Ukrainian drone strikes Russian Ka-52 helicopter

The Ukrainian military from the Balista unit has hit a Russian Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopter.

During the attack, the tactical strike unmanned aerial system Bombus was used.

This was reported by the unit Balista on its official page on Instagram.

According to the Ukrainian military, the enemy helicopter was on combat patrol over Ukrainian territory.

Ukrainian special forces captured a group of occupiers The Ukrainian special operations forces have staged an unexpected raid on the rear positions of the Russian army.

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They had to blow it up

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Russian leaders and propagandists have at once denied the existence of a Ukrainian nation and called for purging or cleansing the Ukrainian territory, in terms that often mirror rhetoric preceding past genocides. In this report, the authors seek to shed light on how Russia's extremist, hate-peddling narratives deployed in the war have spread online through social media.

Russian propaganda is making inroads into some of the major European languages—Spanish and German, as well as French and Italian.

REMVE narratives are also finding more-receptive audiences among relatively small linguistic communities in Eastern Europe. Serbian- and Bulgarian-language communities emerge as particularly vulnerable to cross-language and cross-cultural transmission of REMVE messages on both X and Telegram.

However, Russia's ability to successfully mainstream its propaganda and mobilize its audiences against Ukrainians is limited: The most virulent REMVE conversations on these two platforms remain highly Russian-language dominated, are concentrated in specific communities, and do not draw much attention from others in the networks.

Full research report: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3400/RRA3450-1/RAND_RRA3450-1.pdf

The incoming Trump administration has been supportive of this European initiative. It is consistent with the president-elect's stated desire to disengage the United States from security matters on the continent, and instead have the European Union and the United Kingdom take the lead. But a deployment of European forces to Ukraine will inevitably entangle the Americans. European militaries depend on their U.S. allies for out-of-area operations. Inevitably, a large deployment to Ukraine will once again expose this dependency when they turn to the United States for help with critical tasks such as air lift, logistics, and intelligence that they cannot conduct alone.

The Ukrainian military faces critical challenges that demand immediate, honest evaluation:

• Infantry roles becoming increasingly unsustainable

• Recruitment system disproportionately burdens vulnerable populations

• Command structures trapped in outdated bureaucratic frameworks

• Morale gradually eroding under prolonged combat stress

• No clear exit strategy for frontline soldiers

• Commanders prioritizing reporting over human lives

• Declining Western support momentum

• Deeply entrenched leadership inefficiencies

Suggested changes:

• Implement merit-based officer promotion systems
• Establish fixed, transparent service terms
• Rebuild trust between military leadership and soldiers

More in the article.

According to the article, Danieli continues to operate in Russia despite EU sanctions, collaborating with steel giants like Severstal and MMK, both linked to military production. Danieli reportedly uses its Chinese subsidiary to bypass sanctions, enabling the supply of equipment to Russia. In 2023, its Russian subsidiary’s cash flow increased 35-fold, contradicting claims that the business is unprofitable or disconnected from the military sector. The company’s justification hinges on technicalities, but the financial and strategic realities suggest complicity in sustaining critical industries that support Russia’s war economy. At what point does this move from legal maneuvering to outright enabling?

A strong majority of Americans across the political spectrum sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia in the ongoing war: 62% of respondents express more sympathy with Ukraine than Russia, including 58% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. At the same time, just 2% of respondents said they sympathized more with Russia in the conflict, including 4% of Republicans and 1% of Democrats. Republicans (20%) were more likely than Democrats (7%) to say they sympathized with neither side, while equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (5%) said they sympathized with both sides equally.

The percentage of respondents who said they want the United States to stay the course in supporting Ukraine grew from our October 2023 poll, reaching the highest level in our tracking since the spring of 2023. In our latest survey, 48% of all respondents said that the United States should support Ukraine as long as the conflict lasts, including 37% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats. All these numbers are new highs in our four polls since March-April 2023.

Highlights

“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” (Chuckles.) “Good luck!” (Laughter.) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” (Laughter.)

While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China.

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.

This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.

Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy.

In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped.

Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive.

None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic.

Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.

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The major story of the past couple of weeks has been Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and the seizing of over 1100 square kilometres of Russian territory in the past ten days. This has been a stunning change in the direction of the war. At least five Ukrainian brigades, or elements of those brigades, and possibly more have seized the initiative and remained on the move since surprising the Russians in their initial crossing of the border into the Russian Kursk oblast.

Seeing all these videos of soldiers dying and getting injured, it makes me wonder if the field medics carry morphine to ease their suffering.

Cyber Conflict and Subversion in the Russia-Ukraine War

Metadata

• Author: Default
• Category: article
• URL: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/cyber-conflict-in-the-russia-ukraine-war

Highlights

The Russia-Ukraine war is the first case of cyber conflict in a large-scale military conflict involving a major power.

Contrary to cyberwar fears, most cyber operations remained strategically inconsequential, but there are several exceptions: the AcidRain operation, the UKRTelecom disruption, the September 2022 power grid sabotage, and the catastrophic Kyivstar outage of 2023.

These developments suggest hacking groups are increasingly fusing cyber operations with traditional subversive methods to improve effectiveness.

The first exceptional case is AcidRain. This advanced malware knocked out satellite communication provided by Viasat’s K-SAT service across Europe the very moment the invasion commenced. Among the customers of the K-SAT service: Ukraine’s military. The operation that deployed this malware stands out not only because it shows a direct linkage to military goals but also because it could have plausibly produced a clear tactical, potentially strategic, advantage for Russian troops at a decisive moment.

The second exception is a cyber operation in March 2022 that caused a massive outage of UKRTelecom, a major internet provider in Ukraine. It took only a month to prepare yet caused significant damage. It cut off over 80 percent of UKRTelecom’s customers from the internet for close to 24 hours.

Finally, the potentially most severe challenge to the theory of subversion is a power grid sabotage operation in September 2022. The operation stands out not only because it used a novel technique but also because it took very little preparation. According to Mandiant, it required only two months of preparation and used what is called “living off the land” techniques, namely foregoing malware and using only existing functionality.

After all, why go through the trouble of finding vulnerabilities in complex networks and develop sophisticated exploits when you can take the easy route via an employee, or even direct network access?

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