Condoleezza Rice reported Russian attack
The United States and Ukraine need to make more efforts to counter information wars and cyber attacks, State Department Special Representative Kurt Volker said at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I want to say that in this matter we are very sluggish in showing our will. We have all the necessary and effective tools, in particular in comparison with our enemy,” he said, without specifying who exactly he means by the word “enemy.”
However, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spoke next, pointed to the enemy quite straightforwardly.
Rice said that Russia's first serious cyber attack took place more than 10 years ago, against Estonia. Moreover, according to her, no appropriate steps have been taken since then.
“In 2007, Russia simply closed and completely cut off Estonia. I remember President Toomas Ilves called me and asked: “Do you understand what is happening?” This country has always been proud of electronic government, the entire budget is on the Internet, electronic voting - this is very important. An attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. Was this a violation of Article 5? The Bush administration began to understand very early on what a digital attack could mean. We understood that it would not be the same as on the battlefield. But they didn’t know how to prevent it or how to react. I think that we haven’t made much progress since then, although 10 years have passed - we need to change that,” Rice concluded.
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