98.

Lessons from the world’s first hybrid war

STINGER: You’re listening to Click Here. I’m Dina Temple-Raston

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: This week, as part of our special holiday lineup, we’ve got the fourth
in a series of five radio shows we produced with WNYC. You may have heard one or two of
them on your local NPR station already. And if you did, you’ll know it’s still the same Click
Here stories about people making and breaking our digital world. They’re just in a little
different format.

In today’s show, we decided to put a lot of our reporting from our trip to Ukraine all in one
place. It’s an episode we’re calling: Lessons from the world’s first hybrid war. Take a listen.

[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And just as a warning, there are some sounds of explosions in the show
and some strong language that we’ve bleeped out. We begin with a new wrinkle in warfare:
a new kind of fighter, the cyber warrior.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And in this case, they are mild mannered IT professionals by day, and
become cyber mercenaries for Ukraine by night. For more than a year, this all-volunteer
force has been defending Ukrainian networks, hacking into Russian ones, and punching
back in very surprising ways. And we begin our story with one of those people, a man in Kyiv
who goes by the very digit-y name of ADMIN.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Can I ask about your cyber background and education? Are you like a
computer science guy?

IT ADMIN: Um…more like an enthusiast.

TEMPLE-RASTON: [Laughs] Okay. You love computers…

1
IT ADMIN: Yes.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And do you have a military background?

IT ADMIN: Um, sort of.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Okay, what does that mean?

IT ADMIN: It’s not the questions I can answer you fully because it may lead to a better
understanding of what kind of person I am.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: We agreed to keep his identity a secret because, first, he’s talking to us
from Kyiv. And second, because he’s part of a resistance movement there. But he’s not a
member of those Territorial Defense Forces fighting Russia on the ground. The person we’re
talking to has older parents, so he said he couldn’t go to the front to fight.

IT ADMIN: I need to stay closer to my family, to support them. And it’s my duty as a man, as
a human being, to be closer to them, to protect them and to help them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So instead he decided to do something a little different: he began working

with a cyber force.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: “Admin” is one of eight administrators trying to organize volunteers

helping Ukraine fight Russia in cyberspace. They’re a diverse group of IT and cybersecurity
professionals from all over the world, and they call themselves the “Ukrainian IT Army.”

And while, as a general matter, they aren’t the kind of skillful hackers that take down a
power grid or blow up rockets on the launch pad, they are very good at being irritating.
Really irritating. Admin and people like him post targets on the IT Army’s telegram channel
and their digital militias just get to work. The channel has some 180,000 subscribers, and
they claim to have hacked the Moscow stock exchange and cracked into the state railway’s
ticketing systems. They’ve hobbled ministries, Russian banks, and even media outlets like

2
TASS. And what makes all this different is that for the first time in history just about anyone
can join this fight — right where they are, just for the asking.

[MUSIC OUT]

IT ADMIN: I joined the volunteers on the first day of invasion because they wanted to help
people. Um, but I needed to stay with my family. I joined a few different groups, and one of
them invited me to join an IT Army.

TEMPLE-RASTON: ​I'm sure there are a lot of people like you who want to do something to
help, who maybe their best skill is not, you know, grabbing a rifle, but instead grabbing a
keyboard…

IT ADMIN: Yes, we, uh, we are deciding what type of targets to attack. What should we do
next? How to organize people in better ways so we can achieve our goals faster and easier.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Using Telegram, they’ve developed bots to block Russian news sites.
They’ve created a system to log and report Russian troop movements. There are even online
lessons on how to make Molotov cocktails. And you could say that “Admin” has developed a
speciality: he focuses on misinformation.

IT ADMIN: Um, it's important to shut down some of the main information platforms for the
Russian people where they would receive news. One of the target types for us is online news
websites, but I’ll stay quiet about the details.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The early volunteers for this IT brigade were thousands of hackers and IT
professionals around Ukraine. Then, as the fighting grew more fierce on the ground,
something shifted. The IT Army became a global swarm, and the pile-on didn’t just include
Ukrainian cybersecurity officials.

Hacktivists from around the world starting showing up and asking what they could do to
help. People like Squad303, a group of programmers from Poland who managed to get
their hands on nearly 200 million Russian cell phone numbers and email addresses.

3
They built a site that allows anyone in the world to message any of those numbers and tell
them the truth about the war. Then hacktivist collective Anonymous stepped up.

DISCORDIAN: And we saw the propaganda and disinformation, and we just decided
something needs to be done about this.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Discordian. He’s a kind of spokesperson for Anonymous.

DISCORDIAN: And we started talking amongst ourselves and being like, Hey, can we turn
this into an operation?

[MUSIC]

DISCORDIAN: It was, like, day one of the invasion. And you see this Belarusian arms
manufacturer being hacked and, you know, there's training manuals, there's trade secrets,
and those are the same kind of weapons that are now at this moment being used to bomb
Ukraine.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So Anonymous released those training manuals. And they had other little
projects.

