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In Ukraine, Cyber War With Russia Heating Up
concertina226 writes "If you think the crisis in the Ukraine is limited just to being just on the ground, think again. A cyberwar is flaring up between Ukraine and Russia and it looks like just the beginning. On Friday, communication centers were hijacked by unknown men to install wireless equipment for monitoring the mobile phones of Ukraine parliament members. Since then, Ukrainian hackers have been defacing Russian news websites, while Russia's Roskomnadzor is blocking any IP addresses or groups on social media from showing pro-Ukraine 'extremist' content."
Adds reader Daniel_Stuckey: "On the other side of the border, RT — the news channel formerly known as Russia Today and funded by the state — had its website hacked on Sunday morning, with the word 'Nazi' not-so-stealthily slipped into headlines. Highlights included 'Russian senators vote to use stabilizing Nazi forces on Ukrainian territory,' and 'Putin: Nazi citizens, troops threatened in Ukraine, need armed forces' protection.' RT was quick to notice the hack, and the wordplay only lasted about 20 minutes."
Finally, as noted by judgecorp, "The Ukrainian security service has claimed that Russian forces in Crimea are attacking Ukraine's mobile networks and politicians' phones in particular. Meanwhile, pro-Russian hackers have defaced Ukrainian news sites, posting a list of forty web destinations where content has been replaced. The pro-Russians have demonstrated Godwin's Rule — their animated GIF equates the rest of Ukraine to Nazis."
Comparing to Nazis? Really?
Yes, really.
TFS got it wrong though, making the comparison to Godwin's law. This is a particularly offensive piece of propaganda that goes above and beyond mundane internet stupidity, given historical events (see: Great Patriotic War) and the particularly heavy price that Ukraine paid in WW2, likely worse than any European nation not called Poland.
Calling someone a Nazi is a special level of insult in the Slavic countries.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The comparison is apt.
Shortly after hosting an Olympic Games filled with nationalistic posing and bluster, the megalomaniacal leader of a dictatorship ordered his armed forces to invade a neighboring country for their "protection".
It is in fact a perfectly apt comparison of the situation as history repeating itself.
Whatever the merits of claiming that government asked Russia for help, that government is no longer in power. The former president has been impeached as per Ukraine's constitution and the new government is within its rights to request foreign troops leave its sovereign territory.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I was referring to the insults being directed Ukraine's way as being particularly offensive, not the other way around, though of course there are few worse things you can call a Russian than 'fascist'.
As far as the comparison, it's not all that apt. Russia in 2014 is a vastly different place than 1938's Germany, Putin is not Hitler, the Crimea is not the Sudetenland, and the other Great Powers have not signed off on his actions.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And yes, the US did take control of cell networks to track phones and calls in Afghanistan and Iraq to find and eliminate those who fought the US invasions of those countries. But no one in the US cares very much, so it's hard to raise the issue. But we done did it first, sure. The US doesn't have much moral authority left after Afghanistan and Iraq. We're intellectually bankrupt, as Secretary of State Kerry so ably - and without irony - showed the other day when he told the world that invasion under false pretext is wrong.
But, we fight the fight in front of us, and can't restart the lost battles. Phone surveillance bad. Invading countries under false pretext to cover up not-so secret national interest is bad. Russia - RUSSIA BAD. They don't get a pass 'cause Americans can be the same flavor of assholes. Onward.
There is also the fact that the troops Russia sent in were all wearing masks, had no identifying insignia of any kind on their uniforms, and appear to be well equipped and highly trained. To me, it seems that Putin has likely taken the ouster of his lapdog and the loss of a potential client state personal. He has also quickly eroded any international goodwill Russia might have obtained by taking in Snowden, as well as potentially set a dangerous precident by saying Russia has a right and duty to protect the Russian-speaking people in the Crimea. Can Germany now do the same thing? How about the US? Does Iran now have the right to invade the US to protect Persian-speaking people? Putin is playing a dangerous game, and he is really exhibiting a lot of the characteristics Hitler and even Stalin did, including the cult of personality over the last few years.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Russia is in charge now of the entire ex-Soviet Union area.
