There is an invisible layer to the war in Ukraine.
You can't see it or touch it, but it's
vital to every aspect of decision making in warfare.
This invisible layer is the radio noise.
And hidden in the radio noise are signals.
We're going to look at three aspects of radio
in Ukraine, the interception of communications
between Russian soldiers--
--how broadcasters are using radio
to combat censorship online, and the mysterious silence
of a number station known as the Russian Lady.
Why would a 21st century Russian army
send so many unencrypted radio signals
on the battlefields of Ukraine?
And how can we confirm their legitimacy?
This, as far as we can tell, is a recording
of a Russian soldier in Ukraine, but the people who captured it
were far away and weren't using radio equipment directly.
A software-defined radio is a computer with a radio receiver
and an antenna attached.
It can pick up radio transmissions
across a wide range of frequencies at the same time.
The cheapest ones are about 30 pounds.
So you can watch a waterfall of radio signals
from across the spectrum and spot
one you're interested in, then choose exactly how you want
to decode the signal just with the click of a button,
no extra equipment required.
Connect it to the internet and, suddenly,
100s of people from around the world
can stream any radio signal your antenna can pick up.
And many people are very interested in monitoring them.
Couple those web servers with a chat room app like Discord,
and you can create an open-source intelligence
team of volunteers, which is what Boyan Malashev did.
My name is Boyan Malashev.
Well, Ukrainian Radio Watchers is a really brilliant community
that it's made by a lot of people
who give a lot of their time and their efforts
in trying to listen the Russian communications.
When the war could get so intensive,
many people actually started to join.
We were shared in platforms like Reddit and Twitter,
so many people started to understand
about us, started to join because most of them
wanted to get translations about what is happening.
And we had pretty active translators doing this.
I think in the server we have 100 translators.
Sometimes, I listen, and sometimes I record.
But the main thing I do in the server
and how I help the server is by developing the Discord server
and making the website.
The recordings and the main function of the community,
it's made by the people who are in it.
I do not know anything about radios and communications,
but it's important because we are dealing with war crimes;
we are dealing with deaths; we are
dealing with trying to help people who
are actually in war right now.
We heard how commanders and officers are arranging
airstrikes with locations.
We are trying to find the call signs of them.
The question of whether we can trust the recordings
is a bit of an open one.
This is obviously still a conflict, and what we do know
is that Ukrainians themselves have been exceptionally good
in terms of their information warfare,
in terms of their communications about how successful they've
been versus the Russians.
That said, there, I think, is very little doubt
that some of these communications are genuine.
Some of the content would be exceptionally hard to fake.
And when you put together all of the other material
that we've seen, for example, pictures
on social media of captured Russian troops,
pictures of the radio equipment they were using, all of that
together paints a picture that would be very hard to fake.
When you hear the conversations, you can feel it first,
and then you have-- we have the experts who can check
if this could be manipulated or not.
And as we're monitoring a whole day of conversations,
we can know that what is happening,
it's not fake because sometimes something is happening
and-- while they're arranging attack.
And in the next seconds, attack actually happens.
We could see that in the news.
We could see that the airstrikes actually happened.
So yes, we have some evidence that the conversations
we monitored are authenticated.
Both sides are fighting quite an aggressive information
campaign, so you do have to be wary of that within analysis.
Do the things that we're hearing in these transmissions marry up
with what we're seeing on the ground?
Do they compare well with what other sources are reporting?
So if we have seen that there are Russian soldiers carrying
unencrypted radios or notionally unencrypted radios, and now
we are hearing unencrypted transmissions
that have been intercepted, that all points
towards that information being something
that we can use to form an assessment
and begin to construct analysis.
The image of this pretty invincible, very tough
Russian war machine has taken a huge knock.
I mean, even Western intelligence analysts
expected Russia to win pretty easily.
They thought that Russia had overwhelming military might,
far superior technology, and battlefield experience
in places like Syria and, before that, in wars in Georgia,
and so on.
