Jim Geraghty of National Review Online highlights Russia’s latest misdeeds in eastern Europe.
The good news is that the large-scale Russian cyberattack against Poland’s energy infrastructure at the end of last year was stopped by firewalls and other cyber defenses.
The bad news, as Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki tells me, is that the threat from that attack was “very, very serious” — he put a lot of emphasis on that second “very” — and had it succeeded, it would have knocked out electricity and heat for large portions of Poland during the middle of winter for God knows how long.
According to the after-action report from Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, the attack was directed at “more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a private company from the manufacturing sector, and a large, combined heat and power plant supplying heat to almost half a million customers in Poland.” The report continued:
“All of the attacks were purely destructive in nature — by analogy to the physical world, they can be compared to deliberate acts of arson.” …
… The other bad wrinkle to this is that I suspect that this is the first you’ve heard of this attempted large-scale cyberattack. “Russia tries to take down Poland’s power grid and fails” is not nearly as big news internationally as “Russia tries to take down Poland’s power grid and succeeds.” But the fact that Russia didn’t succeed means that the rest of the world barely noticed their attack on Poland’s energy infrastructure. And global inattention isn’t much of a form of deterrence.
Poland and the rest of NATO are not in a declared war against Russia, but that doesn’t mean they’re really at peace with Russia, either. …
… [I]f Russia continues to pursue its “gray zone” tactics against the countries on NATO’s eastern flank without significant retaliatory consequences, it’s just a matter of time before a whole bunch of innocent civilians get killed.
This seems like a less-than-ideal time for the U.S. to send a signal of nonsupport to Poland, doesn’t it?