Not quite. NATO isn't likely to roll over and accept aggression directed at Poland or the Baltic States (boy, I bet they're happy they got admitted now) and I suspect even the EU would grow a spine if Russia started pushing Finland around.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
There was a parliamentary vote to impeach him. At least by the English translation of Ukraine's constitution that I read, that's how it's done. Sure the lawmakers may have felt a lot of pressure to do so, but the forms were obeyed, even if in a ragged and somewhat bloody way.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No, the parliament threw him out. The mob never did anything but protest and get shot at, until members of his own former party stopped supporting him, making room for a majority against him. The new government is as legally elected as the former! There was never any revolution, just protests, that triggered insane behavior from the president that let to him losing his parliamentarian basis.
The "overlords" are the Russians. Crimea is Ukrainian territory. The Russians have invaded Crimea, which means they have invaded Ukraine. It similar to having invaded Germany if you invade Bavaria.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
And yes, the US did take control of cell networks to track phones and calls in Afghanistan and Iraq to find and eliminate those who fought the US invasions of those countries
Afghanistan had a cellular network in 2001?
It's debatable that the United States invaded Afghanistan. We were invited there by what used to be called the Northern Alliance, a group that was the near-universally recognized government (held the UN seat, was recognized by everyone except Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Pakistan) of the country. Even if you want to call it an invasion it was certainly a justified one, given that the de-facto Government had provided refuge to a group that murdered nearly 3,000 American citizens.
We've made a lot of mistakes there, trying to build a modern Democracy in a country with a literacy rate in the 20-30% range heads the list, but I do wish people would stop conflating Iraq and Afghanistan.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'm not sure anybody was ever fooled by the "local militiamen" who just happened to organize themselves into a cohesive force and acquire uniforms and decent military equipment in less than half a week. It was immediately obvious that they were russian soldiers - the "real" local militiamen (as in, truly a militia) look like your average hastily put together group without uniforms.
The fact alone that those soldiers are unidentified makes it a war crime (As stated in the Geneva Conventions). If this ever gets to trial (ha!) and is considered war, we already have a war crime before a single shot was fired.
One other difference: The economy in Russia took a BIG punch to the face due to the offensive. The ruble and the Russian stock market paid dearly for this.
I do fear a remake of "The Guns of August", but these are different times. Back then, people thought economic interdependence would keep war from breaking out. I wonder if it will be the case today.
Whatever the merits of claiming that government asked Russia for help, that government is no longer in power. The former president has been impeached as per Ukraine's constitution and the new government is within its rights to request foreign troops leave its sovereign territory.
Unfortunately that's completely irrelevant. He was voted on to be impeached, but all that means is he's summoned to trial; constitutionally he still retains all the powers granted the President. In the meantime, the French, German, and US ambassadors to Ukraine negotiated a deal with the opposition and Ukrainian Parliament that stripped Yanukovich of his power and gave it all to the Parliament, which is a direct violation of the Ukrainian Constitution; they are not allowed to do that. Now you have a situation where power is vested within the Parliament unconstitutionally via a deal negotiated by foreign powers, and correctly under the Constitution Yanukovich requested Russian military aid in restoring order. So arguably speaking it's the Parliament on the wrong side of the Constitution and the Russian intervention is legal via the Ukrainian Constitution.
Note I am not a Russian supporter, these are simply the convoluted facts of the situation.
By the same token, justifying one dubious or illegal act by bringing up another strikes me as a pretty flawed argument. That the US invaded Iraq in 2003 doesn't mean Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 is appropriate.
This is exactly the tit-for-tat Great Power games that lead to WWI... The US, I think, has come to deeply regret the Iraq invasion, which happened a decade ago under an entirely different Administration.
If only nations as pure as the driven snow could call out infamous acts by other nations, there would be virtually no one to complain.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And even more, even if Janukovych were the ruling president, he would not have the right to request foreign troops, as that prerogative belongs only to the Supreme Council. But hey, Russia never cared much about validity of their excuses for invasion. And remember: they used the very same excuse on 1939-09-17 when invading Poland.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Problems that were staged by Putin's own special forces. Litvinenko is a hero of Snowden's calibre, yet somehow data he brought up isn't widely known.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That is not correct. Impeachment is solely the official accusation of crimes directed at the official. It only strips powers when he is removed from office, which can only happen during a trial and decision made by the Constitutional Court.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ukraine,_2010
See Article 108 and 111; 108 says the powers go away "once removed via the process of impeachment", and 111 says that removal only occurs once the Court has made a decision, not during the vote of impeachment. Thus he retains his powers and responsibilities, meaning the Parliament has acted Unconstitutionally.