As it turns out, the Russian military effort
has been much more chaotic than anybody anticipated.
And I think that is a big blow to the image
of the Russian military and indeed to the image of Russia
that Putin has so carefully sculpted because I think
a lot of what Putin is trying to do
is to say, take us seriously as a great power.
He couldn't really do that on an economic level,
but Russia could always point to its enormous military might.
And now, even that looks slightly less credible
than it did before this conflict.
There is another group listening to Russian troops in Ukraine.
They call themselves ShadowBreak and were originally
a VC-funded security company focused
on mapping and other intelligence services.
Samuel Cardillo is their founder and head of technology.
We're ShadowBreak.
It's a company created, like, three years ago, founded by VC.
We're mainly a geospatial intelligence company.
Intelligence is our core business.
The thing here is that everything
we're doing concerning Ukraine has being totally free.
The company has unlocked $500,000 of personal money
to help Ukraine.
We started a logistic supply run and all the things
to serve people within Ukraine, and we're
trying to help because I think it's our duty.
In terms of military backgrounds,
well, I've been serving in the army for three
years in the intelligence--
in the Israeli Army.
I've been doing intelligence for a very long time.
I have a family background in intelligence.
There's been a shift in the last few years,
certainly since the Syrian civil war,
towards a real prominence of open-source intelligence,
open-source reporting.
And of course, the great example of this
is Bellingcat, which began reporting on munitions that
were being photographed by Syrians in the very early
stages of the Syrian conflict.
Ever since then, we've seen this proliferation
of open-source intelligence outfits, websites
piecing together information about conflicts
and making it public sometimes for commercial gain,
sometimes simply because it's viewed
as a sort of public good.
And a lot of these organisations are funded by donations,
by charities by government grants that kind of thing.
There is an open question about all of this, this new world,
this frontier, about where the money does always come from
and then whose interests might lie behind some of these
organisations.
Russia, in particular, has repeatedly and baselessly,
I should add, slandered organisations like Bellingcat
and accused them of being stooges for Western
intelligence agencies.
Ultimately, a lot of these organisations you have to judge
on the content that they are putting out there and the stuff
that they are making available.
And I guess that the fundamental factor
is that this is publicly available information.
It is open-source intelligence.
And the better of these organisations make clear what
their workings are.
They show why they have arrived at certain assumptions,
and then, sort of in a kind of Wikipedia format,
invite others out there to challenge their conclusions.
The fact that we're kind of expanding within the signal
intelligence is a little bit weird.
We had to kind of understand a lot of new things and recruit
translators, and it's completely new for the company.
Right now, most of the people are
working with us are volunteers.
We have few people who are on full-time salary
but very few at this moment for this operation.
There's a big question about where the aerials
and where the SDR systems themselves
are located because the nearer they are to the battlefield,
the clearer the signals they can intercept.
So there is public web SDR which are located outside of Ukraine.
And then, we have secured logistical supply
at this point.
And we're doing things to have web SDR within Ukraine which
gives us access to UHF frequencies, which
let us listen as well to radio handles,
which are shorter waves basically, like nearer troops.
Both ShadowBreak and Ukrainian Radio Watchers
say that there have been cyber attacks against many
of the servers they use for listening.
I don't know who is behind that, but we've
seen clearly cyber attacks against some web SDR.
They get hacked and stuff like that.
So we could assume it's like either trolls or people who
don't want all the people to listen to those frequencies.
So we don't know.
But yeah, we made our own, and we're still
working on making our own kind of private web SDR
things, which is also part of the money we've unlocked.
I think many of them are under DDoS attack, which
is attacking of hackers so they can stop their services.
Maybe some of them were bombed and--
for example, the antenna is broken,
or the whole equipment is dead.
The number of the web SDRs in Russia and Ukraine are going
down, which is a big problem for us because without the web SDRs
we cannot do anything.
Boyan also says he's planning to go into Ukraine in order
to set up an SDR.
