s operations by predicting the address of data that is likely to be accessed next. The DMP then puts “pointers” that are used to locate data addresses in the machine’s memory cache. These caches can be accessed by an attacker in what’s known as a side-channel attack. A flaw in the DMP makes it possible to trick the DMP into adding data to the cache, potentially exposing encryption keys.
The flaw, which is present in Apple’s M1, M2, and M3 chips, is essentially unpatchable because it is present in the silicon itself. There are mitigation techniques that cryptographic developers can create to reduce the efficacy of the exploit, but as Kim Zetter at Zero Day writes, “the bottom line for users is that there is nothing you can do to address this.”
In a letter sent to governors across the US this week, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House warned that hackers from Iran and China could attack “water and wastewater systems throughout the United States.” The letter, sent by EPA administrator Michael Regan and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, says hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and Chinese state-backed hacker group known as Volt Typhoon have already attacked drinking water systems and other critical infrastructure. Future attacks, the letter says, “have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities.”
There’s a new version of a wiper malware that Russian hackers appear to have used in attacks against several Ukrainian internet and mobile service providers. Dubbed AcidPour by researchers at security firm SentinelOne, the malware is likely an updated version of the AcidRain malware that crippled the Viasat satellite system in February 2022, heavily impacting Ukraine’s military communications. According to SentinelOne’s analysis of AcidPour, the malware has “expanded capabilities” that could allow it to “better disable embedded devices including networking, IoT, large storage (RAIDs), and possibly ICS devices running Linux x86 distributions.” The researchers tell CyberScoop that AcidPour may be used to carry out more widespread attacks.
Volt Typhoon isn’t the only China-linked hacker group wreaking widespread havoc. Researchers at security firm TrendMicro revealed a hacking campaign by a group known as Earth Krahang that’s targeted 116 organizations across 48 countries. Of those, Earth Krahang has managed to breach 70 organizations, including 48 government entities. According to TrendMicro, the hackers gain access through vulnerable internet-facing servers or through spear-phishing attacks. They then use access to the targeted systems to engage in espionage and commandeer the victims’ infrastructure to carry out further attacks. Trend Micro, which has been monitoring Earth Krahang since early 2022, also says it found “potential links” between the group and I-Soon, a Chinese hack-for-hire firm that was recently exposed by a mysterious leak of internal documents.
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Europe’s Biggest Salt Mine Is Now in ‘Minecraft,’ and It’s Helping Ukraine Rebuild
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On February 24, 2022, Stepan Bandrivskyi woke up before dawn and got ready for a special day: his birthday.
It wouldn’t be a particularly happy one. Hours earlier, a couple dozen miles away, Russian tanks had rolled across the borders of his native Ukraine. The full-scale invasion had begun.
Like so many other Ukrainians, Bandrivskyi didn’t know what to do. So he went to work, to the Soledar Salt Mine, a cavernous state-run operation in Eastern Ukraine. Kyiv says it is the biggest such mine in Europe. His manager told him to go home: The mine was closed. It hasn’t resumed operations since.
Bandrivskyi fled the region not long after, as Russian forces advanced. After nearly a year of fighting, during which the mines were turned into bunkers, Russia seized and occupied the town of Soledar—although fierce fighting continues nearby. Over time, Bandrivskyi came to the painful realization that he may never see the salt mine, and its eerie and isolated beauty, ever again.
Last year, Bandrivskyi received a phone call from a colleague. “He invited me to participate in a very interesting project,” he says.
The Ukrainian government wanted to completely map the mine “and translate it into a game environment,” he says. Bandrivskyi seized the opportunity. “I wanted to keep it in my memory, and I wanted other people to be able to kind of immerse themselves in this world as well,” he says.
With that, Minesalt was born.
The idea for Minesalt comes from United24, the official crowdfunding arm of the Ukrainian government. For nearly two years, United24 has raised funds to rebuild apartment blocks and purchase de-mining equipment. Last year, United24 began shipping batches of salt to donors, through its “Soledarity” campaign—raising some $3 million to purchase reconnaissance drones.
But as the war drags into its third year, donor fatigue has set in. That has pushed United24 to come up with new and innovative ways of attracting the world’s attention—and support.
Minesalt, which launches today, might be their most inspired effort yet.
On the left, the Soledar Salt Mine in Ukraine. On the right, a recreation of the mine in Minecraft. (Move the slider in the middle to see a full view of each image.)
“It is important for us to remember and talk about every Ukrainian city that is under temporary Russian occupation,” Yaroslava Gres, chief coordinator of United24, told WIRED in a statement. Last summer, when a team suggested bringing Soledar to life as a video game, it was a very easy idea to say yes to.
Built for the wildly popular sandbox game Minecraft, Minesalt challenges players to race through the mine, collecting 140 hidden salt crystals as fast as possible. At the end of the run, a quiz tests players’ recollection of details from Soledar. But, like in the rest of Minecraft, Minesalt players can also opt to wander at their own pace.
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Europe Lifts Sanctions on Yandex Cofounder Arkady Volozh
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Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia’s biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech.
On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week.
Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation,” the bloc said last year to justify its decision. “As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation.” In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions “misguided.”
Three months later, Volozh, who has been living in Israel since 2014, became one of the few prolific Russian businessmen to speak out against the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine, describing the war as “barbaric.” “I am horrified about the fate of people in Ukraine—many of them my personal friends and relatives—whose houses are being bombed every day,” he said in a statement in August.