Notably this is also true of the 2004 Constitution, whcih they have reverted back to; that revokation of the 2010 is also unconstitutional as the President is required to sign his approval of this, which he has not.
Again, I'm a US Person; I generally favor a pro-Western Ukraine, but unfortunately the way this is going more and more the Western side and the protestors are on the wrong side of the law.
I predict that threats of economic sanctions and actual real-time market forces will bring this to a resolution in about a month.
(Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about.)
Anyone?
I think you misunderstand me. Frankly I think Russia's annexation of Crimea is a fait accompli, and I think the EU and the US knew it all along. They're gamble, I suspect, is that Crimea will be sufficient coin to buy Russia's acquiescence to the rest of Ukraine moving westward (so to speak). It strikes me that that is Russia's view as well, as it seems to have contented itself with putting Russian forces in a position to negate any real action by Ukraine military forces.
In other words, I'm not blind to real politik. At the same time, territorial integrity has been a rather large theme in the international sphere since the Allied Powers agreed to the creation of the United Nations during WWII. Sure, it hasn't been uniformly applied; there have been effective secessions, civil wars and the like, but in general, the idea of military forces entering a region of a sovereign state and annexing it has been viewed as a breach of international peace. In the case of Crimea, Russia was a signatory to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear arsenal that it had inherited after the collapse of the USSR, so I think it's pretty firm that the occupation of Crimea and the clear intent to annex it into the Russian Federation breaks international law on a number of counts.
But, as I said, I think it's a fait accompli, and I think the end of this story was written weeks, if not months ago. Russia will agree to restrict itself to "protecting" Crimea. There will be a referendum in Crimea that will inevitably lead to Crimea either being annexed proper into Russia, or being given a sufficiently strong autonomous status that Ukraine will permanently lose it. The forms of diplomacy have to be obeyed, so Western leaders and foreign ministers will wring their hands and cry foul, even though everyone knew how this would end.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think the whole situation just confirms that Obama really f***ed up on Syria. The United States- the most powerful nation in the world- said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line" that cannot be crossed. And then Assad crosses that line, and crosses it again, and finally crosses it once more by gassing 1400 unarmed people with a series of massive, coordinated attacks on civilians... and Obama sits back and defers to congress, until finally the Russians step in and help negotiate a deal where Assad agrees to hand over the chemical weapons. This is roughly analogous to a schoolyard bully beating a kid up with a baseball bat, after the teacher warns him not to, and the only consequence is that the bully has to surrender the baseball bat. If your teacher handled an incident like that, would you have even the least amount of respect for them? That's not the way you handle that situation. You don't dither. You don't consult congress. You just arm the goddamn Tomahawk missiles and you take out some of Assad's runways, artillery, and communications centers, and make him pay. The issue isn't supporting the Syrian opposition or not, the issue is that the U.S. said that there would be severe consequences if Syria used chemical weapons. And then there weren't. Maybe Obama shouldn't have gotten involved or not What Putin saw was that Obama was more afraid of Congress, and more afraid of Assad's ally —Russia— than he was committed to standing up for the principles we claim to believe in. Putin saw weakness. I do think the Iraq invasion was a huge mistake, and I voted for Obama twice, but I think he's really screwed up on Syria, on the coup in Egypt, and now on the Ukraine.
Article 5 of the 3rd Geneva convention defines 'lawful combatant'. Uniforms are required if you want Geneva convention protections.
The main point of a uniform is to identify what side you are on. Simply wearing green does not qualify if that is not the standard uniform of your force.
Black pajamas was the 'uniform' of the VietCong. But that only worked because they didn't have another uniform already.
In almost all military forces, if you remove the insignia you are 'out of uniform'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
However many things are indeed eerily similar. Putin really does have immense power. Putin really does say that Russia should use military power to protect Russian speaking minorities in other countries.
And it's not Crimea which is a parallel to Sudetenland, it is eastern Ukraine which has had a few centuries of Russification (mostly in cities though).
Parallels do fall down though in many other ways. Ie, Czechoslovakia did not have a disliked president who fled the country taking $70 billion with him.
I.e. the exception to the rule: If faced with actual military invasion the comparison to Nazis is no longer prohibited.