DISCORDIAN: Russia Today was taken offline for multiple, multiple days during the initial
attack.

TEMPLE-RASTON: You mean the news channel?

DISCORDIAN: Yeah, the news channel. It was unreachable for days, uh, because of
Anonymous because they also engage in a lot of this disinformation that we see out there.
For example, uh, the disinformation that Ukrainians would just accept the soldiers coming
into their country and they would be happy because they also speak Russian, which is a
completely weird reason to accept an invasion. Right? Oh, you, you speak Russian. We speak
Russian. You're welcome here. No, you're invading my country. Get the f**k out. So yeah, it's
kind of like going against that narrative is also very important to us.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They’ve hacked into Russian websites and posted casualty numbers. They
have provided photographs. And then they had this other particularly inspired little gem.

4
DISCORDIAN: There was this operation to write Google reviews in Russian restaurants to say
what was going on there, to get around censors. Anonymous is very creative.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hackers have always made mischief. What’s different this time is that the
people hacking on behalf of Ukraine are cybersecurity professionals, the people businesses
call on when their networks have been compromised. The people typically on the other side
of a hack.

And this call to arms — or call to hack — has put the concept of war-time cyber operations
into an entirely new light. And no one is quite sure what to make of it. Government officials
usually see this collective action in cyberspace as a kind of hooliganism. But now, it’s a new
dimension of war.

VICTOR ZHORA (PRESS CONFERENCE): We have a martial law here in Ukraine and, uh, I
don't think that appealing to moral principles works since our enemy doesn't have any
principles.

TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Victor Zhora. Until just recently, he was one of Ukraine’s top cyber
security officials, and this was from one of his press conferences early in the war. And even
back then, he made clear that Ukraine had to fight fire with fire in cyberspace.

ZHORA: They're killing innocent people: children, women. They're firing in hospitals, in
nuclear plants, bringing threats to the whole world.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Enter the IT Army. While we can’t verify how big it really is, Zhora told
us….

ZHORA: It’s probably up to half a million cybersecurity professionals, IT professionals,

students, volunteers from other countries.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Zhora was in charge of the Ukrainian equivalent of our Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. And his job, like CISA’s, was to protect the nation’s
networks from attack. The power grid, communications, hospitals. Back in November Zhora
was fired, arrested and detained on charges of misappropriation of funds. It had something
to do with the purchase of software for the nation. He says an independent investigation will

5
ultimately clear him. And while his fortunes have changed, it doesn’t erase what Russia has
been doing to Ukraine in cyberspace for years now.

ZHORA: Ukraine witnessed the most disruptive cyber attacks in history over the last eight
years, and we were working hard on strengthening our cybersecurity infrastructure for the
last one or two years. I suppose we were well-prepared for this cyber war.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Well-prepared for the war for a few reasons. Ukraine has been a test bed
for Russian cyber attacks for years. Russians hacked Ukraine’s elections commission. They
shut down websites. The Russian group known as “Sandworm” turned out the lights in Kyiv
for hours, just because they could.

CBS: Parts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, went dark. Russia appears to have figured out how
to crash a power grid…with a click.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And the attacks kept getting worse.

CBS: The cyberweapon NotPetya started in Ukraine in June 2017, quickly spread, paralyzing
major companies and causing more than $10 billion in damage.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ukraine has learned from past experience. So its networks are harder to
hack. It has, by design, created thousands of Internet service providers so if adversaries take
one down, there are dozens more lining up to take their place. They have a network of
cybersecurity companies and partners who have spent years preparing for just this kind of
battle. Among other things, the U.S. sent military cyber teams to Ukraine before the war to
hunt for malware planted in their systems. And they worked side by side with Ukrainian
hunt teams to make sure they’d be cleaned out. But that doesn’t mean all this has been
easy.

When we come back…there’s a problem with creating an all-volunteer cyber army: no one is
in control.

This is Click Here.

We’ll be right back.

6
[MUSIC OUT]

[BREAK]

[REJOIN STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston and this is Click Here. Today we’re looking at
what Ukraine can teach us about the future of war. In the earliest days after the invasion
there was an unusual call to arms. Officials in Ukraine called for all kinds of volunteers:
fighters, doctors, weapons experts. All the usual suspects but for one very notable
exception: Ukrainian officials asked anyone anywhere in the world who had hacking skills to
get in touch. And one of the people who stepped up was this guy.

JANI: Well, let's just go with ‘Jani’ for now.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Jani…

JANI: Obviously I can’t tell you too much about what I do. Let's just say that I'm an IT
professional and I'm trained in cybersecurity.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Where do you live?

JANI: In Finland and that's all I'm going to give for now.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Jani did reveal to us that he works in the cyber security industry, and felt
compelled to act.

