On May 8, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said through his telegram account that business tycoon Elon Musk “would have to answer” for providing “military communications” to “fascist forces in Ukraine.”
Rogozin claimed that “testimony” from a captured Ukrainian military officer showed that “ground-based subscriber equipment” from Musk’s Starlink satellite company “was handed over to Nazi ‘Azov’ battalion militants and U.S. Marines.” the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine] in Mariupol by military helicopters.
“According to our information, the delivery and transfer to the Armed Forces of Ukraine of the Starlink Internet receiving and transmitting boxes were carried out by the Pentagon,” Rogozin wrote. “Therefore, Elon Musk is involved in supplying military communications to fascist forces in Ukraine.”
That is false.
The fact that Musk’s satellite broadband system has been widely distributed in Ukraine since the war it has been no secret. But in addition to providing military communications, Starlink is also being used by hospitals, schools, and fire departments in Ukraine.
Russia has falsely tried to justify its war against Ukraine as a fight against fascism, but that has been widely discredited. Connecting Musk to alleged fascists is blatant slander.
In fact, Starlink, a division of Musk’s aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, is helping keep Ukrainians connected to the internet amid Russian cyberattacks aimed at cutting them off from the world.
After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, it followed up with a massive cyberattack targeting Internet servers and networks in Ukraine and across Europe.
Starlink provides an alternative to terrestrial Internet servers. US government funding has helped pay for his distribution.
According to Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, more than 10,000 Starlink terminals are operating in Ukraine, serving some 150,000 users.
Satellites have kept essential services in Ukraine running and ensured the country’s access to communications and information. More than 590 medical facilities received Starlink terminals to keep them online during the war.
To maintain the ability to censor Ukrainians, Russia redirected a fiber-optic cable used by Ukrainian internet service providers to a Russian-linked provider in Crimea. Starlink provided a way to bypass Moscow censorship, Ukrainian officials said financial time.
In fact, most Starlink terminals are for civilian purposes, although they have been used to help Ukraine’s drones target Russian tanks and to help soldiers communicate. wired magazine reported, citing Fedorov of Ukraine.
Due to their small size, Starlink’s antennas allow Ukrainian forces to move with less chance of detection and attack. Foreign policy informed.
In April, The New York Times posted a video that Sgt. Leonid Kuznetsov from the National Guard of Ukraine sent via Telegram. Kuznetsov was hiding in a bunker with other soldiers and 1,000 civilians inside Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant. Kuznetsov was able to communicate with the world and report on the situation using the Starlink network.
(Russia has tried to portray the Ukrainian Army’s Azov Regiment as fascist, but that has been discredited for multiple fact checkers. It is the Azov fighters who have been defending Mariupol and who are now under siege in Azovstal.)
according to a senior US military officer, Starlink proved to be more efficient than the US military in resisting Russian jamming attacks against its systems. On April 20, Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, told the C4ISRNET Cybersecurity Conference that after a jamming attack, “Starlink had released a line of code and arrangement”.
The most visible Russian cyber attack occurred in late February and targeted Viasat, Inc., one of the world’s largest commercial satellite providers. The attack paralyzed thousands of modems that communicated with Viasat KA-SAT Satellitedisrupting communications in Ukraine.
A Viasat official told Reuters that hackers sabotaged the company’s modems and disrupted its work across Europe, but mainly in Ukraine, on the day Russia launched its invasion.
Most modems remained offline for more than two weeks. That affected Ukrainian government and bank websites, as well as Ukraine’s military and security services, whose communications systems ran on Viasat’s network.
Initially, Russian hackers were suspected of being behind the cyberattack, and on May 10, the United States, Britain, Canada, Estonia, and the European Union officially accused Russia of having carried it out.
The US Department of State he said the communications disruption in Ukraine caused by the removal of data from Ukrainian government websites, website defacement, and malicious traffic disruption were “all part of the Russian playbook.”
“The United States has assessed that Russian military cyber operators have deployed several families of destructive cleaning malware, including WhisperGate, into Ukraine’s government and private sector networks,” the State Department said.
On April 27, Microsoft released a report saying Russian state cyber actors launched destructive cyberattacks synchronized with military operations targeting critical services in Ukraine.
Microsoft said it observed 40 cyberattacks targeting hundreds of systems, and that 32 percent of them targeted Ukrainian government infrastructure at the national, regional, and city levels. Microsoft said that as the war continues, such attacks will continue.
May 1st, State Service for Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) said the country’s cyberspace was under heavy pressure from Russian hackers.
Ukrainian radio and television stations are also under Russian attack aimed at limiting Ukrainians’ access to news and information. The SSSCIP said Russia is deliberately destroying the infrastructure of broadcast networks in order to deny Ukrainians “reliable information about developments in the war and the situation in Ukraine.”
cybersecurity authorities in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom said in an advisory published in April that intelligence reports indicated that Russia was looking for possible targets of cyberattacks.
The advisory noted an increase in malicious cyber activity in the region and advised infrastructure network defenders to prepare for cyber attacks, including destructive malware, ransomware, denial-of-service attacks and cyber espionage.
On May 10, Musk said on Twitter that Starlink had so far been successful in deflecting Russian attempts to hack the system, “but they are ramping up their efforts.”
Reference-www.polygraph.info