Ukraine has been hit by a “massive” cyber-attack, which has taken down the websites of several government departments, including the ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of education. Officials said it was too soon to draw any conclusions, but they said there had been a “long history” of Russian cyber attacks against Ukraine. The attack came after security talks between Moscow and the US and its allies broke down this week. Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, and Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, both said they condemned the attacks.
A group of EU politicians and security experts will meet to figure out what to do and how to help Kyiv. “We are going to mobilise all our resources to help Ukraine to tackle this. Sadly, we knew it could happen,”
Ann Linde, the foreign minister of Sweden, said that the western world must fight back against any Russian threats.
Thursday was a bad day for the Russian envoys who had talks this week with the OSCE, NATO, and the US. Russian delegation leader Sergei Ryabkov said that talks had reached a dead end and that there was nothing more to be done. The Kremlin wants to know that Ukraine and Georgia will never join Nato but this is not something that could be agreed upon.
Russia demands that Nato troops and equipment from member states in eastern Europe are removed and bring Nato’s deployment level back to 1997 when it was smaller. On Friday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that Moscow would not wait for a response for long. Russia has put 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine and sent in a lot of weapons. Its defense ministry said that more equipment would be moved from the east of the country to the west as part of what it called a “test.”
Since 2014, when Russia took Crimea and started a war in the eastern part of Ukraine, Ukraine has frequently been under attack. There were about 288,000 cyber-attacks in the first 10 months of 2021, compared to 397,000 in 2020. Some people think that Russian hackers broke into Ukraine’s power grid in winter 2015. This caused about a quarter of a million people to lose power and heat. In 2017, a virus called NotPetya was released by suspected Russian hackers, causing chaos.