JANI: Basically once I started hearing about civilians and children and women and elderly
getting bombed or killed or starved is when I basically decided I have to do something.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So when he got an invite on Telegram to join the IT Army, he jumped on it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: What was the signup process like? Or was there one?

JANI: There wasn't any. That's one of the big problems here, actually.

[MUSIC]

7
JANI: Basically anybody can join in and start doing whatever.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So that’s one issue. Another, which is a perennial hacker problem, is good
old-fashioned bravado. Some members of the IT Army are trying to show off. And they don’t
know what they don’t know. Which could have some unexpected consequences.

JANI: When you do something like try these things on a scale like this, you don't have
chances for mistakes, basically.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The kinds of mistakes made — mostly — by amateurs.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So the term in the U.S. — I don't know if it’s a term in Finland — is script
kiddies, someone who pretends to be really good at hacking and that sort of thing. But in
fact, copies a lot of code from other people and tries to pass it off as their own. So they're
sort of amateurs trying to look like professionals.

JANI: Yeah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And do you get the sense that there were a lot of script kiddies out there?

JANI: Yeah, the majority are, unfortunately.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s almost like… in the Ukraine, they're handing guns to everyone and a
lot of them probably don't know how to shoot them. Is it the same sort of thing?

JANI: Pretty much, pretty much.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s not to detract from what they’re doing or how well-placed their
intentions are. It’s just a fact. “Admin,” the guy in Kyiv we talked to at the top of the show,
said so himself. The effort was a little chaotic in the beginning, but they are trying to bring
order.

ADMIN: At the start we faced a few problems with the trust, with dependability on each
other. Right now I'm ready to say that we became like, uh, a hub for digital resistance here
in Ukraine.

8
TEMPLE-RASTON: A hub for digital resistance. But it was hard to tell who was friend or who
was foe. They knew that Russian agents would be trying to infiltrate the group.

ADMIN: The problem of trust that we faced at the start of the war, it still haunts us. It's, uh,
kind of hard to share some crucial information with the people you don't trust.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So they set up systems to assess volunteers. They put together a steering
committee to protect against infiltration and sabotage. They silo information. Things are on
a need-to-know basis. The group has special communications channels only its leadership
can access. And they have a committee that tries to bring some order to the hacking targets
the IT Army chooses. And the committee itself only comes together when big decisions need
to be made.

ADMIN: If someone has a question, we don't really, like, put on a big call for it; we can
discuss it fast enough with the team. If it is important to make a decision sooner, we make a
call sooner.

TEMPLE-RASTON: With these systems in place, they were able to take in and work with
volunteers from Poland, the United States, the hacker collective Anonymous — people from
all over the world.

ADMIN: I can't count the number of people who are busy with executing tasks, but on a
higher level, I mean, if we're talking about decision makers, it's around 25 general leaders.

TEMPLE-RASTON: All Ukrainian?

ADMIN: Yes.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So the control of the IT army is in the hands of Ukrainian professionals?

ADMIN: Yes.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So how big are you now?

9
ADMIN: It's usually better to be quiet about the numbers.We still have more users from
Ukraine because it's our war, it's our problem. But it's always nice to see people joining
from, uh, other sides of the world, cheering for us, trying to do their best to help.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But they aren’t just depending on the outside world. The IT Army hosted a
“hackathon” recruiting event in a Kyiv subway station recently in order to find talented
young Ukrainians who can help the effort. And while the IT Army certainly has not changed
the course of the war, it has been very effective at one thing: it is a terrific irritant.

Cybersecurity officials say that Russian state hackers who might otherwise have been
working on ways to attack Ukraine are spending a lot of their time fending off these small
attacks and network intrusions, all courtesy of this motley team of volunteers. And they’ve
managed to pull off some pretty amazing things. Last summer, they were behind a denial of
service attack that overwhelmed the networks at Russia’s equivalent of Davos…

NEWS TAPE: Russia’s president today giving his annual speech at the forum after a delay
caused by what the Kremlin called massive cyber attacks.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They managed to delay President Vladimir Putin’s opening speech. Not
earth shattering, but definitely irritating. It embarrassed Putin. It told the world everything
isn’t just fine. Things aren’t normal. And they created a system that allows people to log
and report Russian troop movements. The Ukrainian government subsequently created its
own app for that. The tricky thing is that with so many people working independently in the
fog of war, moral and ethical lines start to blur. Consider this video the IT Army posted last
year.

[VIDEO FROM UKRAINIAN IT ARMY]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It feels like something straight out of Mr. Robot, only it’s Ukrainian.

[VIDEO FROM UKRAINIAN IT ARMY]

TEMPLE-RASTON: In the video, a digital face says the IT Army has leaked Russian
documents and cracked into Russian television — all in a bid to try to reach the Russian
public and tell them what’s going on in the war.

Then, it gets disturbing. Photos of dead Russian soldiers begin to flash across the screen.

