"This Is The First Documented Attempt By The Lukashenko Regime To Strike At Ukraine's Defenses."

• 31.10.2026, 15:12

There has been an unprecedented rapprochement between the Russian and Lukashenko-aligned intelligence services.

Cyberspace is becoming a full-fledged battlefield for hacker groups affiliated with the alliance of dictatorships.

Usually, when we talk about special operations in cyberspace, we imagine hacking into data storage systems to find compromising information or conduct intelligence gathering. However, the modern era brings new challenges and threats. Today’s online operations go far beyond simply hacking email accounts.

Cyberspace is the ideal arena for waging asymmetric warfare, which is based on actions that fall below the threshold of a conventional declaration of war. Judge for yourself: cyber “little green men” strike in a space where the source of the threat is difficult to identify.

Cyberspace itself has specific properties: physical access is not required to cause damage. And the methods of attack and influence are very closely intertwined with the psychological characteristics of the people operating in this space.

The human factor plays a huge role in cybersecurity. Stealing passwords, compromising accounts, and blackmailing users provide hackers with ample opportunities to operate.

Consequently, the cost of causing damage is incomparable to the potential consequences. The low reputational costs for dictatorships of collaborating with hackers have created a defense imbalance for democracies.

For yet another petty dictator, it’s no problem to shell out a few million in cash, crypto, orgold to pay for small but highly effective groups of cybercriminals who don’t particularly care what they hack—whether it’s the payment accounts of ordinary citizens or the control systems of an adversary nation’s infrastructure. And if the source of the threat is exposed, the dictatorship can always deny any involvement in the attacks.

Hacker groups linked to the Kremlin and the official Minsk regime work in close coordination with their counterparts operating in the information sphere. One of the main themes of information campaigns against Western society is the threat of “Europe freezing without Russian gas.” It is precisely energy and infrastructure facilities that have been the targets of the most well-known and documented hacker attacks.

In December 2024, hackers managed to remotely damage and disable the water supply to nearly fifty homes in Denmark. The Danish military intelligence agency, FE, directly linked the actions of hackers from the Z-Pentest group to the Russian government. This attack clearly demonstrates what chaos and loss of control over infrastructure can look like in the wake of such attacks.

An attack on the Polish power grid by pro-Russian hacker groups was expected to have even more far-reaching consequences. The attack took place in December 2025 and affected more than thirty wind and solar power plants.

A large combined-cycle power plant serving half a million customers was a specific target of the attack. The hackers failed to cause significant damage; however, each such attack allows hackers to gain experience and uncover security vulnerabilities.

A recent report from the cybersecurity company ESET revealed an attack on a Ukrainian transportation company by the FrostyNeighbor hacker group, which is linked to the Lukashenko regime. This is the first documented attempt by Lukashenko-affiliated hackers to strike at Ukraine’s defense, a crucial part of which is the uninterrupted operation of the country’s transportation network.

Experts note that the attack may have been carried out on behalf of Russian intelligence agencies and point to an unprecedented convergence between Russian and Lukashenko-regime intelligence services.

If developed nations do not pay sufficient attention to such attacks and do not invest in creating a specialized anti-hacking defense system, it could prove too costly for the free world. The facts confirm that the threat level is already high today, not in the distant future.

Sergey Kovalchuk, “Solidarnast”