From Russia with Love: The Science of Hybrid Warfare
In this edition of The Naked Scientists, we’ll find out how Putin and his cadre in the Kremlin play a neverending game of technological cat and mouse...
In this episode
Russian weaponry and new deadly drones
Michael Clarke, Sky News
On February 24, 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves across the world. Tanks rumbled across borders, missiles rained down on Kyiv, and Europe found itself facing its largest conflict since the Second World War. But the battlefield doesn’t begin and end in Ukraine - it stretches deep into the heart of the West.
Beyond conventional warfare, Russia fights in ways that aren’t always apparent. Cyber attacks cripple critical infrastructure, energy blackmail holds Europe hostage, and GPS jamming disrupts navigation systems. This blend of regular and irregular tactics is often collectively described as hybrid warfare.
Later, we’ll explore how the Kremlin uses advanced science and technology to weaken the West. But first, we begin with an assessment of Russian firepower with Michael Clarke. Michael used to be the head of the Royal United Services Institute security think-tank, and he’s now a defence analyst at Sky News…
Michael - The Russians are fighting in Ukraine with more or less everything they've got other than nuclear weapons themselves. So they've brought their army to bear with all of their armored vehicles, their tanks, some of their most modern tanks, though they haven't performed all that well, I have to say. They've brought their superiority in artillery. They use a lot of artillery, a lot of shells, literally about 15,000 - 20,000 a day. And they've brought to it greater numbers, numbers of troops. So they throw a lot of troops into the attack. They're still working with rifles and machine guns, Second World War style. But because they do everything with such big numbers, then eventually it begins to tell.
Chris - And mines. I mean, we've had quite a lot of deployments of mines, haven't we?
Michael - The Russians have used mines, landmines and anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines. Again, this goes back to the Second World War, goes back to the 1940s. But they've used an old technology in very intensive ways. So when they were laying their minefields in 2023, south of where they knew that the Ukrainians were likely to attack them, they laid them on top of each other. They sometimes laid three or four mines in one square metre. It wasn't just one mine every few metres. And they laid about three times as many per kilometre as military manuals say you need to lay for an intensive minefield. So the world has never seen so many mines used in such intensive ways, even though the technology is actually a very old one.
Chris - One thing that is very new, though, is the introduction of drones to this party, isn't it? This was the first conflict I've ever kind of monitored from afar watching the news and so on where I've seen drones actually brought to bear in such great numbers and making such a big difference.
Michael - There was one conflict in 2020 between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where drones did have a significant effect. But that was a relatively small conflict. But it was a wake up call to the militaries. And the Russians certainly learned the lessons because they were on the wrong end of that conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I mean, their client, Armenia, was on the wrong end of it with all their Russian equipment. They got completely beaten by the Azeris using drones, Turkish drones, mainly, and Israeli drones to great effect. And what the Russians have learned and the Ukrainians is that the drone used in high numbers is a new dimension of warfare. And it's not too much to say that the airspace below 5,000 feet now belongs to drones. There's a whole new war going on. Above 5,000 feet, aircraft still operate the way they always did. But below 5,000 feet, it's a drone war between drone on drone, one drone trying to kill another drone, drones being shot at from the ground, drones being jammed by electronic measures, and drones that are some as big as an aircraft, which carry a lot of stuff, and drones as small as a hobby drone, just like a quadcopter, which can carry a grenade. And it can literally, it can chase soldiers down, it can chase them into their trenches, it can chase them into their dugouts. And if you talk to any soldiers on the Russian side or the Ukrainian side, the thing that most bothers them, it's called FPV drones, first person view drones. It's these little drones with one grenade on that literally can see them and chases them wherever they go, almost a weapon of terror to individual soldiers.
Chris - Presumably, this is useful to military strategists everywhere watching this, because this is kind of 21st century warfare, massive amounts of money and munitions being thrown at it. But it gives us an opportunity to see what happens when you use some of the new and some of the old weapons and tactics.
Michael - Yes, and militaries all over the world are watching this conflict with enormous professional interest. Because what it shows is a conflict on the one hand looks like the conflict that our grandfathers would have been familiar with, working in trenches, working with grenades, with rifles, with bullets and having to worry about artillery shells. I mean, my father dealt with that, my grandfather dealt with that. But on the other hand, this is also a conflict which involves space. So a lot of the situation awareness, as they say, on the ground, the ability to play something on the ground is coming straight from space. So it's a conflict that is both completely 21st century and a little bit of 19th century all at once. And somehow that's got to be fitted all together. So modern militaries are learning a lot from this conflict. But they're also learning that major conflict is, as you say, hugely expensive. It absorbs massive amounts of equipment. And for instance, I mean, in Britain, we know that if we were fighting this conflict, if we were fighting it in the way that the Ukrainians are having to fight it, we would have run out of ammunition after the first couple of months.
