The role of multinational MNOs, mostly European, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent humanitarian crisis, has largely been confined to oiling the wheels of communication and eliminating charges on voice or data calls to and from the country.
For those telcos with operations or collaborations in Russia, there are more significant impacts, with Vodafone quick to end its 14-year partnership with Russian operator MTS after the initial invasion. This came just six weeks after Vodafone had extended that partnership to embrace procurement, marketing and network operations. MTS, just over 50%-owned by the vast Russian industrial conglomerate Sistema, is the country’s largest MNO with 86m subscribers.
For Deutsche Telekom the implications are far more profound, since it has deep roots in Russia with several thousand staff there and a major software engineering in St. Petersburg, where Open RAN software is developed, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) and self-service apps. CEO Tim Höttges was quick to express outrage and confirm that DT had set up a crisis unit to determine potential actions, including sanctions, with one option under consideration being to relocate staff to hubs in Germany and elsewhere, helping out with business visas for non-German employees as necessary. But any definitive move is yet to be confirmed.
Germany as a whole has conducted a remarkable change of strategy regarding its relationship with Russia, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG or German Research Foundation) announced on March 2 that it was suspending all its funded research projects between academics from Germany and Russia with immediate effect, the first such body in Europe to do so. However, in the same breath, the DFG made clear that it would support not just Ukrainian scientists in exile, but also Russian scientists if they effectively defected before any martial law was declared.
The implications were most profound of all, perhaps, for the tech giants, given their role as conduits for communication and propaganda as guardians of social media outlets. Broadcasters faced some of the same dilemmas, but for them the issues revolved around promulgation of Russian TV channels, with some nervous at first of shutting out foreign sources decried as ‘fake news’. In the event though, the gravity of the situation persuaded most to react as on a war footing by shutting down slots for Russian channels, as Sky did in the UK with the RT channel.
It is a different story for the social media giants because of their effective role as publishers as well as arbiters of truth, caught between demands for free speech and for censorship by governments, regulators and vested interests. In the case of Russia, the big sites had, on the whole, held out against state-sponsored censorship and as a result have been in receipt of sanctions there themselves, with full blocking of access for Facebook and Twitter after the Ukraine invasion. Yet in some markets such as Vietnam, these sites have complied with government-enforced censorship, blocking access to content deemed unacceptable themselves. This role in Vietnam’s ‘bamboo firewall’ has been well-documented.
In the current situation, controversy has centered more around censoring of content deemed offensive outside Russia. There is little dispute over material glorifying genocide and crimes against humanity, but the sites face more difficult decisions over more nuanced content that still might offend many people who are naturally incensed by Russia’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians in some of the actions.
There is also the cyberwarfare dimension, where mobile networks are not just conduits of attack but also targets and sources of critical information. This was brought home in June 2019 in a report by Boston-based cybersecurity technology firm Cybereason finding that a Chinese group had hacked 10 MNOs over a two-year campaign, first stealing credentials that allowed access and then eventually gaining domain control rights that allowed them then to obtain login cvrede4ntials and call records. Finally, they were able to follow the movements of individuals by tracking their phones. Such techniques have been applied on both sides during the current war in Ukraine.
It is true that on the surface it has appeared that cyberwarfare has played a smaller role than had been expected in the Ukraine war, with Russia resorting to missiles and bombs to attack infrastructure, rather than viruses, worms, malware and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. Yet while NATO has not become involved in conventional warfare, some of its countries have been very active in cyberspace.
Indeed, one reason the cyber dimension has been less prominent is because Russia has effectively been at war in cyberspace with the west and Ukraine for some years, so effective defenses have accumulated. Ukraine first experienced a major cyberattack in December 2015, when its power grid was hacked, resulting in power outages for about 230,000 consumers, lasting up to six hours. This was followed by an increase in ransomware attacks in the Ukraine and elsewhere, often traced to groups in Russia, driving improvements in capabilities, including defenses in depth that mitigate the impact of hacks that are initially successful.
For telcos, the most public responses so far have been in facilitating communications with and among people in Ukraine. Few European operators waited until receiving an open letter on March 2 from BICS, the provider of wholesale carrier services, to remove all charges and call costs from Ukrainian MNOs. The point here was that Ukraine, not being within the EU, was subject to additional call routing charges and BICs’ argument was that these were entirely within the gift of MNOs to impose or annul.
Most MNOs had already acted, with the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) having the previous day published its rapid internal survey of European telecom operator members, finding that many already offered free international calls to Ukraine without roaming charges, as well as free distribution of SIM cards to refugees arriving in neighboring countries, and free WiFi in refugee camps, among other steps.
Those with operations in multiple European countries were best placed to act, with Orange for example introducing measures across its whole footprint, including free calls and texts to and from Ukraine.
There were clearly many further actions that could be taken at time of writing, as was clear from another open letter issued on March 9, this time from a group of writers and cultural figures, outlining 10 steps designed to end the war, including a call for major social networks to block and ban all accounts enabling the Russian government, and its affiliates, proxies and lobbyists to spread their propaganda. The letter also called on Microsoft specifically to block all access to its services and systems in Russia, while western cloud operations were exhorted, until further notice, to be made inaccessible in the country.