April 11, 2024 (EIRNS)—Russian Foreign Ministry Press Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reported in her April 10 briefing that the level of cyberattacks on Russian critical infrastructure—the government’s medical, energy, transportation facilities, as well as media—has reached “unprecedented levels.” Those attacks are largely run out of Ukraine, but Russian specialists “have established that foreign intelligence services are behind many major attacks,” she charged, specifying “NATO’s military-political leadership,” and citing a network of cyber warfare centers controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency that Russia has identified along Russia’s borders.
“In order to prepare and carry out cyberoperations, the U.S. and their allies use a network of special centers controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency and located along the Russian borders (in particular, in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and Romania; with Georgia and Moldova in the future). These are cyber laboratories created for tactical and technical support of groups from the bloc’s cyber teams or special operations forces,” she stated. “They are also used to monitor the cyberspace and collect intelligence data, and work out scenarios of how to strike Russian critical information infrastructure facilities using information and communication technologies.”
As for Ukraine, “it is no secret” that it has become a center for anti-Russian cyberattacks. Zakharova pointed to the so-called “IT Army” of Ukrainian hackers, backed by the Kiev regime and its Western patrons, whose cyberattacks against Russia—some real, some invented, she noted—are publicly and proudly talked up by Ukrainian authorities. The IT Army, “controlled by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and supervised by NATO member states, is in fact a conglomerate of criminals, specializing primarily in plain stealing of assets,” she added.
Are some in Washington getting nervous about Russia’s clear, and repeated statements that NATO—and the U.S.—are at war with Russia, directing terrorist attacks, cyberattacks, strikes on Russian oil and other installations, etc.? The same day Zakharova made her briefing remarks, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander provoked a rage fit by Washington’s rabid war crowd (e.g., neocon centers such as the Hudson Institute and Jamestown Foundation), because she insisted in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that the Biden administration has conveyed its “concerns” to Ukraine over its attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, since those are “civilian targets.”
