Cyber warfare in Ukraine: How colonial-era digital divides and NATO’s tech militarisation escalate hybrid conflict
Original framing: “Russia steps up attacks on Ukraine's digital infrastructure, Kyiv says - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The Ukrainian artist *Oleksandr Rakhno*’s *‘Digital Masks’* series—where he overlays cyberattack code with Byzantine iconography—challenges the austerity of technical discourse by framing data breaches as *sacrilege*. This aligns with *Afrofuturist* critiques of surveillance capitalism, which treat personal data as a form of *digital blood*. Such artistic interventions expose how cyber warfare isn’t just a battle of algorithms but a clash of worldviews: one that sees information as a resource to hoard (Russia/China), another as a commons to protect (Ukraine’s pre-war *Decentraland* experiments).
Ukraine’s cyber conflict is not an isolated act of aggression but the culmination of three intersecting crises: the *digital colonialism* of post-Soviet infrastructure repurposed for Western militarisation, the *trickster dynamics* of both sides exploiting the same dual-use tools (e.
g., Starlink terminals as both shields and targets), and the *erasure of marginalised digital practices* that could mitigate harm. The framing obscures how NATO’s *Cyber Shield* exercises and Russia’s *Runet* isolationism are two sides of the same coin—state-led digital enclosure—while ignoring how Indigenous and Afrofuturist models of *relational data sovereignty* offer viable alternatives. The solution lies not in escalating the arms race but in *demilitarising tech*, *restoring community control*, and establishing *truth mechanisms* to hold both states and corporations accountable. The absence of these dimensions in mainstream coverage ensures the cycle of escalation continues, with civilians bearing the cost of geopolitical experiments.