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Mobile crews in May in Prypyat, Ukraine. Credit: courtesy of the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Ukraine
After the wonderful counteroffensive of Ukraine, which recaptured huge swathes of the northeast of the country from Russian forces, groups of local technicians and engineers quietly arrived. Wearing bulletproof vests and helmets amid ongoing shelling, escorted among Ukrainian troops to avoid landmines, those personnel wait a bit to see the last of the retreating Russian infantrymen before beginning repairing broken base stations and fiber-optic cables that have left many cities and towns without news of their families and the outside world.
These arduous efforts to repair web and cellular connectivity underscore the urgency with which Ukrainian officials view the disruption of communication in areas occupied in the past. “The first thing the Russians do when they occupy those territories is cut off the networks,” Stas Prybytko, head of cellular broadband advancement at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, told TIME. “So, the other people who live there don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine, they can’t call their families to describe the situation, they don’t know if their loved ones are alive or not.
Ukraine’s web war shows how both sides see online access as a must-have weapon in a twenty-first-century war. The constant stream of videos and images from Ukraine was an indispensable component of the war effort, making the world a prominent position for invasion. Russia’s moves to cut off access to the web and cellular networks have left Ukrainians living under profession in a data vacuum that Russia has filled with its own propaganda. Russian troops in the occupied spaces emerged months after the crimes were committed.
Russia’s attempts to control data transmission have been considerable. More than 4,000 base stations belonging to Ukrainian telecommunications providers have been seized or destroyed by Russian foot soldiers since the invasion began, and more than 60,000 kilometers of fiber-optic lines used for the web have been destroyed. captured or damaged, according to Ukraine’s Special Communications Service. Russian forces also destroyed 18 transmitting antennas that provided radio and television signals. In parts of southern Ukraine, Russia appears to have redirected web traffic through its own providers, exposing it to the Kremlin. Vast formula of surveillance and censorship.
Read more: Inside the Ukrainian counterattack that the tide of war.
As a consequence, telecommunications staff have become “invisible heroes,” hailed by Ukrainian officials and citizens’ social media posts showing them running around the destruction, dressed in the familiar jackets and bright logos of major Ukrainian suppliers. Despite continuous blackouts and bombings, most of the country remained online. The liberated territories were restored at an impressive rate, according to outside analysts. As of Oct. 13, Ukrainian cellular operators had rebuilt 71 of their base stations in cities liberated from Russian profession since the counteroffensive began. last month, according to figures shared with TIME through Ukraine’s Digital Ministry. In total, Ukraine’s telecommunications staff have restored 1232 base stations in spaces occupied by Russia since March. Even before maintenance was complete, the government installed makeshift WiFi hotspots where citizens queued for 15 minutes each to overwhelm the fragile union, according to the Ures image posted in Telegram groups.
These paints have endangered the lives of technicians working for Ukraine’s cell phone and Internet providers. In the October 10 airstrikes, some of which targeted telecommunications buildings, 4 Ukrainian branch painters guilty of overseeing virtual infrastructure were killed in eastern Luhansk and Dnipro.
Ukrainian officials say the urgency of regaining control of Ukrainian networks is transparent to everyone involved in the effort. “These restorations are done thanks to the heroic efforts of those boys,” says Prybytko. Doing this work, however, we look forward to doing it, because there are many citizens in the liberated villages who want to connect urgently. “
After Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, their occupation of Ukrainian cities followed a pattern. After building the control, its first block was the offices of the local web service provider, Ukrainian officials told TIME. There, they took over telecommunications networks at gunpoint.
To avoid handing control of local telephone and Internet facilities to the Russians, the personnel of these service providers would destroy the devices as soon as it became clear that the domain was going to be occupied. Some of those personnel have been imprisoned by Russian forces, adding personnel from Ukrtelecom, one of the country’s main suppliers, according to the company.
