Tag Archives: Ukraine

Ukraine to call up 10,000 soldiers in new mobilization drive

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s military will call up some 10,000 men and seek volunteers to replace some of the 45,000 soldiers who are due to return home after more than a year on the front lines in the separatist east, President Petro Poroshenko said on Tuesday.

A February 2015 ceasefire failed to completely halt the conflict with pro-Russian rebels that is entering its third year. Sixteen soldiers have been killed so far in March – the army’s highest monthly death toll since August, according to Reuters calculations based on military data.

Almost all Ukrainian men have to do at least one year of military service and can then be called up to fight until they reach 60 years of age.

But as well that compulsory mobilization, the government is trying to tempt them to volunteer for active duty, increasing salaries to at least 7,000 hryvnia ($275) per month, well above the minimum wage of around 1,400 hryvnia.

Around 13,000 servicemen have been signed up under such contracts this year, part of drive to build a professional army capable of withstanding what Ukraine sees as a long-standing threat from Russia.

“Next year I am sure there will be further (wage) growth to raise not only the moral but also the financial attractiveness of military service,” President Poroshenko said at a meeting with military personnel.

Around 250,000 men currently serve in the military across Ukraine. While it is illegal to dodge the compulsory mobilization drives, some potential recruits have done so by bribing officials or simply leaving the country.

Over 9,000 civilians and soldiers have been killed since fighting between Ukrainian troops and rebels seeking independence from Kiev erupted in April 2014.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Two years after annexation, Putin seeks to bind Crimea by bridge to Russia

Tuzla Island, CRIMEA (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin, marking the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, on Friday exhorted workers building a bridge between the Black Sea peninsula and Russia to fulfill an “historic mission” first conceived by a Russian tsar.

Russia seized the majority Russian-speaking Crimea from Ukraine on March 16, 2014 after an uprising toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, but the peninsula has since struggled with economic isolation.

The annexation unleashed a wave of patriotic euphoria in Russia and Crimea, but Putin needs to ensure public attitudes do not sour over the economic costs and avoid handing vindication to Western governments, who condemned the move as an illegal land grab.

Russia was hit with international sanctions over the annexation and Crimea remains largely cut off overland from Ukraine, depending on ships to keep it resupplied from Russia.

As cities around Russia prepared to celebrate the second anniversary of what Moscow calls the reunification of Crimea, which was part of Russia until 1954, Putin visited the construction site where the bridge is taking shape.

He said the bridge, which will span 12 miles across the Kerch Strait from Crimea to southern Russia, would integrate the peninsula with Russia and help stimulate the economy.

“Our and your predecessors understood the importance of this bridge,” he told workers at an inspection of the site on an island just off Crimea’s coast, referring to aborted plans dating back to Tsarist Russia.

“Let us hope that we will fulfil this historic mission. Undoubtedly, it will create additional opportunities for economic growth.”

The bridge is being built by a company owned by Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s judo partner, who was among the first in the president’s entourage to be slapped with Western sanctions after Crimea’s annexation.

PRO-RUSSIAN POPULATION

Russian officials say Crimea’s 2 million people voiced their desire to join Russia in a democratic vote in 2014, so there was no violation of international law. Given Crimea’s history within Russia, many residents feel closer to Moscow than to Kiev.

Crimea once prospered as a Black Sea tourist hub. Now its businesses are starved of tourists and international investment is barred by Western sanctions. A dependence on Ukraine for power supplies has also left them vulnerable to pro-Ukrainian activists who sabotaged electricity cables last year, subjecting the peninsula to weeks of rolling blackouts.

Putin’s approval rating among Russians is at its highest in four years and 95 percent of Russians support Crimea’s annexation, according to state-run pollster VTsIOM.

But these numbers could fall as patriotic fervor in Crimea peters out and Russia’s economic crisis deepens, eating into real wages and eroding living standards.

Building the bridge, at a cost of 212 billion rubles ($3.13 billion), and supporting Crimea will impose additional burdens on Russia’s shrinking state budget, which has been hammered by a collapse in global oil prices – the country’s main export.

