Relativity and Cyber diplomacy in the Russia-Ukraine conflict

By Anonymous -

 

Name: Priyanka Raman 

Roll No.: 2010110489 

Department: IRGS 

Date: 04.02.2022 



Relativity and Cyber diplomacy in the Russia-Ukraine conflict


Security studies is a discipline that is a culmination of content from various disciplines such as history, political science, economics, sociology, philosophy and more. The role it plays for states and their people is where its scholars help to identify, analyze and suggest and predict, reasons and probable solutions to states for conflicts that constitute international relations in the discipline of IR. With the global order being defined by transitions in power throughout the course of history, states engage in numerous actions in order to sustain or climb up the existent power hierarchy. What is seen as a defense for one state is seen as an offence for the other. This relativity and a level of ambiguity in the field of security studies is at the core and defining characteristic of the discipline, and the area of cyber diplomacy is also one where the same trend of relativity has been observed. With the varying levels of technology present in each state and the distinction between the Great Powers and the developing and least-developed powers, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict also brings in these hierarchies beyond the lens of just the military understanding of a “threat” to redefine the same and then analyze the conflict, its past, present and future. 

“At least 100,000 troops are positioned within reach of Ukraine's borders and US President Joe Biden is expecting some kind of military move.

Russia may deny any plans for invasion but it has carved out a series of demands from the West that cannot be met. (Kirby, 2022)” The understanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict is not one that is recent but one that can be traced back to the end of the Cold War, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Both have extremely close cultural ties, “In June 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people ... one nation.” 69 Most Ukrainians can speak Russian, whether as a primary or secondary language. In Ukraine’s last national census (2001), 17% of the population identified as ethnic Russians, mostly concentrated in the south (Crimea) and east, where ties to Russia are stronger than in the rest of the country. In Soviet times, eastern Ukraine became home to a heavy industrial and defense production sector that retained close economic ties to Russia after independence.(Cory 2019)” Putin has moved in troops post the annexation of Crimea, and backing rebels in violence in the Donbansk region of eastern Ukraine and numerous times violated the Minsk Agreements signed between the two, the result of which is the loss of “killing of more than 14,000 people. (Chadwick, 2022)” The Russian motivation for these actions could be based on as aforementioned, a historic connection, Ukraine’s intentions and growing relationship with the opposing military alliance of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) that is led by the United States, which is also associated with the legacy of the cold war, a fear of expanding into assumed Russian territory of influence, as the NATO has managed to admit Latvia, Romania, Estonia and many more Eastern Europe nations, which also explains the Russian demand to the West to not admit Ukraine and Georgia, another nation Russia briefly attacked, as members of the alliance. 

The recent progressions in the Russia-Ukraine conflict are not events that can be understood in isolation. The most important highlight of the conflict is the increased action through hybrid warfare.  “To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion.”(Bilal 2021) “A special feature of hybrid warfare is a conscious blurring of the lines between war and peace. (Limnéll 2015)” The realm of cybersecurity, cyber diplomacy, or “information conflict” as the Russians refer to it, is one area that challenges and forces a rethinking of rigid definitions that have been embedded in the understanding of security owing to its progression as a discipline. However, for example, cybersecurity poses the question of what even constitutes an attack of a state? because the use of cyberwarfare requires moving beyond the basics of only the physical realm in order for it to be considered a security threat. One of the challenges to understanding security challenges calls for breaking the mainstream, traditional, conventional definitions and acting on security concerns and conflict with a holistic lens in order to “broaden and deepen” (Krause and Williams 2018), the analysis beyond only a military, high politics focus. 

Cyberwarfare, as mentioned above has always had a very ambiguous, vague understanding in terms of its application under international law due to the lack of acknowledgement of the annexation of Crimea and diverging opinions on the issues, it converges the digital and the technological field, the digital world with a real physical world,  with the level of anonymity and use of proxies the issues of “attribution problem” (Limnéll 2015), which refers to the problems faced in identifying sources of a cyberattack as a state, non-state, or independent actor, all redefine the conventional understanding of the concept of even peace and war. Its use has both a military and strategic impact on the victim state. The military impact would include the physical effects achieved through the use of kinetic weapons by states. Strategic impacts would include, “a cyber attack can produce results equivalent to a kinetic attack, but this is not its primary effect, which (at least for now) is to manipulate data, knowledge, and opinion to produce political or psychological effect rather than physical damage.(James 2015)” 

 

The recent cyberattack on the official Ukrainian foreign and education ministry websites with the message, “Suspected Russian hackers left a message on the foreign ministry website, according to reports. It said: “Ukrainians! … All information about you has become public. Be afraid and expect worse. It’s your past, present and future.”

The message reproduced the Ukrainian flag and map crossed out. It mentioned the Ukrainian insurgent army, or UPA, which fought against the Soviet Union during the second world war. There was also a reference to “historical land” (Harding 2022). The Ukraine-Russia conflict proves to be an extremely important case study in the domain of cyberspace as with the advent of globalization and the onset of the digital revolution, almost all the means of a states’ functioning, consists of information and technology, especially the military. Further advancements in the conflict will go on to redefine the way security studies includes the role of technology, how it redefines concepts of security in order to account for the “human” implications of the cyberworld. 


References

Andrew, James, and Kenneth Geers. "‘Compelling Opponents to Our Will’: The Role of Cyber Warfare in Ukraine." In Cyber war in perspective: Russian aggression against Ukraine, pp. 39-48. NATO CCDCOE, 2015. 

Bilal, Arsalan. 2021. "NATO Review - Hybrid Warfare –New Threats, Complexity, And ‘Trust’ As The Antidote". NATO Review. https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/11/30/hybrid-warfare-new-threats-complexity-and-trust-as-the-antidote/index.html. 

Harding, Luke. 2022. "Ukraine Hit By ‘Massive’ Cyber-Attack On Government Websites". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/14/ukraine-massive-cyber-attack-government-websites-suspected-russian-hackers. 

Kirby, Paul. 2022. "Is Russia Preparing To Invade Ukraine And What Does Putin Want?". BBC News.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56720589. 

Krause, Keith, and Michael Williams. 2018. "Security And
“Security Studies” ". The Oxford Handbook Of International Security, 13-28. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198777854.013.2. 

Limnéll, Jarno. 2015. "The Exploitation Of Cyber Domain As Part Of Warfare: Russo-Ukrainian War". International Journal Of Cyber-Security And Digital Forensics 4 (4): 521-532. doi:10.17781/p001973. 

Welt, Cory. "Ukraine: Background, conflict with Russia, and US policy." Congressional Research Service (2019): 1-46.

 

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