That’s an obvious suspect. Recall the widespread and at times debilitating attacks on official Georgian websites during the 2008 Russia-Georgia War. Or the crippling cyber assault against Estonian government sites in 2007, when Tallinn was at loggerheads with Moscow over the relocation of a Soviet-era monument.
Those attacks were so sophisticated and all-encompassing that they went down in history; they now serve as case studies in cyber security and military planning for many Western countries.
Russia’s proxies don’t include just gun-toting separatists in eastern Ukraine; scores of them sit behind computer screens, ready to menace. They have drastically upped their game with sophisticated malware. And this seems to be a response to the lower-tech knocking out of Ukrainian electricity to Russian-occupied Crimea, tacitly accepted by Ukraine’s authorities.
The evidence and incidents show that Ukraine must be prepared to defend itself in cyberspace as well as the eastern Ukraine battlefield.