Crimea will get 43.5 billion rubles in federal government transfers in 2016 and Moscow will provide an added 148 billion rubles as part of a state development plan for the peninsula, part of which will be used to finance the bridge.

The combined total is only a fraction of the 16 trillion rubles originally earmarked for the 2016 Russian state budget. But the costs of annexation will be much higher as sanctions – which the International Monetary Fund has said could cut Russian GDP by 9 percent – continue to exact their toll.

TSARIST-ERA BEGINNINGS

An idea first hatched under Russian Tsar Nicholas the Second in 1910, the bridge will now consist of two parallel road and rail spans capable of carrying 40,000 vehicles every 24 hours and connected by road to the Crimean capital of Simferopol.

Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said the bridge would be completed in December 2018 as scheduled, but critics have said the plans are too ambitious and will run over budget.

A number of other large-scale infrastructure projects in Russia, such as preparations for the 2018 World Cup and plans to build a new cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East, have been plagued by delays and had their funding cut to compensate for dwindling budget revenues.

Anti-corruption campaigners have also criticized the Russian government’s decision to award the construction contract to Rotenberg’s Stroygazmontazh, a company which specializes in gas pipelines and has never built a bridge.

“The annexation of Crimea was an obvious mistake, which the Kremlin and the majority of Russian people will not recognize for a long time. But we continue to pay for it,” Russian business daily Vedomosti wrote in an editorial on Friday.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini reiterated on Friday Crimea’s annexation was illegal and the peninsula should be returned to Ukraine.

($1 = 67.6800 rubles)

(Writing by Jack Stubbs; Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly and Jason Bush; Editing by Christian Lowe and Mark Heinrich)

NSA chief says ‘when, not if’ foreign country hacks U.S. infrastructure

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. National Security Agency chief said on Tuesday it was a “matter of when, not if” a foreign nation-state attempts to launch a cyber attack on the U.S. critical infrastructure, citing the recent hack on Ukraine’s power grid as a cause for concern.

Speaking at the RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco, Admiral Michael Rogers said he was also worried about data manipulation and potential offensive cyber threats posed by non-nation-state actors such as Islamic State.

The U.S. government said last week a December blackout in Ukraine that affected 225,000 customers was the result of a cyber attack, supporting what most security researchers had already concluded.

Some private researchers have linked the incident to a Russian hacking group known as “Sandworm.”

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

U.S. spy chiefs expect continuing problems in Libya, Ukraine

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. spy agencies expect continuing upheaval in Libya and Ukraine, top intelligence officials told Congress on Thursday.

James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told a House of Representatives Intelligence Committee hearing that the United States had “great hope” that a new government of national accord will soon be formed in Libya.

But at the same hearing, CIA chief John Brennan acknowledged that the United States in practice was pursuing a two-track policy in Libya, in which it was engaged both in a diplomatic effort to knit together two competing, regionally based self-proclaimed Libyan governments while also conducting “counter terrorism” operations against a growing contingent of Islamic State militants.

U.S. officials now estimate that up to 4,000 foreign fighters have traveled to Libya to base themselves in Islamic State training camps that have sprouted up around the country, where they have joined up with hundreds if not thousands of local Libyans who have joined the movement.

U.S. officials privately acknowledge that efforts to bring together rival government factions are moving slowly at best. Clapper told the hearing that the rival factions themselves are far from “monolithic,” although even competing leaders agree that the Islamic State poses a major threat.

While diplomatic efforts continue, officials privately say, the United States is likely to continue periodic air strikes against suspected Islamic State leaders like one that earlier this month targeted a militant named Noureddine Chouchane.

At the hearing, Clapper and Brennan also discussed Russia’s continuing involvement in Ukraine. Clapper said Russia still considers Ukraine to be “Little Russia.” He said Russia “will continue I think to be a proxy for separatists to sustain their interests in Ukraine.”