Chris Sobering thought, isn't it? The West is deploying munitions into the arena, and therefore, I suppose, getting to test stuff vicariously through the Ukrainians using it. But we're getting to see how some of these technologies, new and old, perform. And then that's a useful learning exercise as well.
Michael It is one of the side effects of this war. And some people get very upset about it as if somehow the war is being waged in order to be a sort of an experimental lab for new systems. It isn't at all. But it has that effect that the world can see that Western war equipment, generally speaking, performs a lot better than Russian equipment. And, you know, the Russians have sold their equipment all over the world. And a lot of customers of Russian equipment in Africa and Asia are looking at it and thinking, well, actually, this stuff isn't all that good if it's up against Western equipment.
There's no question about it that in most areas that Western equipment has been proved far superior to Russian equipment. But the difference is that the Russians have deployed far more of it. They are outnumbering with tanks and armored vehicles and with sheer munitions, everything that the Ukrainians can produce and that they've got and what we are prepared to send them. And that's been the difference.
Chris - Do you think they will go down the nuclear route? They'll just say, we've run out of patience and start nuking us.
Michael - The Russians won't initially think in nuclear terms. They talk in nuclear terms to frighten everybody. And they've shown that they can frighten a lot of people. They certainly frighten a lot of European publics rattling their nuclear weapons. There is no nuclear use in Ukraine that would do them any good for all sorts of reasons. They could not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine to any useful military effect. And there are many, many reasons why I don't think they would do it. But any war against Russia or any war where we find ourselves fighting directly against Russian forces somewhere in Europe, of course, raises the increased possibility of nuclear exchanges. But I wouldn't overemphasise that at all, because the Russians know that the West has got very good nuclear weapons. Britain has got its own independent deterrent. And they know that if the British prime minister gave the order now, this moment, while you and I are speaking. if for some reason that order were ever given to use British nuclear weapons, then in 55 minutes time from now, a British submarine would launch a completely unstoppable strike against Moscow. Now, that's the reality. You and I can argue as to whether that's a good thing or not, whether it's moral or not. But that is the scientific reality. 55 minutes from this instant now, when the prime minister says, yes, we do it. 55 minutes later, the weapons take off. 20 minutes after that, Moscow is totally and completely and utterly destroyed. That's where we are. And the Russians know that.
Cyber warfare and how to defend against it
Ciaran Martin, University of Oxford
Part of the Kremlin’s arsenal is it's sophisticated cyber weapons now. This type of warfare has the capability to shut down entire infrastructures, disrupt economies, and even shape the outcome of conflicts themselves. But how do these attacks work? And can they be countered? Here’s Ciaran Martin, the founder of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, and now a professor at the University of Oxford…
Ciaran - Cyber warfare is a hotly disputed term. Some people say it means nothing at all. Others say it's a very powerful way for modern states to harass their opponents and enemies. For me, states have always engaged in hostile cyber activity since we've had computers, mostly for spying, and that happens all the time and Russia is very good at that. But the essence of spying is if you're the victim of it you're not supposed to notice, it's supposed to aid your aggressor. But you can also disrupt through computer network attacks, so you can take out critical infrastructure, you can take out hospitals, you can take out TV stations. You can intimidate, so you can spy, but instead of just hoarding that information you can possibly leak it and Russia's done that from time to time in politics, in the politics of sport, all sorts of different areas. Nowadays some people are even extending cyber warfare to actually wrecking technological infrastructure. I wouldn't call that cyber warfare, but if you think about how the internet works, the sort of Russian sabotage of cables that we've talked a lot about recently, some people would see that as cyber related warfare. The essence of cyber aggression though, and the thing that makes it different, is that the aggressors don't have to leave their home countries to perpetrate what they're going to do and that gives them a safety that if you're a soldier, a terrorist, whatever it may be, you don't have. And so that's why it's quite attractive to states.
Chris - Russia has quite a lot of form in this area. Why is it so well-developed in Russia? Or is it that it's more visibly manifest in Russia, but pretty much every country is at an equivalent level?