10
[VIDEO FROM UKRAINIAN IT ARMY]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It turns out, members of the IT Army had taken it upon themselves to call
Russian families directly to tell them their kids had died in the war, and then they’d send
them this photographic proof. Not in a nice way, but in a demoralizing, break-your-heart
kind of way.

It appeared the IT Army had found a way to get access to a powerful facial recognition
program called Clearview AI and then they used it to identify these soldiers….

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The incident raised a lot of questions: What other cyber and tech tools
was the IT Army stockpiling? And, what kind of precedent would this set?

DANIEL: I do think that there are always unintended consequences from this.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Michael Daniel spent more than four years as President Obama’s
cybersecurity advisor. And when we spoke early in the conflict, he said that it was inevitable
that the distinction between civilian and combatant would get murky.

DANIEL: And to the extent that other countries. See this model as beneficial and see various
ways that they could use this kind of model outside of a war, outside of a conflict like this,
that could be very problematic.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The concern is that while the IT Army appears to be hacking on the side of
angels now, when the conflict ends, what will they do with their new skills? And will we look
back and realize that this first hybrid war ended up training a whole new cohort of hackers?
Creating New keyboards-for-hire itching for causes to hack for?

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: You’ve just heard about Ukraine’s IT Army, and how it posts Russian
targets on its Telegram channel to get volunteers to attack them. But this digital warfare
isn’t just online. Ukraine’s scrappy, McGyver-esque innovations have popped up in lots of
other surprising ways, too — in not just online technologies, but physical ones.

11
Nothing more so than with drones, which have been a force multiplier in the war. Partly
because, among other things, Kyiv loosened the regulations that govern the manufacture of
drones in the earliest days of the conflict. There used to be just seven companies that were
allowed to build drones for the military. Now there are more than a hundred. And with the
proliferation of drones has come a heightened demand for people who can actually fly
them. People like translator Maryna Khorunza.

[DRONE SOUND]

KHORUNZA: It's like some angry bee, you know, the crazy bee with some virus inside.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Maryna is now a camera drone operator.

KHORUNZA: It's scary. You know? It's scary when you turn it on. I think Russian soldiers
must run away only while hearing…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Being on this side of the camera is new for Maryna because she’s also a
fashion model.

[MUSIC]

[UNIDENTIFIED MAN FROM ‘BLOW UP’ MOVIE: Smile, Smile! Smile!]

[MUSIC]

KHORUNZA: Photographers, they loved me, they invited me and they loved me to have my
pictures…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Maryna has long dark hair. She looks a lot like the pop star Dua Lipa. And
while she’s beautiful and willowy and tall. She hates being typecast.

KHORUNZA: Everybody saw me in that sphere because they said you were created for that,
uh, and you were born. But I never wanted…because my grandfather, he told me, you know,
it's good that you have good appearance and good genetics. And you were born like a
beautiful person, but what you have inside, this is the most important and what you have in
your brain, believe me… the first thing I wanted in my life is to be smart and then beautiful,
really.

12
[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When the invasion first began, Maryna was determined to act like nothing
out of the ordinary had happened. She has twin boys, 11 years-old.

KHORUNZA: I was sitting in the kitchen and I made the tea and I said, okay, I will just
protect the room, they will sleep till they wake up..I will prepare a breakfast like nothing
happened. My mom was looking at me like I was crazy, but I said, no, we will not, no panic
will be in our place. Everybody depends on my emotional health, right? So… and started
from that time, from the 24th of February… I've always been like that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So she went about her normal routine, which included, rather
improbably…

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ukrainian Fashion Week. You could be excused for not knowing there is a
huge fashion industry in Ukraine. In fact, its first Fashion Week was held decades ago, back
in 1997. It was the first fashion week held in Eastern Europe. And Ukrainian Fashion Week
is not some rinky-dink pseudo-fashion event. It looks like one of those pret-a-porter runway
shows in Paris. In fact, before the war, it took place twice a year. And it helped launch
designers like Ivan Frolov and Julie Paskal. You’ve seen Frolov’s creations but probably
didn’t know it: he’s dressed Beyonce and Gwen Stefani. These days, Frolov is now making
bulletproof vests. And at Ukrainian Fashion Week, Maryna got recruited.

KHORUNZA: It was a Ukrainian Fashion Week event. The director of the show came to me
and he told me that, you know, uh, you love Ukraine. I know that you are not only beautiful,
but you're smart. And then he introduced me to Valeriy…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Valeriy Borovick.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Are you wearing body armor right now?

VALERIY BOROVICK: Yeah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Okay. Um, and do you have to wear that all the time?

13
BOROVICK: Not, not all time because I am in Special Forces, under counter intelligence of
Ukraine.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Valeriy is CEO of Alliance New Energy of Ukraine. And among other
things, they actually manufacture drones.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Not long after the war between Russia and Ukraine began, Valeriy
Borovick had this idea. He wanted to start a drone training program just for women.