However, Brennan added that there is “still uncertainty about how the Russians themselves are going to extricate themselves” from Ukraine conflict.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Russia warns of new Cold War as east Ukraine violence surges

MUNICH (Reuters) – Violence in eastern Ukraine is intensifying and Russian-backed rebels have moved heavy weaponry back to the front line, international monitors warned on Saturday as Moscow responded by accusing the West of dragging the world back 50 years.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev described East-West relations as having “fallen into a new Cold War” and said NATO was “hostile and closed” toward Russia, in the latest sign that peace efforts have made scant progress almost two years since Moscow annexed Crimea.

“I sometimes wonder – are we in 2016 or 1962?,” Medvedev asked in a speech to the Munich Security Conference.

Implementation of a deal agreed in Minsk a year ago, which would allow for the lifting of sanctions on Russia, and a lull in violence late last year raised hopes that the conflict that has killed more than 9,000 people could be resolved quickly.

But Lamberto Zannier, who heads the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring eastern Ukraine, said the situation had “become difficult again.”

“We see a multiplication of incidents, violations of the ceasefire,” he told Reuters at the Munich Security Conference. “We’ve seen cases of redeployment of heavy armaments closer to the contact line … and multiple rocket launchers, artillery being used,” he said, referring to the heavy weaponry that is meant to be removed under the Minsk deal.

Medvedev accused Kiev of trying to shift the blame onto Moscow for the continued shelling in the industrial regions of eastern Ukraine now under rebel control.

“The Minsk agreements have to be observed by everyone. But we believe that it’s first and foremost up to the Kiev authorities to do that,” he said.

The West says it has satellite images, videos and other evidence to show Russia is providing weapons to the rebels and that Moscow has troops engaged in the conflict that erupted following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.

Russia denies such accusations.

NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove said Russia had the power to “dial up and down” the conflict as it wished to put pressure on the government in Kiev but he said NATO did not want, nor currently see, a new Cold War.

AMNESTY

Extended at the end of last year, the Minsk peace deal signed by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany aims to give Ukraine back control of its border with Russia, see all heavy weapons withdrawn, return hostages and allow an internationally monitored local election in the east.

Zannier said the vote could not happen until there was a ceasefire and even then it would be difficult to do by mid-year because international observers need to be in place.

Medvedev said Ukraine, not Russia, was in breach of the Minsk deal because Kiev was yet to change Ukraine’s constitution to grant special status to eastern Ukraine.

Russia wants an amnesty for mainly Russian-speaking people in the east who seized government buildings during the upheaval of early 2014, when pro-European protesters toppled Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovich.

“Without this amnesty, these people won’t be able to participate in the elections,” Medvedev said.

Kiev’s Western backers acknowledge the government of President Petro Poroshenko must speed up reforms, especially those tied to its $10-billion International Monetary Fund bailout, but say Russia must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.

“Neither the people of Ukraine nor their partners in the international community believe they have done enough,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said.

(Additional reporting by Warren Stroebel; Editing by Helen Popper and David Evans)

Ukraine sees Russian hand in cyber attacks on power grid

KIEV (Reuters) – Hackers used a Russian-based internet provider and made phone calls from inside Russia as part of a coordinated cyber attack on Ukraine’s power grid in December, Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Friday.

The incident was widely seen as the first known power outage caused by a cyber attack, and has prompted fears both within Ukraine and outside that other critical infrastructure could be vulnerable.

The ministry, saying it had completed an investigation into the incident, did not accuse the Russian government directly of involvement in the attack, which knocked out electricity supplies to tens of thousands of customers in central and western Ukraine and prompted Kiev to review its cyber defenses.

But the findings chime with the testimony of the U.S. intelligence chief to Congress this week, which named cyber attacks, including those targeting Washington’s interests in Ukraine, as the biggest threat to U.S. national security.

Relations between Kiev and Moscow soured after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and pro-Russian separatist violence erupted in Ukraine.

Hackers targeted three power distribution companies in December’s attack, and then flooded those companies’ call centers with fake calls to prevent genuine customers reporting the outage.

