SeattleGriz wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 4:26 pm
Is it just me, or did Ukraine totally flip flop, and Putin come out looking as a much stronger leader as he just had talks with Biden.
Pretty much can tell what happened. Ukraine was going to fight Russia with US backing, only to have Ukraine do a 180 today and say that they weren't looking for casualties, just peace.
Biden got put in his place by Putin today. Let's hope Putin doesn't use the recording of the "meeting" to further blackmail Biden into other beatdowns.
Addled old fool.
I don't think that was ever the case. Ukraine was never going to fight Russia. They've been in the middle for decades. They've long wanted peace - and that includes the discontinuance of Russian hackers using cities like Kiev as a cyber terrorism proving ground. I've been railing for years at what Russia has been doing to Kiev. We either aren't paying attention or we aren't taking it seriously.
How an Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyberwar
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hac ... k-ukraine/
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine ... e-attacks/
The war in eastern Ukraine has given Russian-affiliated hackers the opportunity to perfect their ability to launch cyberattacks with a series of major intrusions in Ukraine over the past few years.
“The annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas, it has created a volatile political environment," says Merle Maigre, the former head of NATO’s cyberdefense center in Tallinn who is now executive vice president at the Estonian cybersecurity firm CybExer.
Even as Russian tanks crossed the physical border into eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014, Russian-affiliated hackers were sending malicious code onto Ukraine’s IT systems, providing political chaos as a smokescreen.
Three days before the presidential election in May 2014, hackers broke into Ukraine’s Central Election Commission and disabled parts of the network using advanced cyberespionage malware, according to a report by the International Foundation of Electoral Systems funded by the U.S. and U.K. and seen by POLITICO. The Central Election Commission was hit again later that year, when hackers took down its website ahead of a parliamentary vote in October.
Large-scale attacks followed the next year, and again in 2016. The targets, this time, were companies running Ukraine’s power grid. In 2015, hackers used so-called BlackEnergy malware, dropped on companies’ networks using spear phishing attacks that tricked employees into downloading from mock emails. So-called KillDisk malware later destroyed parts of the grid.
The resulting blackouts — the world’s first known successful cyberattack on an energy company at scale — affected about 230,000 Ukrainians for up to six hours. A year later, in December 2016, hackers relied on even more sophisticated tools to successfully turn off the lights in large parts of the Ukrainian capital yet again.
We're seeing these attacks here. There are documented attacks and our country has done nothing. Obama did nothing. Trump certainly didn't do anything (he actually accused the Chinese while the rest of his government used data and facts to accuse Russia). Biden's sanctions will have what impact?
We either take the threat seriously and engage or we welcome our new, totalitarians overloads.