BOROVICK: Because many mans go to zero line, go to the Army. And women can help to
protect of our country.

[DRONE SCHOOL PROMOTIONAL VIDEOS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s from one of the school’s promotional videos.

[DRONE SCHOOL PROMOTIONAL VIDEOS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Valeriy’s drone school opened its doors last summer. He called it The
Female Pilots of Ukraine. The way he saw it, both sides of this conflict are looking for ways
to beef up their fighting forces. Russia has gone to prisons to recruit convicts and is drafting
young men right off the streets. Ukraine? It’s leaning on its women.

BOROVICK: If girls can fly all drones, we can see Russian soldiers or tanks near our army.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So the women can add to the effort by being eyes for the army.

BOROVICK: Yes. It's like eyes for us.

[BOROVICK SPEAKING WITH STUDENTS DURING CLASS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Valeriy talks to a small group of his students in a field outside Kyiv.
They’re all bundled up against the cold in heavy parkas and snow pants and boots. The
wind is howling.

[SOUND FROM FEMALE PILOTS OF UKRAINE DRONE TRAINING CLASS]

14
TEMPLE-RASTON: Maryna says most of the classroom instruction for Female Drone Pilots of
Ukraine is outside.

[SOUND FROM FEMALE PILOTS OF UKRAINE DRONE TRAINING CLASS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they begin by learning in places far from the war’s frontlines.

KHORUNZA: We are not on the locations when the people are just dying, and we are
learning in Kyiv, in the capital of Ukraine.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Basic training lasts for about three weeks.

KHORUNZA: But usually it was fun because we had coffee, some cookies, and we had good
mental health, you know.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The women learn from professional military drone pilots.

KHORUNZA: Some of us were piloting. Others were using the maps.

TEMPLE-RASTON: They started on drone simulators.

KHORUNZA: We used computers. Then we had the simulators.

TEMPLE-RASTON: If they do well on that part of the training, the group graduates to the
outdoor part of the instruction. The military drone pilots teach them the basics of
controlling the drone. And then they give them a specific location they need to fly to.

KHORUNZA: To the gas station, for example. Just wait, make couple of pictures…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Maryna, it turns out, is particularly good at interpreting maps to get the
drone where it needed to go.

KHORUNZA: For example, if I was checking where the drone goes. So I was standing behind
the pilot, and I was, I would tell that, for example, you need to go straight then up, like 30
degrees or something like that.

15
TEMPLE-RASTON: They’ve also been taught how to drop a virtual pin and mark where their
drone might have spotted Russian troops or a cache of weapons, or even where the drone
might need to land. That information is later sent to Ukrainian forces or to nearby police so
they can plan a response or retrieve a fallen drone.

In less than a year, 100 women graduated from the drone flight program. 40 went into the
military and the school said it had a waiting list of 200.

[MUSIC COMES IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When she isn’t working as a translator and a fashion model or taking care
of her kids, Maryna is recruiting women for flight teams at the drone school.

KHORUNZA: One is a professional model, another one she's the volunteer working for
Fashion Week, and the third girl is in showbiz. Each woman is so different that we can add
something to each other.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: A lot of the women in the program train to be scouts, helping the war
effort from the relative safety of Kyiv. Others go closer to the frontline. Maryna, for her part,
has decided to stay back and teach. She’s training other women to become drone
operators…

KHORUNZA: I don't have to kill somebody. I just can learn it very well and then give the
coordinates and then people will do what they need to do, you know?

[DRONE SOUNDS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: One of Ukraine’s other best kept secrets, until recently, is just how much
it has MacGyvered plastic, off-the-shelf drones to wreak havoc on Russian troops.

MSNBC: Why are Ukraine's cheap, slow drones so successful against Russian targets?

BOROVICK: We must protect life of our soldier. And one drone, in general, saves maybe ten
of our soldiers.

16
CNN: The soldiers work around the clock repairing, modifying, and arming consumer
drones.

CLIP: This morning apparent footage of drones being used to attack targets in Russia’s
capital…

TEMPLE-RASTON: The drone attacks on the suburb of Moscow are believed to be the work of
the Ukrainian intelligence community.

NEWS: It’s the symbolic value of striking the Russian capital that counts far more than the
actual explosive effect.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ukraine has started strapping grenades and TNT to its drones, and then
have them buzz Russian weaponry or apartment buildings or even the Kremlin, before they
release their payload. Val publicly denied that the Moscow attack came at the hands of his
freshly-minted female pilots. Ukraine hasn’t taken formal responsibility for that attack
either.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The dilemma for Ukraine is that these drones are basically a flying bundle
of communications systems and software, which means they are vulnerable. Russia has
taken to transmitting electro-magnetic fields above their soldiers that allows them to jam
frequencies or send drones off course.

