In March 2021, Russia began to deploy large numbers of troops and armaments near the Russia-Ukraine border in what Western observers believed posed an invasion threat to Ukraine, which Russia strongly denied. An intense debate in the West ensued over whether the troops were being deployed to pressure Ukraine into making political concessions or to conduct an actual invasion.
Noting previous Russian offensive cyber operations against Ukraine starting as early as 2014, many cyber analysts and scholars predicted that an invasion would be accompanied by significant cyberattacks on Ukraine and possibly on Western nations supporting Ukraine, including particularly the US. For example, Maggie Miller wrote in Politico that “in a full-scale cyber assault [on Ukraine], Russia could take down the power grid, turn the heat off in the middle of winter and shut down Ukraine’s military command centers and cellular communications systems.”1 Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation thought the most likely Russian response to Western economic sanctions would be a cyber operation that temporarily shut down some major Western banks.
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