Russia hacked Kyiv’s power grid — report – DW – 11/09/2023

Ukrainian lawmakers have voted to approve a 2024 government budget that will see half of all state spending go to defense, as Kyiv drives resources into the war effort.

According to Ukraine‘s Finance Ministry, nearly 1.7 trillion hryvnia (about $47 billion or €44 billion) will be spent on defense, roughly the same amount as in 2023.

The figure is more than spending on education, social welfare and health care combined, and accounts for about half of the country’s total planned spending of $93 billion.

Ukraine has relied heavily on financial support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western allies like the United States to keep its economy afloat during the war.

It said it needed $41 billion in outside support to cover day-to-day spending next year, about the same amount the IMF predicted it would need in 2023.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said Moscow suspects the West won’t find the perpetrators of explosions that damaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

The pipeline, which passed through Sweden and Denmark’s exclusive economic zones, was designed to increase the flow of Russian gas directly to Germany. In September 2022, several sections of the structure were damaged by a series of blasts.

The United States and the NATO military alliance have called the explosions an “act of sabotage,” while Russia has referred to them as a “terror attack.”

Zakharova said the West had promised to investigate the attack and provide information to the public. She said that Russia had asked for an independent inquiry into the explosions, but she claimed this was “blocked” by the UN Security Council.

She accused Western countries of not being ready for “serious” investigations into the incident, saying that they “refused to cooperate with the state that suffered damage” from the explosions.

Sweden, Denmark and Germany have said that Russia has been informed about investigations by their respective national authorities.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov has said Ukraine’s alternative Black Sea export corridor is working despite a recent attack on a civilian vessel.

The comments come a day after Ukrainian officials said a Russian missile damaged a Liberia-flagged civilian ship entering a Black Sea port in the Odesa region, killing one person and injuring four.

“Ukrainian Corridor: vessel traffic continues both to and from the ports of Big Odesa (region),” Kubrakov said on social media.

He said six vessels carrying 231,000 tons of agricultural products had left ports within the southwestern Odesa region and were heading towards Turkey’s Bosphorus Strait.

“Five vessels are waiting to enter ports for loading. Traffic along the  Ukrainian corridor continued despite Russia’s systematic attacks on port infrastructure,” the Ukrainian official said.

He said 91 vessels had exported 3.3 million metric tons of agricultural and metal products since Kyiv opened a “humanitarian corridor” of ships aimed for African and Asian markets in August. The route aims to circumvent a de facto Russian blockade.

Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukrainian port infrastructure after pulling out of a UN-brokered deal that guaranteed safe shipments of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has dismissed calls for Kyiv to hold peace negotiations with Russia.

“Those who argue that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia now are either uninformed or misled,” Kuleba said on social media.

“Or they side with Russia and want (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to take a pause before an even larger aggression,” he added. “We should not and will not fall into this trap,” he said.

He said that Kyiv held 200 rounds of talks with Moscow between 2014 and the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine in February 2022.

Kuleba claimed that Russia violated 20 cease-fire agreements in the same period when Moscow-backed separatist forces were waging an insurgency in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas region.

Russian cyber-spies launched a hack that  disrupted part of Ukraine’s power grid in
late 2022, a report from the US cybersecurity firm Mandiant says

The hack was said to have been a rare and advanced form of cyberwarfare with Russia one of the few countries with the capability to carry out such cyberattacks.

“This attack represents the latest evolution in Russia’s cyber physical attack capability, which has been increasingly visible since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said the report. 

It did not specify which facility the attack had been carried out against.

The hacking group, known in cybersecurity research circles by the name “Sandworm,” has been previously identified as a cyberwarfare unit of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

It apparently managed to cause a power cut in the unidentified area of Ukraine by tripping circuit breakers at an electrical substation. 

This happened at the same time as a missile strike, and the group deployed data-wiping malware in a bid to cover their tracks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said he and his South Korean counterpart, Park Jin, share “profound” concerns about growing military cooperation between North Korea and Russia.

Blinken and Park talked Thursday about cooperating on a way to implement a so-called extended deterrence strategy for countering threats from North Korea and deepening strategic cooperation with Japan.

“Already our three countries are taking steps to improve our joint response through real-time sharing of DPRK missile warning data, trilateral defence exercises and efforts to counter DPRK’s malicious cyber activities.”

DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s official name. The US and its allies have condemned what they claim is a flow of arms and military equipment from North Korea to Russia. 

While North Korea and Russia have denied any arms deals, their leaders pledged closer military cooperation at a meeting in Russia’s Far East in September.