They are also using radio transmitters to hijack the drones the women fly. Consumer drones
follow whichever signal is strongest, so the Russians can sometimes spoof them into
following their directions instead of the women. At one point last year, Russian operators
began tracking the Ukrainian drones’ signatures to their source, the pilots on the ground.

[ELECTRIC PINPOINT SOUND]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Once they’d find them, the Russians would call in mortar fire.

KHORUNZA: We understand that if they see us, for example, in the middle of the field of
some area, you know, anything can happen. So it was actually dangerous.

[MUSIC OUT]

17
TEMPLE-RASTON: It became such an issue that Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation
warned about it on his Twitter page. Maryna said it is now part of the drone pilot school
curriculum. They never launch from the same place twice. And the Ukrainian drone pilots
have started to deploy countermeasures, something they call, appropriately enough, Olga.

It’s a simple black box that plugs into a drone’s USB port and scrambles the signal in a way
that makes it harder to hijack it or locate it.

KHORUNZA: Olga can block Russian, uh, uh, Russian system and Russian drones, and they
cannot find us.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: More than a year after the war began, Maryna says she never for a
moment considered leaving Ukraine to wait out the war. And while she’s not at the zero
line, some of her students are.

KHORUNZA: Girls who has learned after me, they are in the east of Ukraine right now,
maybe some people don't understand that woman, even the most kind like me, you know
who will never do something bad for anything insect. If some invader comes to your country,
I believe that many people, they just don't realize how strong women are.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Now Maryna is using that brain her grandfather loved so much. The one
he said, so many years ago, was the most important part of her.

KHORUNZA: When I start speaking and telling what I'm doing, they say, hmm, really? Are
you joking? Why do you need that?

TEMPLE-RASTON: She needs to do that because she loves Ukraine.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, how a deputy mayor with a few smartphones and an
iPad, is gathering the evidence that might bring perpetrators of atrocities to justice.

This is Click Here.

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Stay with us.

[BREAK]

[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston and this is Click Here. Today we’re talking about
the future of war and how technology is transforming modern warfare. In the battle
between two tech-savvy nations, we’ve seen innovations like volunteer cyber armies and
fashion models flying drones.

And tech is making its presence felt in other more fundamental ways, like holding Moscow
accountable for what it has done. That’s what our next story is about: one woman’s
tech-forward approach to investigating one of the tragedies of this conflict: mass graves.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Wherever they turn up, mass graves seem to offend something deep in
the human conscience. They fly in the face of the universal instinct to honor the dead.

[MUSIC IN]

MYKHAILYNA SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: There was mass graves where Russians executed

people, digged the holes in the graves and hid them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, the deputy mayor of Bucha, a leafy

bedroom community just 15 miles from Kyiv.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Officially, I'm Mykhailyan Skoryk-Shkarivska, but for my foreign

friends I usually ask to call me Mykha. I think it is easier, no?

TEMPLE-RASTON: And we’re talking to Mykha because of this special skill she has. She is
really good at digitally organizing things. Before the war, she was in charge of digital
innovation for the city of Bucha. Her job was to digitize and organize city records. She was

19
supposed to look for ways to automate tax collection or parking tickets. And then, Russian
troops marched into Bucha.

PBS: Global outrage grew today as more horrific revelations surfaced from Bucha, Ukraine…

ABC: …who describe brutal killings carried out by Russian forces…

CBS: …forces left behind a, quote, ‘scene from a horror movie’ as they withdrew from areas
near Kyiv…

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Nobody in Bucha expected, uh, to become a place of tragedy. A

Bucha tragedy.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Human Rights officials arrived in Bucha after Russian troops withdrew
and found evidence of summary executions and torture. Residents talked about forced
disappearances and civilians killed by sniper fire. And many of these victims ended up in
mass graves, buried without identification. I had always assumed mass graves were the
work of perpetrators, a ham-handed effort to cover up unspeakable crimes. But in Ukraine,
that’s only half the story.

MYKHAILYNA: In Bucha we have a different kind of mass graves.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Mykha says that in many of the Russian occupied cities in Ukraine, local
people dug the mass graves themselves — to prevent disease or to stop stray dogs from
desecrating the bodies.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: The biggest mass grave near St Andrew church

TEMPLE-RASTON: Church of St. Andrew, in the center of Bucha. That mass grave was the
work of municipal and hospital employees. Bucha was still under Russian occupation when
they began to dig.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Russians allow them to do temporary cemetery, so they digged a big

trench and put like, they are saying about 67 bodies.

20
TEMPLE-RASTON: Eventually there would be hundreds of bodies, which meant someone had
to put a name to a face, and then to its remains. And it is a huge logistical challenge.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: You have to bury people even without the documentation. And when
you did it without the documents, you have to dig them out.

TEMPLE-RASTON: You have to exhume a neighbor, in order to identify them.

