Russian Intelligence Hacks Ukrainian Command and Control Information Systems

By Romegas

A number of NATO donated Information systems used by the Ukrainian Military for overall command and control have been allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence. This was revealed by the anonymous hacking collective, known as Joker DPR, which is probably nothing more than a front for Russian Intelligence and which has an extensive history of publishing sensitive Ukrainian data as you can see on their telegram channel.

The most important of these systems is the American DELTA program, which is actively used by Ukrainians. The program contains information about Ukrainian and Russian troops, as well as the coordinates of military equipment. The program is also not only used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but also by NATO officers who constantly coordinate with the Ukrainian General Staff.

To prove, that this was indeed the case, the Joker collective published not only screenshots but also a video showing the hackers playing around with the software and even entering bogus information into it.

One might reasonably ask, why would Russia let the whole world know that it has hacked these systems? If by staying quiet they could easily simply see what the Ukrainian military plans are and use this to their advantage. I can think of several reasons, including:

Contrary to the western media reporting, the so-called Ukrainian Counter offensive we have been constantly hearing about has in fact fizzled out in disaster. Countless Ukrainian soldiers have been sacrificed in the attempt to gain a few kilometers of barren steppe and thereby the hope of a propaganda victory. In truth, every time they attack some part of the front, they find the Russians waiting for them and have suffered truly catastrophic losses up to the point that they are now no longer able to mount any kind of offensive beyond company levels. This coincidence of encountering stiff resistance everywhere they try to advance must have the Ukrainian military already suspect that their systems are compromised.

Secondly, by demonstrating that they have indeed hacked these systems, the Russians not only deal a devastating morale blow – prior to their own planned offensive that is expected to begin once the partial-mobilisation of 300,000 new soldiers is complete and winter sets in and the ground hardens but more importantly, even if they fix the security breach, the Ukrainians must conclude that their data is irretrievably compromised. They will in effect have to question every piece of data and reverify it – something that will take months and by the time they will complete it, the information will be by then useless since it will be totally out of date as the reality on the front is always evolving.

Thirdly and most importantly, this is a warning to NATO itself  – to think twice and more before escalating the conflict further.  Demonstrating that software that it uses for command and control has already been hacked by the Russians, begs the question of what else they might have already compromised. One here has to keep in mind the recent Starlink outages during Kiev’s so-called counter offensive where it was described that outages led to a “catastrophic” loss of communication and had not only the Ukrainians themselves in “a panic” but Elon Musk himself, who suddenly thereafter began to voice the need for a peace plan much to the public chagrin of the Pentagon. Russian threats to disable commercial satellites providing the Kiev military with information and communication are also not empty threats. Russia does indeed have the most advanced anti-satellite systems by far and if it had to use them in a conflict with NATO, the latter would in all probability find itself deaf and dumb from the get-go.

In truth, Russia did not need to hack these systems to have a real-time picture of what’s happening on the Ukrainian battle and home fronts – it does after all possess extensive ISAR, spaced-based military satellite constellations, electronic warfare and signals intelligence on par with anything that the US possesses – not to mention human intelligence embedded in all the strata of the Ukrainian society including in the Ukrainian military complex itself, given that a significant proportion of which has at minimum divided loyalties but while I have no means of independently verifying the claims made by Joker DPR, it is my conclusion that the Russians have indeed hacked these systems, and have done so for quite a while – The truly disproportionate and tragic losses being suffered by the Ukrainians on a daily basis, losses which are hidden from western eyes (not least thanks to unprecedented censorship) are perhaps the perfect testimony for it. Following Russian telegram channels, one is fed a constant diet of what at this point is nothing other than a turkey shoot (and given that the Ukrainians are now increasingly depending on donated NATO equipment such as the Finnish SISU and US M113 APCs shown in the below videos), there can no longer be any doubt to whom they belong to and who is getting a real hiding.

I show these videos which are just a couple of too many one gets to see every day, not because I enjoy military porn but for people to hopefully understand that the narrative they are being fed by the ever-compromised and propagandistic western media couldn’t be further from the truth on the ground.

By the end of winter, it will be game over for Ukraine. The only question that needs to be settled is where will the Russians stop. Will they be content with the four regions they have recently annexed? Or will they gobble up more? Indeed will Ukraine itself continue to exist by the time this is over? The answer to this in effect resides in Washington rather than Kiev or Moscow. It is Washington that will decide Ukraine’s fate as it has since 2014. If the people that matter across the Atlantic ocean really cared about the Ukrainian people’s best interest they would be pushing their puppet regime to compromise and find a negotiated solution, the alternative is simply more senseless slaughter and the end of Ukraine as a state.   

This is therefore as good a reason as any to let the US know, that software that NATO utilises for command and control has been hacked.