He left. He surprised the existing government by leaving suddenly while negotiations were ongoing. A lot of money has gone missing over the years and I think he decided it was time to cut and run before he could be held criminally responsible. His supporters were no longer voting the way he wanted and the writing was on the wall. It certainly was not a coup. If he had lost the election I'm certain he felt that the opposition would have imprisoned him in the exact same way that he imprisoned/poisoned the old opposition.
I'm not going to hold either side blameless and pure, but certainly Yanukovych was a right bastard.
Much of the remaining parliament were there before Yanukovynch left, members of the new government were also part of the old government. It was not replaced with a mob.
Crimea is the Autonomous Republic of Crimea with its own constituion really and it was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR by the communist Ukrainian clown Khrushchev in 1954.
In short you acknowledge that Crimea is legally part of Ukraine, and has been recognized as that by the world for the last 60 years. Russia leased bases there, so it acknowledged it in the past too. Russia has now seized this territory by force of arms and not by negotiation.
Yes, Russians (about 60% of population) invaded Crimea the same way as the British "invaded" Gibraltar or Maledives... err wait... Falklands.
OK, Russia invaded ... good. The ethnicity population doesn't really matter. Should Germany invade Russia now to protect the Volga Germans that have been so abused? Does Russia have similar claims on Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and other nations that have people of Russian blood living in them? Russia was certainly menacing them in the 1990s. Russia has many nationalities in it, I'm surprised they want to start this sort of thing lest they find themselves on the other side of the argument.
As to the Falklands, they were not inhabited when the Europeans colonized them. They are 500 km off from the mainland, very far outside Argentina's waters.
Gibraltar has been under British control since before the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The native population has chosen to remain British in several votes in the last 50 years.
Neither of those two cases really bolsters your argument.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Sure they had such. Well, Iraq certainly did.
We invaded. The "alliance" was a creature we created for our own purpose.
You can't impose a democracy on an invaded people; they get cranky about the invasion and will call anyone who cooperates with the invader a quisling, and justifiably so. They aren't angry because they are illiterate. They are angry because they are living in an occupied country. They have an excellent grasp of current events.
If the US had been invaded by the Taliban because Canada, Mexico and Grenada said it was fine by them, Americans would not cooperate either. People in foreign cultures are no less proud and no more willing to be conquered than we are. The US went insane because 40-odd people scattered around the world (not Afghanistan - they were almost all Saudi) set up 4 plane attacks (they couldn't get manpower to crash the planned 12) and killed 3000 Americans on our home soil. Can you imagine what the US response would be if the Taliban bombed us, conquered us, and tried to install a Muslim government and sneered at our ignorance when we refused?
The Taliban rose to power because the mountain tribal thugs we elevated to power after we used them to fight off the Soviet invaders (who were worried themselves of fundamentalist revolutionaries on their border) were such murderous raping hillbillies that the Taliban was welcomed as a less oppressive solution.
The Taliban never attacked us - they weren't suicidal. Some of the people in the loose thing called the Taliban apparently had granted Al Qaida a place to train fighters - but that wasn't ALL the Taliban, just as the Michigan Militia ain't the United States of America. We bombed the country because they wouldn't give up the AQ boys without proof of guilt - somewhat reasonable, granted their culture and common sense. Bush said no proof - give over or die. They chose pride and we blew them up. AQ - all forty of them - mostly got away for awhile, because we were chasing oil in Iraq, but the people of Afghanistan - and Iraq - were annihilated by our blind rage and need to lash out at ANYthing. Thing is, we blew any goals we had - the bad guy got away, and turned the damned planet against us.
I don't see how it was justified. AQ wasn't the Taliban. We conflated, and still conflate, all Muslims who defy us as AQ. We blew up a country - two countries - that had nothing to do with the attack against the US. This is the cognitive dissonance that Americans won't confront, because then we wouldn't be good guys. We needed their cooperation, and instead turned them into enemies. and once again, the bad guy got clean away.
The Russian stock market is already recovering, though.
And you know what's funny? It's seeing a lot of trades... but whoever is buying those stocks back is not the ones that held it before the conflict. The holders of those stocks before the conflict were mostly foreign investors, once you discount the government of Russia itself. If the new holders turn out to be Russian, well... it might well be the first time in history that a war in Europe was threatened and almost provoked to fill some pockets with a lot of cash.