Ciaran - Russia would be one of the most powerful cyber nations in the world. It's not perhaps as good as it thought it was and hasn't been able to utilise cyber and its brutal campaign of aggression against Ukraine in the way that perhaps we might have thought before the invasion. But Russia kind of got computers early. It's always had a skilled set of mathematicians and engineers and it's had quite a high risk appetite for doing things that others mightn't do. So for example, way back in 2015, a French TV station was taken offline in a very sophisticated cyber attack and it turned out to be Russia, even though they were pretending to be so-called Islamic State. And we were always very sceptical about this because so-called Islamic State didn't have anything like these capabilities. It's a sort of operation that perhaps the US might be able to do, the UK might be able to do, but wouldn't routinely do it in peacetime against a country like France. But Russia was.
Chris - Who were they going after, chiefly?
Ciaran - The primary targets of Russia's cyber aggression as a nation have been Ukraine, which is known in some cyber security circles as Russia's cyber playground before it became the subject of a full-scale atrocious invasion. So from about the annexation of Crimea in 2014 until the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Russians harassed Ukraine in cyberspace through trying to take out power stations so there were power cuts, by trying to dismantle and disrupt government payments systems, by doing all sorts of espionage and sabotage operations via cyberspace. But they've also then, in terms of the West, primarily against the United States, but also against other countries, including the UK, they've used cyber to sort of intimidate and further their political objectives. If you like, if war is the extension of politics by other means or the other way around, you could say cyber is an extension of both sometimes. So for example, when Russia was kicked out of the International Sporting Association because of doping scandals, the Russians hacked the World Anti-Doping Agency and leaked the apparent doping records of other athletes and medics, most famously when they wanted to stir discontent in the United States in 2016. They hacked a bunch of emails and servers relating to the Democratic Party and instead of just using that for spying, for working out how US politics was going, they flooded the American media with them. So there are different types of attacks they can do, but primarily they've gone for their near neighbours, particularly Ukraine, because that's been the target of so much Russian aggression over the last 10 years. And they've used it with less ferocity, if you like, to harass and intimidate the West.
Chris - To what extent is this a new incursion, and to what extent is it that they've been doing this for years and they've slowly inveigled their way in through back doors everywhere, and so everyone's compromised by them everywhere, and therefore they can just call up these sleeping networks of servers they've got all over the world at will? Or am I just exaggerating?
Ciaran - Some of the operatives and the groups that are attracted by Western security services have been known since literally the last century, so there's very little new about this. Obviously the techniques evolve, the targets may change and so forth, but broadly speaking it is the case that Russia, technical term for it in cybersecurity, is known as pre-positioning. Russia will pre-position on networks, and if you're pre-positioned on a network you can use it to spy, which is if you're passive, the network still works. And if you're operating that network you don't know that all your traffic is going back to Moscow. But then sometimes those pre-positioned implants, those presences, can be used as a basis to disrupt and stop the network from working. And Russia, it goes and fits and starts, but activates those implants that they've got to try to stop things from working. What's been interesting was that when the war broke out in Ukraine in February 2022, a lot of Western security agencies and a lot of Western governments and Western security experts were very worried that Russia would launch a really sustained campaign of cyber aggression against the West in order to deter the West from intervening on Ukraine's side with the sort of ammunition and financial support that the West has given them. That didn't happen. That's not because Russia couldn't do it, I think it chose not to. Partly it was distracted by what was going on in Ukraine and the fact the war went much less well, and they thought, partly because there is this mystique about cyber attacks that you can do them completely deniably, you can get away with anything in cyberspace, that's not true. Had Russia unleashed these attacks they would have been, even if they hadn't been prevented, they would have been detected, they would have been attributed to Russia, and just as there had to be a response by Western governments over the Salisbury atrocity back in 2018, there would have had to have been a response. It would have been just as provocative as a military incursion, as a state-sponsored proxy terrorist attack, as another Salisbury. There's nothing special about cyber other than you can't often physically get at the perpetrators because they're in Russia and don't have to leave Russia, but there's nothing special about cyber and that it's some magic way of getting away with it, it isn't.
How Russia weaponised energy supplies
Kristine Berzina, GMF Geostrategy North
Before the war in Ukraine, Russia supplied almost half of Europe’s gas. In 2022, it cut these supplies in response to sanctions - which, in turn, triggered an energy crisis. But what has driven our recent dependency on Russian energy? And is there a way to ween ourselves off it? Here’s Kristine Berzina, the managing director of GMF Geostrategy North, which aims to provide insights and policy guidance on how to address Europe’s energy challenges…
Kristine - After the invasion of Crimea in 2014, and that is profoundly important. So after Russia showed its cards and its desire to use military force to take over neighboring countries' territory, only 11 years ago, Russia proposed Nord Stream 2. And so saying, 'okay, let's do another pipeline, a parallel pipeline under the Baltic Sea directly connecting Russia and Germany,' that I feel is the most brazen of the steps that Russia has taken in establishing this natural gas dependence and this relationship.