We are thinking to do our own web SDR.
I got some connections in my country with people who are
actually travelling to Ukraine to bring supplies.
So we can-- some day in the next two weeks,
we are setting up a web based here in Bulgaria,
and we are setting up SDR in Ukraine.
Setting up a system like this was risky even
before the current invasion.
Last year, Stanislav Stetsenko, a resident of Crimea,
was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service
under suspicion of being a Ukrainian informant
and was facing up to 25 years in prison if found guilty.
So we know how people are tuning into these transmissions,
but it still leaves the question, if they know
they can be intercepted, why are the Russians
using unencrypted radios in a war zone?
The amount of communications we're hearing in clear
seems to indicate that Russian military may
have a problem with crypto and key distribution
as secure communications require some form of encryption.
And how that encryption typically
works is a series of keys are provided to anybody
on the network, and the traffic can only
be encrypted or decrypted using those keys.
And that requires a level of management in a military
to ensure the keys change daily, for instance--
they may change hourly--
and that they're distributed to everybody who needs them.
And then, everybody who is using those keys
has the correct encryption and decryption equipment
attached to their radios or embedded
in their radios and software.
That indicates that the modernization that the Russian
ministry of defence has been parading and promoting has
potentially been less successful than they were actually making
out.
It indicates a potential vulnerability in the way
that the Russians are actually conducting war.
Some of the things that we've identified
are the Russians using civilian radios that you can buy on--
I mean, you can buy them on eBay.
They're not that hard to find.
They're not that expensive.
These would use sections of the electromagnetic spectrum that
are open access to everybody.
We've spent a large portion of our professional lives
trying to understand what is happening
within the Russian military, particularly
in light of the reforms that were launch 10 years ago,
the "new look" Russian military as it was termed.
I think our analysis of the data herein
has always been the Russians have kind of got
their mojo if you like and after years of malaise
had been upgrading their military, taking the steps they
need to make this military and an army that
is fit for the kind of wars it's going to be fighting
in the 21st century.
And when suddenly you see that that military is
doing something as basic as transmitting
clear traffic on HF, I think that brings
into a wider question.
It's a bit like, well, if they're not
doing that correctly, well, what else is going wrong?
And this, I think, provides other clues
into perhaps the health of the Russian army,
writ large, in this conflict so far.
Is Putin aware of what's happening on the ground?
One suspects that his intelligence is probably
pretty limited.
He has a very tight circle of advisors,
and he is an autocrat.
He's a fairly scary guy.
And so the extent to which people
will want to bring him unwelcome messages
that the war is not going that well may be limited
because the commanding officers of the armed forces
may feel that that reflects badly on him.
And that could well be one of Russia's problems
as they attempt to adapt to what's going on.
In military communications, there's an awful lot of traffic
that needs to be carried.
If you think of it in terms of your internet at home,
your internet is carrying a lot of data, full-motion video.
It can carry voice, things like that.
And the military needs its radio communications
to do all of those things but spread out over a wide area.
So typically, they would have--
for a certain size formation, they
would have what we'd call a trunk
network, which is designed to carry most of that information.
Think of it as like the trunk of a tree, and then
you kind of have the branches going off it
into tactical communications and things like that.
That's what we would expect to see because that provides
the frontline soldier in his or her tank with the ability
to reach back to their officers, and their officer's officers,
and their officer's officer's officers all the way up
to Moscow if needs be.
Most of those communications would be encrypted, but instead
what we're seeing is mounting evidence
that these networks haven't been put in place.
They haven't been built.
So users on Discord servers like Ukrainian Radio Watchers
and ShadowBreak are identifying unusual signals,
then they tell other users which frequencies to listen on,
work out how the signals should be decoded.
They record them.
They translate them and timestamp the audio
so that they can be published to a wider audience.
There's another reason why so many Russian users
are using Discord.
Some of the Russians also care to get the news.
What is the opinion about the other people for them?
What is happening about Russia in the other countries' news?