“The Russians tried to attach their graphics and some gadgets to our networks, but they couldn’t reconfigure them because we absolutely destroyed the software,” Ukrtelecom CEO Yuriy Kurmaz said in July. “We will never collaborate. “
But many small suppliers have been forced to operate under Russian control. Starting in April and May, virtual watchmen who spoke to TIME detected that some vendors in the southern Kherson region were redirecting their customers’ traffic through a subsidiary of Rostelcom, a Russian state. owned company founded in Crimea, exposing them to Kremlin surveillance and censorship. As of June, about 700 Ukrainian service providers were controlled by Russian professional forces, according to Liliia Malon, commissioner of Ukraine’s virtual infrastructure and services regulator.
Read more: The guy on Ukraine’s virtual front.
It’s a component of a family playbook, says Doug Madory, director of analytics at Kentik, a company that oversees network functionality. Russia followed suit when it annexed Crimea in 2014, laying a submarine cable across the Kerch Strait that connected the peninsula to Russia and allowed it to bypass Ukrainian telecommunications companies.
The good fortune of the Russian operation is measurable. Since the invasion began last February, the number of users connecting to the web in Ukraine has dropped by at least 16% nationwide, according to figures shared with TIME through London-based industry research organization Top10VPN. The occupied regions of Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk saw a relief in available IP addresses of 81%, 58% and 56%, respectively, according to the organization’s analysis, and there were at least 276 web outages in Ukraine for a total of 19,000 hours.
The damage could have been greater without Ukraine’s complex telecommunications infrastructure, which relies on a network of lots of separate service and cellular providers, says virtual rights researcher Samuel Woodhams.
“The kind of decentralized nature was also an advantage, because it meant that Russian forces couldn’t enter a workplace and destroy an entire area,” Woodhams says. “There were a lot of those workplaces and the actual apparatus was geographically separated. “this has contributed in part to Ukraine’s resilience, “clearly also means you have to do it bit by bit” to get them back online one by one, he adds.
This colossal task falls largely to Prythroughtko, the 33-year-old head of Ukraine’s cell progression department. When he spoke to TIME from Kyiv on September 28, he was dealing with engineers who had been under artillery fire seeking to repair service in a newly reclaimed domain and resistance from citizens from some other region who opposed the installation of a cell tower on the roof of a hotel. The latter was due to festering conspiracies causing health problems, Prythroughtko says, which were exacerbated through wa’s trauma.
“We still have this challenge and we face it at least once a week,” he told TIME with a tired smile. “A lot of people still think it can harm them. “
It was intended to be a big year for Prybytko’s 11-person team within Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital, which planned to launch an ambitious effort to transfer to 5G technology. Instead, they spend their days looking to navigate a patchwork of fundamental patches to re-establish any viable connection with certain parts of the country.
His team met with other government officials in a new task force created to coordinate those efforts with local government and cell phone providers. He rushed to conduct security assessments, provide escorts to the army in spaces formerly occupied by Russian troops, and place the mandatory apparatus in local warehouses.
The biggest challenge is the physical protection of fixed crews. In addition to the risk of bombing, “mining base stations is a big problem,” Prybytko says, because the Russians used landmines “to prevent faster recovery of service. “
Read more: How Ukraine uses the virtuality of war crimes in crowdsourcing.
In those cases, teams will have to wait for the Ukrainian state’s emergency facilities to clear the domain before they can access it. After assessing the damage and determining what equipment might be needed, they try to protect what they can in nearby warehouses. Many newly freed spaces have no electricity, forcing crews to run manual diesel turbines to do their jobs.
As the war continues, Ukrainian officials and web service providers say they have already won on the virtual front. Competing operators have worked together to provide roaming policies to Ukrainian users, who can transfer between networks if their providers’ policy goes down. They collaborated to fix the bombed base stations of others. Since the war began, Ukrainian cellular operator Lifecell has made more than 55,000 equipment visits to repair equipment, the company told TIME, and 92 percent of its networks are now operational. Ukrtelecom has 87% of its regional network offices back online.
“We actually have brave technical groups and cellular operators,” Prybytsko says. “Despite the danger to their lives, they will continue to go to towns and villages in war zones. . . Because they know the importance of what a lot of other people think. “As insignificant before: make a phone call, read the news. This is not a scenario that anyone can believe in the twenty-first century.