Chris - Don't you think though, it just seems beggar’s belief that we ended up so dependent in Europe on one main supplier in this way, leaving ourselves very exposed?
Kristine - I think it is a big strategic mistake. Because what is Russia using the money for? To kill people in Ukraine, to support and purchase weapons from North Korea, from Iran, from these established enemies of the countries to which it is selling its gas. And so the countries that are sending the payments for the natural gas via pipeline traditionally, but now increasingly for liquefied natural gas moved by tanker, not banned at all. Currently, this money is going back to Russia. And what is Russia doing with it? It is building tanks and it is propping up and purchasing arms from actors that threaten all of the West.
Chris - The irony of the fact that our gas bills have been paying Putin to slaughter people in Ukraine hasn't escaped many Europeans. They did react strongly in 2022. When this first kicked off, there was a wholesale withdrawal from doing business with Russia. That included some energy. And finally, we got to a point now where we've seen just this last week, the Baltic states that we're talking about; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they've just switched away from Russia's electricity grid as well, haven't they? So is this finally disentangling ourselves of the tentacles of Russia into Europe's energy?
Kristine - I wish it were so simple. It is a very good move in the Baltic states to move on the electricity side. So there was a physical link, a synchronisation of electricity grids between the three Baltic states and Russia and Belarus, which meant that there could be manipulations in electricity supply from Russia or Belarus, which often acts now in concert with Russia in the Baltic states, which given hybrid warfare and geo-strategic vulnerability, it was a very large vulnerability purely in terms of three Baltic states being able to keep lights on in case of a dramatic action in the context of hybrid warfare or of a military attack. So this is great. The Baltics will be able to develop more renewable sources. They'll be more connected to the European other markets. They already had electricity connections to the Nordics, but this really cleans up unfinished business in terms of electricity connections.
But I'm not all that worried about electricity. What I'm worried about is the consistent increase of liquefied natural gas exports from Russia to European markets. And there's a lot of stuff in the news about Slovakia or Hungary being friendlier to Russia than others, not interested in the sanctions, being concerned about the cutoff of Ukrainian transit. But when you look at who's responsible for an increase of liquefied natural gas purchases, this is France and Spain and Netherlands and Belgium. This is the comfortable, richer Western European countries that really should know better.
Chris - But how big is that market compared to, say, what India's offloading as part of Putin's dark ghost ship fleet, which is moving things off the radar and off the balance sheet to other places like India much more cheaply? They're getting cut price deals on a lot of this energy. How much money is flowing into Russia from sources like that compared to these people in France, for example?
Kristine - The Indian and China's markets for the shadow fleet fuels are absolutely a concern. And there's also a concern about the risk of environmental disaster should anything happen with these terribly maintained ships as they go through complicated seas along European shores where Europe is going to have to be responsible then for cleaning everything up. That's one issue. And the size of the Indian market and the comfort of India in purchasing this gas is also a problem. But the fact is that at the end of last year, Russia still provided 18% of European natural gas imports.
Chris - And why is that? Why are we allowed to get away with that? Why is it that we've got money flowing from the big economies in Europe and billion scale levels of funding flowing into Ukraine to buy weapons? And at the same time, we are giving that much money to the Russians for a product. Why are countries still allowed to do that?
Kristine - A lack of political bravery.
23:05 - Consequences of Kremlin GPS jamming and spoofing
Consequences of Kremlin GPS jamming and spoofing
Ramsey Farragher, Queens’ College, Cambridge
Russia has disrupted satellite navigation systems across the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean. This tactic - which is known as GPS jamming - interferes with the Global Positioning System, affecting everything from commercial flights to military operations. But how does GPS actually work? Here’s Ramsey Farragher at the Royal Institute of Navigation and Queens’ College, Cambridge…
Ramsey - So that's the Global Positioning System, which is the American satellite constellation that we all use every day in our smartphones to navigate to and from the shops. Things like ships and airliners and taxis and buses all use it as well. It's a large set of satellites, 30 satellites in orbit around the Earth that transmit the time very accurately. And your GPS receiver uses those time messages that it picks up from the sky in order to calculate where it is. And it's not just the GPS signal we use. The Galileo system is the European system. There's a GLONASS system, which is Russian, and a Chinese system called Beidou. And your little smartphone in your pocket uses all of them every day to help you get about your business.
Chris - Why time? Why does that matter?
Ramsey - Well, this is good old Einstein helping us out in some respects. The speed of light is constant and a known figure. And that means that when the satellite transmits the signal to you, there's a particular time of flight for that signal to reach us. Your phone basically works out the time differences in the arrival times of all of these different signals from the different satellites. And it can do a clever bit of maths that says, ‘hey, the only way I could have picked up this particular sequence of those timing messages is if I'm at that place on Earth there.’