“According to one of the power companies, the connection by the attackers to its IT network occurred from a subnetwork … belonging to an (internet service) provider in the Russian Federation,” the ministry said in a statement.

Deputy Energy Minister Oleksander Svetelyk told Reuters hackers had prepared the attacks at least six months in advance, adding that his ministry had ordered tighter security procedures.

“The attack on our systems took at least six months to prepare – we have found evidence that they started collecting information (about our systems) no less than 6 months before the attack,” Svetelyk said by phone.

Researchers at Trend Micro, one of the world’s biggest security software firms, said this week that the software used to infect the Ukrainian utilities has also been found in the networks of a large Ukrainian mining company and a rail company.

The researchers said one possible explanation was that it was an attempt to destabilize Ukraine as a whole. It was also possible these were test probes to determine vulnerabilities that could be exploited later, they said.

(Writing by Matthias Williams; additional reporting by Eric Auchard; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

NATO agrees to deter Russia from attacks, but avoids Cold War footing

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO agreed on Wednesday its boldest steps yet to deter Russia from any attack in the Baltics or eastern Europe, setting out ways to rapidly deploy air, naval and ground forces without resorting to Cold War-era military bases.

In an effort to dissuade Moscow after its 2014 annexation of Crimea, NATO defense ministers will rely on a network of new alliance outposts, forces on rotation, warehoused equipment and regular war games, all backed by a rapid-reaction force.

“Russia is a threat,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Juozas Olekas told Reuters at an alliance meeting in Brussels. “It is Moscow’s actions in Crimea, their support for separatists in Ukraine and their snap exercises that concern us”.

The measures, which British Defense Minister Michael Fallon said proved that “NATO means what it says”, showed a unity the West has not been able to muster against Russia in Syria, where the United States faces criticism for not stopping the Russian-backed assaults on rebel-held areas of Aleppo.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Munich Security Conference later this week to stress the defensive nature of NATO’s strategy for the Baltics and eastern Europe.

“We believe that especially when times are difficult, as they are now, it’s even more important that we have political dialogue, channels open, between NATO and Russia,” he said.

Russia denies it has acted aggressively. Moscow blames the West for stirring anti-Russian feeling across the east, particularly in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, which it considers its historic sphere of influence.

The crisis in Ukraine, where the West accuses Russia of fomenting a separatist rebellion, and the Western economic sanctions on Moscow have raised concerns about a new Cold War.

Non-NATO member Georgia, which fought a five-day war with Russia in 2008 that left two of its regions occupied by Russian military, also warned NATO to be on alert. “With the Kremlin, nothing can be excluded,” Tinatin Khidasheli, Georgia’s defense minister, told Reuters. “They cannot show weakness.”

Poland’s new conservative government has been the most vocal in calling for permanent NATO bases on its territory and while Warsaw has now agreed to the new lighter military presence, its defense minister Antoni Macierewicz signaled that difficult talks over troop numbers lie ahead.

WANTED: MONEY, TROOPS

Initial discussions suggest NATO could have a brigade of up to 1,000 troops in each of the six former communist countries, once under Moscow’s domination, that the alliance is looking to reinforce: Lithuanian, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. They will be backed by a rapid-reaction force that includes air, naval and special operations units of up to 40,000 personnel.

Asked about whether a 1,000-troop presence was acceptable, Macierewicz said: “From our point of view it is clearly too little.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the plan aimed to move NATO to a “full deterrence posture” to thwart any aggression but cautioned: “It’s not going to look like it did back in Cold War days.”

In the past, the United States stationed some 300,000 troops in Europe and NATO wants to avoid any such posture because of the costs and also so as not to further antagonize the Kremlin.

Britain said it would contribute two warships to a NATO maritime groups this year, sending one frigate to the Baltic.

Another difficult issue is the funding for the deterrent, which Stoltenberg has said “does not come for free.”