[MUSIC FADING IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So, in a way, Bucha’s dead were only put in the ground for safe-keeping –
to preserve evidence and organize it. And Mykha decided to figure out a way to do that.

[MUSIC BUMP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: What happened at the hands of Russian occupiers is well known now,
what was remarkable is how people like Mykha responded. They began to organize the
millions of little digital clues that the Russians had left behind. Establishing cause of death,
tracking hundreds of DNA samples, gathering evidence of possible war crimes. And Mykha,
one-time digital innovator for Bucha, built a system to keep track of it all.

[MUSIC OUT]

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Our system, uh, was not able to manage such a big amount of
requests looking for the bodies or looking for the disappeared people and of course to
recognize the corpses.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She created a system to modernize the way Bucha accounted for the
dead.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We asked our colleagues to provide us some smartphones and one

iPad.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Smartphones and an iPad were all she needed to get started

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We had lots of imprisoned people. We had lots of killed people.

21
TEMPLE-RASTON: They had police databases, missing persons reports, photographs of the
disappeared. The problem was, all these little clues were siloed. There was no central
repository, no single database to search. Mykha came to find out that even Ukraine’s
morgues were mostly pen and paper operations. Digitizing their records was something
they had always intended to do – but never got around to. Mykha decided it was time to
change all that.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We received data from five morgues and we created the primary
database.

[MUSIC IN]

TEMPLE-RASTON: The primary database ingested everything the five morgues in and
around Bucha knew about the 400 bodies they had examined but didn’t have room to keep.
Not just sex, and approximate age, and hair color, but a collection of details that might help
families find their loved ones: tattoos, birthmarks, scars.

Mykha then helped families to use that information to cross reference special Telegram
channels and police databases that laid out who went into which mass grave and where. So
when families arrived with details about their missing relatives, Mykha knew exactly where
to look.

Her system allows families to honor the dead, to hold real funerals and proper burials. But
knowing precisely what happened to each of these people,– before they came to the mass
graves of Bucha — Mykha says it’ll take a while.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: I think that in one year in two year, maybe three years’ time, we will
have not only the names and the dates from the morgue, but also the results of the
investigations.

TEMPLE-RASTON: It will be a painstaking forensic endeavor that will unfold in slow,

incremental steps.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: So it's a big tragedy for Ukrainian families to have this situation.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But, the database helps anchor things. It offers some semblance of order,
and closure.

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SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: We are still, uh, helping families to recognize their killed relatives.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But it’s about more than just closure. Knitting millions of digital clues
together can help international courts bring criminal indictments and trials. These captured
scenes can help hold the guilty accountable.

STEPHEN RAPP: There's no question that the digital means and satellite imagery — often
with other documentary information or witness testimony — really, I think, makes a number
of these situations much, much easier to prove.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s Ambassador Stephen Rapp. I first met him nearly twenty years ago
when he was the chief prosecutor of a Rwandan war crimes trial. Since then he’s been
involved in war crimes prosecutions in Sierra Leone and Syria, and then became an
Ambassador-at-Large focused on war crimes at the State Department. So he’s intimately
familiar with what it takes to build these kinds of cases.

RAPP: Building a war crimes case is quite different than building a normal violent crime
case. Violent crimes may involve some planning, but they are over and done with, they are
like a bank robbery, in a few minutes. And you can control the crime scene and you can take
advantage of video cameras…

TEMPLE-RASTON: In Bucha, crimes were committed over 32 days. All over the city. And while
social media posts, CCTV, and secret iphone videos recorded by witnesses can all help
connect perpetrators to the crime, finding those witnesses in a city of 30,000 — at a time of
war — so they can testify at a trial many years later… only begins to explain why trials for
war crimes are so complicated. Rapp says the bodies themselves provide clues as to what
happened.

RAPP: You have mass graves, bodies left on the street for three or four weeks with hands
tied behind their back with bullets in the back of heads. Those are situations in which there
are war crimes without question.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But they can’t tell the whole story.

RAPP: Then there’s the issue of who committed those crimes? Who's really responsible?
Were they rogue units, uh, scared young soldiers who just, you know, acted out their own

23
impulses? Or was that part of a strategy in which the military command really looked to
intimidate the population?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Before 2014, answering those kinds of questions was nearly impossible.
Then two things happened: Surveillance went from something only governments had to
becoming open-source. And then a collective of citizen investigative journalists working for
Bellingcat found a game changing way to leverage digital information.

BELLINGCAT DOCUMENTARY TRAILER: I’d like to talk about a very new way of
investigating…

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s from a documentary about Bellingcat called Truth in a Post Truth
World. The new way of investigating is all about following digital trails and leveraging
information that is just out there for the taking, if you know where to look.

