Until now, mobile phones and social networks are a means of propaganda, used by the Ukrainian intelligence services to gather operational information that explains the numerous ambushes in which the Russian army has fallen.
Since the withdrawal of the Russian army from Kyiv and its suburbs to focus on the conquest of the Ukrainian Donbass region, the testimonies coming from many regions in Ukraine have been frequent that the invading Russian forces, as soon as they reach any village, remove the residents’ phones and often break them, after they became obsessed with the Russian soldier, because of the failures they caused him .
With that introduction, the French website Mediapart opened a report by Mathieu Sok, in which he said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine provided many lessons for strategists and military researchers regarding how armies operate in a social media environment, after the Russians for a long time were considered to have experience in this. The issue is that they put what is known as the theory of "hybrid warfare".
The writer cited the story of a Ukrainian woodcutter, his brother and 3 other young men from the village of Termakhivka, north of Kyiv, who were tied and blindfolded by the Russian army in a pit for 13 days, accusing them of giving their positions to the Ukrainians via mobile phones, as they told the French website.
The phone is on the line
The researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, Julian Nossetti, had presented a report in this context in 2015 entitled "Information War: The Russian Network in the Conflict in Ukraine", in which he saw that work on social networks would serve as a reinforcement of the political discourse accompanying military action, but he did not imagine Never to what extent can mobile phones affect the field of operations itself, by providing operational intelligence in large quantities, as the author sees.
The writer mentioned that the soldiers deployed in the area of operations are at the forefront of informational sensors for what they constitute the eyes and ears on the battlefield, but American researchers warned in an article in the Small Wars Journal that the entry of the laptop, cellular networks, and the Internet on the line made the Precise and precious documents could be recorded, and allowed Ukrainian soldiers to report on the spot "while still scattered without ever impeding access to them".
In his blog, La Voie de l'épée, retired French colonel and military historian Michel Goya noted that the Ukrainian army is benefiting from "a quantity of tactical information" from "simple fighters equipped with smartphones and regional intelligence units equipped with small, low-cost drones". ".
Although the Russians, on the other hand, as the writer says, could theoretically benefit from this method, they do not have an important tributary to the Ukrainian intelligence services, which is the flow of information provided by the Ukrainian population.
Although the Ukrainian telecommunications networks were partially damaged by the war, nearly 90% of the networks remained operational, allowing ordinary citizens ample time to use their phones and various applications, led by the Russian-origin messaging application Telegram.
The Ukrainian government has reused its official COVID-19 Telegram channel, which it has been using for the past two years to share information about the pandemic, to provide around-the-clock updates on the war, and has renamed it UkraineNow, which has more than 3 million subscribers and broadcasts Warnings about Russian air strikes and places of shelters.
Citizen support
Through these networks, Ukrainians have reported details of Russian troop and armored vehicle movements to regional or national authorities. Information gathering is now relatively easy and troop movements are exposed, because the attacker cannot prevent residents from photographing him, says Damien van Pouvelde, director of the Scottish Center for War Studies and Conflict Archeology. at the University of Glasgow.
In this context, Mediapart indicated that the head of a paint company named Yuri - as he told him - "established a network of informants thanks to his company's clients who remained behind enemy lines, and kept providing him with the locations and movements of enemy forces in real time via Telegram."
Like Yuri, Oksana also helped gather information, telling Mediapart, "I was angry that I couldn't help my country, so I started writing down the locations of Russian troops stationed near the house on the GPS, noting the movements of the armored vehicles. be dangerous."
In an interview published on Tuesday in Le Monde newspaper, Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation, Michalo Fedorov, praised Diia, which collects identity documents for its user, explaining that it has 17 million subscribers, and "is now used for identification via an online service, which makes it possible to Geolocation of Russian forces.
On March 8, the Ukrainian intelligence services admitted that the information provided through Telegram enabled them to successfully attack Russian vehicles in the vicinity of Kyiv, and said in a tweet addressed to citizens, "Your messages about enemy movements via the official chat program bring a new victory every day."
Russia has been hampered by a lack of allied monitors on the ground, as the two American researchers wrote in the Small Wars Journal that “cell phones and social media have changed war, weakening the power of the most daring attack.” .
The writer cautioned that all this role assigned to mobile phones should be taken with a certain amount of reservation, because these devices are not the only responsible for the Russian defeats. His country has accurate, actionable and timely intelligence, and the Defense Department (Pentagon) spoke of a "pioneer exchange of information" with Ukraine.