CYBER CAPABILITIES AND NATIONAL POWER: A Net Assessment 103
9. Russia
Russia’s cyber strategy is dictated by its confronta-
tion with the West, in which it sees cyber operations
as an essential component of a wider information
war. Its cyber governance is centralised, hierarchi-
cal and under the president’s personal control. The
country is highly dependent on foreign ICT corpo-
rations and has a less impressive digital economy
than, for example, the United Kingdom or France.
It is seeking to redress key weaknesses in its cyber
security through government regulation and the
creation of a sovereign internet, and by encouraging
the development of an indigenous digital industry.
Given its economic circumstances, these ambitions
may prove unrealistic. For two decades Russia has
led, with some successes, diplomatic eorts to cur-
tail what it sees as the dominance of cyberspace by
the West, and particularly the United States. It has
credible oensive cyber capabilities and has used
them extensively as part of a much broader strat-
egy aimed at disrupting the policies and politics of
perceived adversaries, especially the US. It has run
extensive cyber-intelligence operations, some of
which reveal increasing levels of technical sophisti-
cation. However, Russia appears not to have given
priority to developing the top-end surgical cyber
capabilities needed for high-intensity warfare.
Overall, Russia is a second-tier cyber power. To join
the US in the rst tier it would need to substantially
improve its cyber security, increase its share of the
global digital market and probably make further
progress in developing the most sophisticated oen-
sive military cyber tools.
Strategy and doctrine
Governance, command and control
Core cyber-intelligence capability
Cyber empowerment and dependence
Cyber security and resilience
Global leadership in cyberspace aairs
Oensive cyber capability
List of acronyms
FSB Federal Security Service
FSTEK Federal Service for Technical and Export Control
GRU Main Intelligence Directorate
ICT information and communications technology
KGB Committee of State Security
SORM operational investigative-measures system
SVR External Intelligence Service
Strategy and doctrine
Russian strategy and doctrine see cyber security and cyber
operations as components of an information confronta-
tion with the West. Russian sources refer more often to
‘information space’ than to ‘cyberspace’ and are doctri-
nally hardwired to integrate technical cyber operations
with other means of achieving information superiority
(for example by manipulating social media). In the last ten
years Russia has sought to use such information capabili-
ties to achieve strategic eect against its adversaries, a pol-
icy articulated to some extent in the concept of a ‘grey zone’
between peace and war mentioned in a magazine article
by the Chief of the General Sta (CGS), Valery Gerasimov,
in 2013.
1
There was evidence of these approaches in the
Russian information operations against Estonia (2007),
Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014–15), each of which had
a component that Western observers described as ‘cyber
aacks’. But perhaps the most notorious example was the
Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation against the Democratic
National Commiee during the presidential-election cam-
paign in the United States in 2016.
