Twitter is part of our war effort – Ukraine minister

As Ukraine’s military and citizens battle advancing Russian troops, the country has opened a new front in the fight, using technological expertise to garner support from Silicon Valley and undermine the enemy. Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov is leading the charge, but some of his tactics are proving divisive.

From his underground haven in a secret location in Kiev, Ukraine’s youngest cabinet minister is waging a digital war against Russia.

Using his weapon of choice, social media, Mykhailo Fedorov has been urging CEOs of big business to cut ties with Moscow. He also took the unprecedented step of creating a volunteer “Ukrainian IT Army” to launch cyberattacks against “the enemy.”

At just 31 years old, Fedorov has shaped his role in government around his lifestyle: he lives through his mobile phone.

Before the war, his main goal was to create a “state in a smartphone”, where 100% of government services were offered online. Now that project is on hold, with all muscles taut in the digital warfare effort.

It has piled pressure on multinational companies to boycott Russia.

Apple, Google, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft, Sony, Oracle… no tech giant has missed an official letter from the government.

Fedorov then posts his letters on social media for the world to see, along with some of the responses.

Whether this has influenced the companies’ actions is impossible to say, but most have changed their policy towards Russia in the days since, either halting products sold there, like Apple, or halting operations.

PayPal’s Saturday announcement that it would suspend services in Russia appeared on Fedorov’s Twitter feed before it was reported in the media. So did the news that Samsung and Nvidia are stopping all business with Russia, something he called for publicly on his social media.

A tweet from Fedorov to Elon Musk shortly after the invasion began produced quick results. Within 48 hours, the billionaire tech mogul had fine-tuned his Starlink satellite constellation and shipped a truckload of internet-ready terminals to Ukraine.

The service is a potential lifeline for the government if internet and telecommunications networks are damaged or destroyed, though Musk has since warned that satellite dishes could become a target for Russian missiles and should be used with care.

Fedorov has more than half a million followers in total on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram and uses them all to get his message across.

“Every platform is very important to us now and we are taking every opportunity to bring big business into this horror that is happening now in Ukraine. We are trying to bring the truth to the Russians and get them to protest against the war,” he said. to the BBC. via email.

He speaks mostly in Ukrainian online, but since the crisis hit he has switched to English on Twitter, where he is having the biggest impact.

“Twitter has become an efficient tool that we are using to counter Russian military aggression. It is our smart and peaceful tool to destroy the Russian economy,” she says.

Technology researcher and author Stephanie Hare says she’s not surprised Fedorov is succeeding.

“[He] he is 31 years old. He gets it,” she says.

The use of persuasion and propaganda is a traditional war tactic. But since social media companies entered the equation in the 2000s, “they’ve changed the calculus because of the speed and breadth with which people can spread their messages.”

Fedorov’s spokeswoman told me that his young team is constantly coming up with new ideas, which the ministry then tries to implement quickly. Last week, Kiev announced that it would issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to fund its military. But some others have been controversial.

Fedorov is urging crypto exchanges to freeze the accounts of all Russian citizens, for example, an idea that many, including the CEO of the Binance exchange, says would “oppose” the very reason cryptocurrencies exist.

And the ministry’s launch of a “Ukrainian IT Army,” which includes thousands of volunteer hackers from around the world (its Telegram group now has 270,000 members) has caused some concern.

“Technology is the best solution against tanks,” Fedorov told the BBC. “The IT Army is directed against the digital and online resources of Russian and Belarusian commercial corporations, banks and state web portals. We have closed the operation of the web portal of Russian public services, exchange, websites of Tass, Kommersant, Fontanka and other important media in Russia”.

So far, the hacking appears to be mostly low-level cyber vandalism, but Fedorov’s team is also explicitly calling for attacks on rail and power networks that, if successful and damaging enough, could cause harm to civilians. It makes some in the cyber security world anxious.

“It’s really important to be careful in this area,” says Suzanne Spalding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If we get into destructive attacks against critical infrastructure that are being carried out by citizens, I think we start to run into the kind of fog of war, misattribution, potential cascading impacts that weren’t anticipated. We could see retaliation from one side for something a citizen has done and things can escalate quickly.

On Friday, the deputy chairman of the State Service for Special Communications of Ukraine, which works closely with Fedorov’s department, defended the decision to rally hackers against Russia.

He said he welcomed the illegal cyberattacks against Russia by all groups, including the Anonymous hacker collective, because “the world order changed on February 24” when the invasion began.

Hacking is also being carried out against Ukraine by people who are sympathetic to Russia, but currently Russia seems to be doing worse. Its crack military hackers seem, so far, not to have played a significant role, for reasons that are unclear.