At a glance.
- Advice from Estonia: it's the information ops.
- Can't fuel tanks; can't run a phony plebiscite, either?
- Mr. Putin is sorry. Not.
Advice from Estonia's former president on fending off Russian cyberattacks.
Kersti Kaljulaid, former president of Estonia, recalled Russia's earlier cyberwar against her country and offered an opinion on why the world hasn't seen more Russian cyberattacks during the present hybrid war against Ukraine. It's like a decision not to jam: the intelligence Moscow is probably getting, she told the Record, is probably more valuable than the results of a large-scale cyberattack would be.
"There are various reasons," she said, "and not the smallest and not to be ignored is that they get open-source intelligence from Ukrainians online. They’re probably regularly scanning whether they have any hope of seeing Ukrainians’ willingness to fight wane. I’m quite sure that they’re also doing a lot with their capabilities to make sure that the Ukrainian willingness starts to wane. We shouldn’t be naive about that. They also need these communications to keep going on and I’m quite sure they are also using it. It would be very weird if they didn’t."
The attempt to undermine Ukrainian willingness to resist, apart from the brutally direct destruction of cities by artillery, is manifest in various influence operations. One current disinformation campaign, being propagated over pro-Russian Telegram channels, maintains that Poland intends to annex western Ukraine, and brandishes a forged letter (circulated by Gossip Girl) to that effect. (At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union moved Ukraine's border west into what had been Polish territory, and Poland's border west into what had been German territory, but there's little to no evidence of any serious revanchist sentiment in either Poland or Germany.)
Kherson's occupation administration will ask for annexation by Russia.
Possibly struck by the insight that Russia is as unlikely to be able to pull off a convincing, rigged plebiscite as it was able to (say) keep an armored regiment fueled and fed, the leaders Russia installed in the occupied Ukrainian city are asking that Russia simply annex the city. Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of the military administration Russia's using to run Kherson ("puppet governors," the Telegraph sternly but accurately calls them) has said he, or his colleagues, will ask Russia to annex them directly. “The city of Kherson is Russia; there will be no KNR [Kherson People’s Republic] on the territory of the Kherson region, there will be no referendums,” the Guardian quotes Stremousov as saying in a televised briefing. “It will be a single decree based on the appeal of the leadership of the Kherson region to the president of the Russian Federation, and there will be a request to make [Kherson] into a full-fledged region of the Russian Federation.”
Doing so would make negotiations with Ukraine more difficult, and it seems likely that this is either Mr. Strmousov thinking with his mouth open or a way for Russia to apply further pressure on its Ukrainian foe. The US Director of National Intelligence said that she believed President Putin was preparing for a protracted war, the Washington Post reports. Avril Haines, the DNI, thinks Mr. Putin's ambitions remain more extensive than simply the Donbas.
Mr. Putin says sorry...
President Putin is said to have offered his Israeli counterpart an apology for his Foreign Minister's historical excursus on how Hitler was actually probably Jewish, and so Zelenskyy is probably another Jewish Nazi, too. Reports don't include details on how the apology was worded.
...but not so fast.
The Kremlin, with silence, takes back Mr. Putin's (alleged) apology to Israel. That apology President Putin was said to have offered Israel last week, the one that regretted Foreign Minister Lavrov's excursus on Hitler's supposed "Jewish blood?" Never happened, the Kremlin effectively said, releasing what it insisted was a complete transcript of the call between President Putin and Prime Minister Bennett. There was no apology in that transcript, Newsweek reports. A statement by Israel's Foreign Ministry after the call had said, "The Prime Minister accepted President Putin's apology for Lavrov's remarks and thanked him for clarifying his attitude towards the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust."