TRAILER: Like a time machine, we can go back to the day of the shootdown on Google
earth…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Bellingcat has been behind a number of remarkable investigations but

the one that put it on the map was the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which just
disappeared from the radar over Ukrainian airspace in 2014. Bellingcat made clear there
was a lot to discover with just a computer, a keyboard, and the will to find the truth.

CBS NEWS: American officials believe that the Boeing triple-seven was brought down by a
surface-to-air missile…

TEMPLE-RASTON: All 298 people aboard were killed. Bellingcat began looking through
social media posts around eastern Ukraine, the area where the airplane went down. They
managed to uncover the actual video of the Russian BUK surface-to-air missile launcher not
just coming into Ukraine shortly before the crash…

[SOUND OF LAUNCHER VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But actually heading back to Russia the very next day carrying just three
missiles instead of four…

[SECOND LAUNCHER VIDEO]

24
TEMPLE-RASTON: Then Dutch investigators were able to find intercepted calls from that
same period. And what they heard was confusion after rebels realized they may have just
downed a commercial plane, arguments about how to whisk the missile launcher back to
Russia.

In the end, three men — two Russians and a Ukrainian — were found guilty in absentia of
the murder all 298 people aboard. The story would have had a satisfying ending but for one
thing – even nine years later – they are thought to be still hiding out in Russia.

RAPP: And so it can take a very long time.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ambassador Rapp says war crimes are really committed by organizations,
not individuals.

RAPP: And then you have to figure out how to attribute criminal responsibility across that
organization and prove the responsibility of people who really made the crime happen.

TEMPLE-RASTON: People up the chain. People like Russian president Vladimir Putin. People
who ordered the bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine. People who told soldiers to
show “no mercy” to the residents of occupied cities.

ANDRIY KOSTIN: Of course, it's not an easy way to prove this system of command
responsibility from the highest level.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Andriy Kostin. He was talking to
CBS Face the Nation.

KOSTIN: We know who is responsible for it. Because the crime of aggression is the mother of
all of these crimes: of war crimes, genocide, because without aggression, there will be no
other war crimes. And for that reason, for the crime of aggression, the highest political and
military leadership should be prosecuted and should be punished.

[MUX FADING IN: Zither Sprak]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Ambassador Rapp is advising the Ukrainian government on how it might

organize those trials. He says they need to be structured and systematic to bring speedier

25
justice. In the meantime, he says Putin isn’t doing himself any favors. By not having court
martials or investigations when news of fresh atrocities surface, he makes it easier to follow
them up the chain.

RAPP: Indeed, Putin giving awards to at least one of the major units involved, there is sort of
heroes of the — and defenders of the — fatherland. You know that you can, in fact, impute
responsibility all the way up to him, potentially.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which is what Mykha wants:

TEMPLE-RASTON: What does justice look like?

MYKHA: Putin in jail. And every killer in every case.

[MUSIC OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Mykha, for her part, says while she’s worried about what Putin might do
next, her life in Bucha has to go on. So she’s making those accommodations you have to
make when you’re at war. She carries her smartphone everywhere now because Bucha has
instituted a missile warning system. It sounds like one of those amber alerts we get on our
phones here.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: So that's the signal that you should hide from another possible
attack. My little son, he's seven years old. He's all the time talking about killing Putin about,
uh, Russians as enemies.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He’s back in school but…

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: Sometimes he has to spend time in the basement because of rocket

attack warning…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Which, she said, is a new reality she’s having to get used to.

SKORYK-SHKARIVSKA: The position that every minute you have to stop, what are you doing
and hide from the air attack.

26
TEMPLE-RASTON: It wears on her, and she sees its effect on her son. He builds pillow forts to
protect them both now, and has taken to singing Ukrainian patriotic songs. Sometimes they
sing them together.

[SINGING NATIONAL ANTHEM TOGETHER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: “Neither the glory nor the will of Ukraine has died yet,” they sing. “We will
give body and soul for our freedom.”

This is Click Here.

(SINGING)

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. Our team includes
senior producer Sean Powers, producer Will Jarvis and editors Karen Duffin and Lu Olkowski.
John DeLore is our sound engineer. Darren Ankrom is our fact checker and Ben Levingston
wrote all the original music in the show. Other music is by Blue Dot Sessions. For more cyber
news, check out our sister publication, The Record by Recorded Future News at the
TheRecord dot media.

Please leave us a review and rating wherever you get your podcasts or send us an email at
ClickHere [at] RecordedFuture [dot] com. And check out our website with details about our
shows and our whole show catalog at ClickHereShow [dot] com.

Next week on a special holiday episode of Click Here…we look at how hackers are more like
the rest of us than you might think. Consider the case of Ryan Green. He created a pretty
famous dark web market, back before dark web markets were really a thing.

GREEN: It was a fun thing, it was a powerful thing, and it was a challenge, which is how
things really spiraled out of control.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So why don’t you tell me about that?

GREEN: Well…

TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston. That’s next Tuesday on Click Here.

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