Founded as a search engine in 1997, Yandex became known as “Russia’s Google” because the company was ubiquitous in the everyday life of millions of Russians. There is Yandex Music for streaming. Yandex Navigator for maps. And Yandex Go for hailing a ride. Although Volozh stepped down as CEO in June 2023, he continues to hold an 8.5 percent economic interest in Yandex’s Dutch parent company, Yandex NV, through a family trust.
Over the past 18 months, Yandex NV has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech.
Last month, Yandex NV announced it had reached a “binding agreement” with Russia to sell its operations in the country to a local consortium for 475 billion rubles ($5.2 billion) in a cash and shares deal. Yandex NV, once worth $30 billion at its peak, said that the price included a “mandatory discount of at least 50 percent” under Russian government rules that apply to the sale of Russian assets by companies based in countries considered to be “unfriendly” by the Kremlin, including the Netherlands.
The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech’s most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. “These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation,” Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. “They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land.”
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
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Security News This Week: Russian Hackers Stole Microsoft Source Code—and the Attack Isn’t Over
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For years, Registered Agents Inc.—a secretive company whose business is setting up other businesses—has registered thousands of companies to people who appear to not exist. Multiple former employees tell WIRED that the company routinely incorporates businesses on behalf of its customers using what they claim are fake personas. An investigation found that incorporation paperwork for thousands of companies that listed these allegedly fake personas had links to Registered Agents.
State attorneys general from around the US sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company take “immediate action” amid a record-breaking spike in complaints over hacked Facebook and Instagram accounts. Figures provided by the office of New York attorney general Letitia James, who spearheaded the effort, show that in 2023 her office received more than 780 complaints—10 times as many as in 2019. Many complaints cited in the letter say Meta did nothing to help them recover their stolen accounts. “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” the officials wrote in the letter. “Proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory.”
Meanwhile, Meta suffered a major outage this week that took most of its platforms offline. When it came back, users were often forced to log back in to their accounts. Last year, however, the company changed how two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram. Now, any devices you’ve frequently used with Meta services in recent years will be trusted by default. The move has made experts uneasy; this means that your devices may not need a two-factor authentication code to log in anymore. We updated our guide for how to turn off this setting.
A ransomware attack targeting medical firm Change Healthcare has caused chaos at pharmacies around the US, delaying delivery of prescription drugs nationwide. Last week, a Bitcoin address connected to AlphV, the group behind the attack, received $22 million in cryptocurrency—suggesting Change Healthcare has likely paid the ransom. A spokesperson for the firm declined to answer whether it was behind the payment.
And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
In January, Microsoft revealed that a notorious group of Russian state-sponsored hackers known as Nobelium infiltrated the email accounts of the company’s senior leadership team. Today, the company revealed that the attack is ongoing. In a blog post, the company explains that in recent weeks, it has seen evidence that hackers are leveraging information exfiltrated from its email systems to gain access to source code and other “internal systems.”
It is unclear exactly what internal systems were accessed by Nobelium, which Microsoft calls Midnight Blizzard, but according to the company, it is not over. The blog post states that the hackers are now using “secrets of different types” to breach further into its systems. “Some of these secrets were shared between customers and Microsoft in email, and as we discover them in our exfiltrated email, we have been and are reaching out to these customers to assist them in taking mitigating measures.”
Nobelium is responsible for the SolarWinds attack, a sophisticated 2020 supply-chain attack that compromised thousands of organizations including the major US government agencies like the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, and Treasury.
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Russia Attacked Ukraine’s Power Grid at Least 66 Times to ‘Freeze It Into Submission’
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Last week marked the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has been marked by multiple reports that Russia may have committed war crimes by indiscriminately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. During the first winter of the conflict, Russia pursued a strategy that US secretary of state Antony Blinken described as trying to “freeze [Ukraine] into submission” by attacking its power infrastructure, shutting citizens off from heat and electricity.
Now, using satellite imagery and open source information, a new report from the Conflict Observatory, a US-government-backed initiative between Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, PlanetScape AI, and the mapping software Esri, offers a clearer picture of the scale of this strategy. Between October 1, 2022, and April 30, 2023, researchers found more than 200 instances of damage to the country’s power infrastructure, amounting to more than $8 billion in estimated destruction. Of the 223 instances identified in the report, researchers were able to confirm 66 of them with high confidence, meaning they were able to cross-reference the damage across multiple trustworthy sources and data points.
Courtesy of Yale Humanitarian Research Lab
“What we see here is that there was a pattern of bombardment that hit front lines and non-frontline areas, at a scale that must have had civilian effect,” says Nathaniel Raymond, a coleader of the Humanitarian Research Lab and lecturer at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated at the time that attacks on Ukraine’s power grid had left “millions” of people without electricity throughout the country.
Researchers found and were able to identify and verify damage to power infrastructure in 17 of the country’s 24 oblasts, or administrative units.
Documenting specific instances of damage to power infrastructure has been particularly difficult for researchers and investigators, because the Ukrainian government has sought to limit public information about which sites have been damaged and which continue to be operational in an effort to prevent further attacks. (For this reason, the report itself avoids getting too specific about which locations it analyzed and the extent of the destruction.) But this can also make it difficult to collect, verify, and build upon the data necessary to prove violations of international law.
By making its methodology public, Raymond hopes that it will make further investigation possible. “Having common standards to a common dataset is a prerequisite for accountability,” he says.
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