The United States’ is seeking a $3.4 billion budget for European reassurance initiatives in 2017, a four-fold increase in Washington’s spending in the region to rotate more troops through the region and provide more tanks and other support.

Carter, speaking to reporters traveling with him to Brussels, said it was important for all NATO allies to increase military spending. “I’ll be looking for others in NATO to echo (us) in our investment,” Carter said.

Stoltenberg said he received new commitments from other NATO allies on Wednesday, but said it was too early to give details.

(Writing by Robin Emmott, editing by Larry King and Dominic Evans)

Ukraine’s president sees increased risk of open war with Russia

BERLIN (Reuters) – The risk of open war between Russia and Ukraine is greater than it was a year ago and Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun an “information war” against Germany, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the German newspaper Bild.

Poroshenko, who met German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Monday, said Russia had implemented “not one single point” of the Minsk accord, which includes a ceasefire between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Russia was building up its military presence on the border with Ukraine, he said.

“The danger of an open war is greater than last year,” Poroshenko told Bild, in an interview published in its Wednesday edition. “Russia is investing a great deal in war preparations.”

Merkel pressed Putin by phone on Tuesday to use his influence to ensure that a ceasefire is upheld in Ukraine and that monitors from the OSCE European security organization are granted free access to conflict areas, her spokesman said.

Berlin is growing increasingly suspicious that Russia is trying to stir up trouble in Germany to try to weaken Merkel, who has taken a tough line on a crisis that was triggered when Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014.

German officials say Moscow hopes to destabilize Europe and create a vacuum into which it can project its own power.

“Now Putin has opened an information war against Germany as well,” Poroshenko said.

German concerns about Moscow grew last month after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the German authorities of “sweeping problems under the rug” over an alleged rape case involving a German-Russian girl.

The case of the 13-year-old, named only as Lisa F., caused controversy after she told police that she had been kidnapped in east Berlin last month by migrants who raped her while she was held for 30 hours.

The Berlin public prosecutor’s office has since said a medical examination found she was not raped.

When asked if Russia had used the case to try to stir up tensions around immigration, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, told reporters on Wednesday: “We cannot agree with such accusations.”

“On the contrary, we were keen that our position be understood, we were talking about a citizen of the Russian Federation,” he added. “Any country expresses its concerns (in such cases). It would be wrong to look for any hidden agenda.”

(Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; Writing by Paul Carrel; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Hackers may have wider access to Ukrainian industrial facilities

KIEV (Reuters) – Hackers were able to attack four sections of Ukraine’s power grid with malware late last year because of basic security lapses and they could take down other industrial facilities at any time, a consultant to government investigators said.

Three power cuts reported in separate areas of western and central Ukraine in late December were the first known electrical outages caused by cyber attacks, causing consternation among businesses and officials around the world.

The consultant, Oleh Sych, told Reuters a fourth Ukrainian energy company had been affected by a lesser attack in October, but declined to name it.

He also said a similar type of malware had been identified by the Ukrainian anti-virus software company Zillya! where he works as far back as July, making it impossible to know how many other systems were at risk.

“This is the scariest thing – we’re living on a powder keg. We don’t know where else has been compromised. We can protect everything, we can teach administrators never to open emails, but the system is already infected,” he said.

Sych, whose firm is advising the State Security Service SBU and a commission set up by the energy ministry, said power distributors had ignored their own security rules by allowing critical computers to be hooked up to the Internet when they should have been kept within an internal network.

This so-called “air gap” separates computer systems from any outside Internet connections accessible to hackers.

“A possible objective was to bring down some branches (of the Ukrainian energy system) and create a ‘domino effect’ to collapse the entire system of Ukraine or a significant part,” Sych said.

Ukraine has also been targeted in other cyber attacks, which included hacking into the system of Ukraine’s biggest airport and TV news channels.

Security services and the military blamed the attacks on Russia, an allegation dismissed by the Kremlin as evidence of Ukraine’s tendency to accuse Russia of “all mortal sins”.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has supported separatist rebels in east of the former Soviet republic, arguing that Kiev’s Western-backed government, elected after the Moscow-backed president fled widespread protests, was illegitimate.