Chris - Because it took different amounts of time to arrive from all the different satellites, and that's the one place where that time would coincide for all of them.
Ramsey - Exactly. And actually it does one clever thing beyond position as well. It synchronises with that set of satellites. So it doesn't just work out where you are, it works out exactly when you are as well. So you've got this universal time all around the planet. And that actually is one of the key things that we'll be talking about when disruptions occur. They occur not just to position, but also to time.
Chris - So when someone says, well, I'm going to jam GPS, because this does happen, we know it happens and we know it can be done. What does that involve then? And how does it work?
Ramsey - Yeah, so jamming basically means you can no longer get the signal you want anymore. So whenever you walk into your house and your phone is in your pocket, and GPS stops working, you've jammed the signal because the ceiling got in the way and the walls got in the way. But you can electromagnetically jam it as well. And that's what's going on in the war zones. So they transmit very high power noise on the same radio frequency that you're trying to listen to satellites with. And it just overpowers it, like someone screaming near air at a party. It just jams you from hearing everything else.
Chris - Can we not just turn the satellites up a bit?
Ramsey - Well, they are powered by their solar panels. So we're limited by the size of the satellites that we could get up there in the first place, the size of the rockets we used, and the size of the solar panels that we could bolt into the equipment at the time. And a GPS satellite is a 50 watt light bulb, 20,000 kilometers away, which means that when you pick it up, you're picking up one quadrillionth of a watt of power. So it doesn't take much to drown it out.
Chris - So if we drench the airspace with these rogue signals, just interference, that stops me hearing the satellite, which means I would lose my way if I was depending upon that to find my way. But what if you wanted to put me in the wrong place? So I thought I was somewhere else, not where I actually am?
Ramsey - This is GPS spoofing. And the reason that this is possible is because the signals we use are completely open. There's textbooks that tell you exactly what the scene looks like, what the messages are, how to decode them, how to do the maths to work out where and when you are. And because it's completely open, there's no passwords, there's no encryption, there's no clever way of stopping people from pretending to be the satellites. Then it's just a matter of getting a radio and writing some software and broadcasting fake signals. And once you're broadcasting fake signals on the correct frequency, then you can fool a GPS receiver to believe it is somewhere it is not.
Chris - And is that going on? Is that what Russia are doing?
Ramsey - Yeah, it's not just in Russia, there are hotspots all over the world. There's a few websites that actually show maps of where the interference is at the moment. There's one called gpsjam.net. And I encourage your listeners to go and look at it because it's quite interesting. It's a patchwork quilt of interference all over the globe at the moment. It's both jamming and spoofing. And the reason it's going on in conflict zones is because this is the era of drone warfare. And a huge amount of the fighting that's going on is being done with either remote control or autonomous drones. GPS is absolutely critical to their operation.
Both sides are using electromagnetic warfare in the form of GPS jamming and spoofing to try to disrupt the use of drones. But the signals are so loud and so strong, they are interacting with civil aviation and maritime.
Chris - And what impact is that having?
Ramsey - So GPS jamming is less of a problem than spoofing by far. The pilots in an aircraft, let's say, can see on their GPS display that there's just no numbers anymore, no longer latitude, and they can use fallback systems, secondary ways of navigating. There's a few different technologies on the aircraft.
Spoofing is a big problem, though, for civil aviation in particular, for two reasons. One is that the pilot has to recognise that the GPS receiver is now lying to them. And so instead of the data just not being there, they have to be able to actually recognise that parts of the aircraft are disagreeing about where they're going and where they are and where they're going.
But the much bigger problem is that the GPS receiver on something like an aircraft is actually hooked up to loads of other parts of the aircraft. And some parts are using the position and some parts are using the time information. And once the GPS receiver is lying to other parts of the aircraft, then it can cause other parts of the aircraft to actually stop functioning.
And we've seen things like the collision avoidance system, the terrain warning system, the texting system that communicates with the ground. Even the weather radar can turn off when GPS is spoofed.
Chris - We've got actual evidence this is happening to civilian aircraft.
Ramsey - Yeah, quite a lot of it. There was a report written called the Ops Group Report last September, which detailed this data we collected from over a thousand pilots of their anecdotal information. And we collected together lots of physical evidence from maintenance logs and even just smartphone videos in cockpits. If you go on TikTok and go and look with a search term like GPS spoofing, Airbus Boeing, you'll see videos of what's going on inside the cockpits that the pilots have recorded themselves.
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