Russia’s encrypted military phones aren’t working. So they’ve resorted to stealing phones from Ukrainians.
Russia’s communications systems are failing at higher-than-expected rates during the nearly monthlong war in Ukraine, U.S. and European officials and experts said, forcing invading troops in the field to rely on open systems that can be readily intercepted by Ukrainian forces.
U.S. officials and experts believe Russia did not prepare adequately for a grinding monthslong ground invasion of Ukraine, expecting to quickly topple Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, and did not properly prepare communications to extend the length of the country, Europe’s second-largest nation by landmass.
Ukrainian units have exploited Russia’s lack of communications to jam and interfere with tactical messages—in some cases even pinpointing the location of Russian general officers for snipers that have been trained by Western militaries over the past eight years.
“They just weren’t fully prepared for operations of this intensity for this long on so many different multiple lines of attack, and so we do see them having some command-and-control difficulties,” a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide a battlefield update, told reporters on Monday. “We’re seeing them use a lot more unclassified communications because their classified communications capability is … for one reason or another … not as strong as it should be.”
The senior U.S. defense official said Russia has also struggled to integrate air and ground forces and make real-time decisions on the battlefield. And Russia’s problems communicating among units have also been hampered by destructive bombing and shelling. Former U.S. officials and experts told Foreign Policy that Russia’s destructive campaign also took down 3G and 4G mobile communications towers necessary to operate encrypted smartphones near Kharkiv, Ukraine, forcing the invading troops to send out sensitive information in the open.
“They didn’t intend on destroying as much of the communications infrastructure as they have,” said Gavin Wilde, a nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities and an expert on Russia and information warfare who previously served as a director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus affairs on the U.S. National Security Council. “I think they’re probably loath to completely destroy so much critical infrastructure because their hope was that they could swoop in and have a more or less intact Ukraine.”
Russia’s communications problems have also been compounded by the lack of an overall field commander for the monthlong fight in Ukraine. On Monday, CNN reported that U.S. officials could not identify a Russian military official in charge of the hundreds of thousands of troops fighting in Ukraine, a force that includes Russian conscripts, Chechen units, and the paramilitary Wagner Group that is mostly fighting in the Donbass region in the east, where the Kremlin hopes to encircle Ukrainian forces.
Russian troops amassed at the border were given little to no warning that they were to be sent to war in neighboring Ukraine, leading to widespread confusion among the ranks and compounding Russian forces’ communications challenges.
“Given 24 hours’ notice, they weren’t able to do things like work out which units they were going to be driving next to and cooperating with and then exchanging encryption keys to their radios so they could use their encrypted communications—the result being they were speaking in clear, trying to use walkie-talkies,” said Jack Watling, a research fellow on land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. By broadcasting on unencrypted frequencies, everyone from amateur radio enthusiasts to Ukrainian and foreign intelligence agencies have been able to eavesdrop on aspects of Russia’s military communications with ease.
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