Sych, who said he could not reveal all the details of the probe, said there was no conclusive evidence that the attacks originated in Russia. One of the emails was sent from the server of a German university, another from the United States, he said.

INSIDER

International cyber-security researchers who have studied the attacks believe the attackers broke into networks by sending targeted emails designed to trick utility insiders to click on Excel documents that were poisoned with malware used to gain control inside the networks.

Sych agreed, saying:

“We understand that this couldn’t have happened without an insider. To carry out this kind of attack you need to know what kind of operating system and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) are used and what software controls the industrial facility,” he said.

SCADA software is widely used to control industrial systems worldwide.

“The attackers must have known what software was installed … to test (the malware) on it. Clearly preliminary investigations were carried out and this was easy to do with this kind of insider information.”

He said the hackers had sent the e-mails in question to workers at the affected power distribution companies with infected Word or Excel files that were meant to look like official correspondence from the energy ministry.

They contained topics that would have been recognizable to the workers and were not sent out en masse but targeted certain individuals instead. One of the emails was about regional electricity production levels, he said.

“It was all very simple and stupid,” Sych said, adding that the hackers totally wiped the data of some of the computers in one of the firms.

Details of the impact of the attacks have been sketchy, but one is reported to have affected 80,000 customers for two hours. The three named companies declined to comment on Sych’s remarks.

“All experts agree this sort of attack on electric utilities or other critical infrastructure was bound to happen because engineering-wise, physics-wise it is technically possible to do,” said Kenneth Geers, a Kiev-based national security analyst who worked for U.S. intelligence agencies for 20 years until 2013.

All it takes is political will or opportunism to try something like this, he said.

Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Oleksander Svetelyk has also accused the companies of lapses, saying on Tuesday there had been a “a lot of errors”. He added that U.S. cyber experts would come to Kiev later this week to help with the investigation.

(Additional reporting by Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow and Eric Auchard in Brussels; Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Ukraine to review cyber defenses after airport targeted from Russia

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian authorities will review the defenses of government computer systems, including at airports and railway stations, after a cyber attack on Kiev’s main airport was launched from a server in Russia, officials told Reuters on Monday.

Malware similar to that which attacked three Ukrainian power firms in late December was detected last week in a computer in the IT network of Kiev’s main airport, Boryspil. The network includes the airport’s air traffic control.

Although there is no suggestion at this stage that Russia’s government was involved, the cyber attacks have come at a time of badly strained relations between Ukraine and Russia over a nearly two-year-long separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine.

“In connection with the case in Boryspil, the ministry intends to initiate a review of anti-virus databases in the companies which are under the responsibility of the ministry,” said Irina Kustovska, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry, which oversees airports, railways and ports.

Ukraine’s state-run Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) issued a warning on Monday of the threat of more attacks.

“The control center of the server, where the attacks originate, is in Russia,” military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said by telephone, adding that the malware had been detected early in the airport’s system and no damage had been done.

A spokeswoman for the airport said Ukrainian authorities were investigating whether the malware was connected to a malicious software platform known as “BlackEnergy”, which has been linked to other recent cyber attacks on Ukraine. There are some signs that the attacks are linked, she said.

“Attention to all system administrators … We recommend a check of log-files and information traffic,” CERT-UA said in a statement.

In December three Ukrainian regional power firms experienced short-term blackouts as a result of malicious software in their networks. Experts have described the incident as the first known power outage caused by a cyber attack.

A U.S. cyber intelligence firm in January traced the attack back to a Moscow-backed group known as Sandworm.

The Dec. 23 outage at Western Ukraine’s Prykarpattyaoblenergo cut power to 80,000 customers for about six hours, according to a report from a U.S. energy industry security group.

Ukraine’s SBU state security service has blamed Russia, but the energy ministry said it would hold off on attribution until after it completes a formal probe.

(Editing by Matthias Williams and Gareth Jones)