Discord isn't blocked in Russia unlike Instagram, Facebook,
and the BBC website.
To circumvent blocks like these, the BBC
has resuscitated an old radio format that, up until recently,
it had been rapidly shutting down around the world.
Shortwave.
It's certainly the case that BBC's shortwave radio, which
incidentally is where I started my career during the Cold War,
was a big player back in those eras.
But that was the pre-internet era.
If they're restarting these services now,
it could reflect a couple of things.
One could be a slight sort of Cold War instinct
that this was something that was terribly
important in the last great struggle with Moscow.
But also, that actually the Russians are really
tightening control of some of new media,
that, for example, messaging apps, or YouTube,
or Facebook, things that had a lot of impact in Russia
may now be much more restricted.
So you may have to go back to some of the old, tried, tested,
and we might have thought rather historic means
of communication-- may regain a new relevance.
This all links back to this Russian perception
of Western information warfare, and the perception
that the West is able to control the narrative
and influence a population externally.
So by the BBC extending its shortwave radio,
it's possible that some Russian citizens perhaps
will still be able to hear what's going on in the West.
You know, everything old is new again.
Some of the oldest, most mysterious radio signals
date back to World War I, and these kinds of signals
are still transmitting now.
So number stations are one of the great mysteries
of the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
They've been around for a long time.
They're very mysterious, almost spooky things to listen to.
What you typically get with a numbers station is you get
a series of digits that are repeated in an automated voice,
not unlike the kind of telephone automation you hear when
you're calling a call centre or something like that.
And it will be a series of seemingly random numbers,
and nobody really knows what they're for.
But there's several number stations
all over the world transmitting out of all kinds of places.
And one theory is that they are a means of communicating
covertly with people, perhaps spies for instance, deployed
beyond the borders of a particular country.
And the theory as to how it would work
is that the series of numbers--
they're usually in sequences of five different numbers.
Each refer to a particular thing.
There are, of course, Discord servers dedicated
to following number stations.
One number station in particular began
acting strangely just as the war in Ukraine broke out.
SO6s, known as the Russian Lady, usually transmits null messages
during the last few days of every month.
Usually, it sends out numbers according
to a fixed format, short messages of less than 10 groups
of five digits at a time.
Suddenly, just before it went off air,
it sent out a message longer than 192 unpaired groups,
which is very unusual.
It has been silent ever since.
Well, number stations are, in many senses,
is a hang up from the Cold War.
But then again, arguably this entire conflict is a hang up
from the Cold War, so it's not necessarily
so easy to write them off as totally insignificant.
But ultimately, there are various ways
that intelligence agencies communicate with many
of their deep cover operatives.
Number stations historically were a method
used by the KGB in the Cold War and, of course,
by other powers.
And on some level, they continue to presumably
have utility probably as a backup means of communication.
Is this a hang up from the Cold War?
Look, there are elements of it in the sense
that I think Putin is attempting to reverse some of the losses
that he felt that the Soviet Union, now Russia,
experienced after the end of the cold war,
in particular, territorial losses and losses
of a sphere of influence.
So I suppose you could see it as a kind of effort
to reverse some of the losses that Moscow
felt it experienced after 1989.
And Putin, after all, has referred
to the collapse of the Soviet Union
as one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes
of the 20th century.
And I feel he feels that he's trying to correct
some of those wrongs.
There's a famous quote by Field Marshal Montgomery
made during the second World War about air power--
"If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war,
and lose it quickly."
Does this now apply to air waves, radio signals as well?
I think that's still the case for the air power,
but I think it's now also the case
for the electromagnetic spectrum.
I think we're dealing with a domain we cannot see.
We cannot sense the electromagnetic spectrum
as humans.
We have no means of being able to do that.
But just because we can't sense it,
it doesn't diminish its importance.
Control of the electromagnetic spectrum
may not lead to victory or defeat in its own right,
but it will certainly be a significant contribution
to whichever side prevails in this conflict.