Why has Russia held back from massive cyber attacks?

Russia has so far held back from launching a full-scale cyber war campaign to cripple Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, against all pre-invasion predictions by western intelligence and defence officials. Despite numerous “harassment” cyber attacks by Russia, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his military commanders have still been able to communicate effectively and rouse the population to take up arms against the Russian troops. The Russian GRU military intelligence agency has the capability to bring down Ukraine’s power grid, telecommunications network and transport systems. GRU’s cyber warfare specialists could turn the lights out throughout the country and shut down the internet system. But it hasn’t happened. The half-measure cyber attacks and the lack of a full-frontal ballistic-missile, artillery and aerial bombing onslaught against Kyiv and other cities appear to be a deliberate move by Moscow to avoid total destruction of a country which President Putin wants to occupy and control as part of his dream of a revived Russian empire. As the US found in Iraq, destroying power stations, airfields, the electricity grid and other key infrastructure facilities then cost billions of dollars to repair and rebuild when Saddam Hussein had been toppled. “We imagined this orchestrated unleashing of violence in cyberspace, this ballet of attacks striking Ukraine in waves, and instead of that we have a brawl. And not even a very consequential brawl, just yet,” Jason Healey, a former White House director of cyber infrastructure protection, told The Washington Post. James Lewis, a cyber expert at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told The Times that if it had wanted, Moscow could have “made all bank accounts inaccessible to the Ukrainian people”. “They could disrupt every system and all government services. The GRU is the best in the world in cyber warfare,” he said. As a result of holding back, the Kremlin has lost the first stages of the information/propaganda war. The Ukrainian president has broadcast to the nation every day since the invasion began, and audio clips that have gone viral, such as the one of Ukrainian soldiers telling a Russian warship to “go f... yourself” have symbolised the nation’s fight-back against the invaders. Another possible reason for Moscow’s hesitation to cripple Ukraine’s infrastructure is that some Russian troops seem to be using smart phones which depend on the internet rather than advanced military radio communications, suggesting they might be facing technical difficulties. If the Russian invasion plan becomes bogged down, and Zelensky still manages to stir his citizens to battle, few experts doubt that Moscow could launch the type of cyber war the West had been expecting before the troops and tanks crossed the border. Meanwhile Ukraine has successfully mounted its own counter-cyber campaign, using enthusiastic hackers to breach computer systems in Russia to leave messages calling on Russia to stop the war. Last week NBC reported that President Biden had been presented with options for launching cyber attacks on Russia. However, such a move would be viewed in Moscow as an act of war, and White House officials downplayed the report.