“Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century. We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.” So says NATO on it’s X (Twitter) account 23/2/23. NATO marked the passing of the first year of the war it provoked in Ukraine in a number of ways. The tweet above, that sounds like a warm-up for a TV game show, was one of them. Since then, it’s had 30.5 million views.

The tweet comes from an account on NATO’s website called ‘Pavlo’s story’. Pavlo presents himself as an average man of the people with an unexceptional history, a patriot who enlisted in the first days of the conflict and has fought on the frontline ever since. In fact, Pavlo Kazarin is a well-known Ukrainian TV journalist with longstanding connections to the West, amongst them a spell working for US government-funded Radio Liberty. He has also written regularly for the New Voice of Ukraine (NV), an avowedly independent outfit that actually works with the US Embassy in Kiev. NV launched its English language version in January 2022 just as Ukrainian forces were stepping up shelling of the Donbas. Far from the frontline, Kazarin was in the UK in the autumn of 2022, attending the Hay-on-Wye book festival to promote his book ‘The Wild West of Eastern Europe’, recipient of a BBC Ukraine prize.

There has been almost no live reporting of this conflict, not even from embedded journalists and photographers. It gets easier and easier to make it sound like a Hollywood movie. “Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of the century.” It’s hard to imagine language more cynically indifferent to the 300,000 deaths the Ukrainian Armed Forces are estimated to have sustained on behalf of NATO. The populations of NATO countries are being increasingly anaesthetised to the realities of war the closer it gets to home.

While the war in Ukraine is being fought conventionally using human bodies on the ground, it has also been an opportunity to test new electronic warfare (EW) technologies – drones, guided missiles, communications, surveillance – all dependent on well-defended computer systems. Cyber security is a rapidly growing and highly profitable area of development whose cutting edge is the preserve of companies not traditionally part of the military-industrial complex (MIC). The MIC is expanding beyond arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and BAE Systems to include specialist cyber companies like PaloAlto, Trustify, and others that are household names providing domestic services – Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Compared with the carefully phased pace of NATO’s delivery of conventional military hardware to Ukraine over the last 18 months, cyber support for the government and the military arrived at lightning speed, effecting what has been described as the digital transformation of Ukraine. Amazon is reported to have responded to a public call for help from the government in Kiev the week before Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) began (1). Soon after, data from Ukrainian ministries, universities and Ukraine’s biggest financial institution, PrivatBank, had all been transferred to Amazon Web Services.

Elon Musk’s Starlink system of satellites operated by SpaceX provided a secure internet service to the Ukrainian military within weeks. Zelensky uses Starlink to communicate with NATO. It has become an indispensable part of the country’s critical infrastructure.

Likewise, Microsoft has been working closely with the Ukrainian government, including round-the-clock live sharing of what its corporate vice-president Tom Burt calls ‘threat intelligence’. Before the SMO began, the Ukrainian government had already transferred the data from its servers in Kiev to the Microsoft cloud. Not to be outdone, Google donated 50,000 Google Workspace licences to Kiev and helped the government set up a system to send air raid alerts to mobile phones. Google Cloud provides cyber threat intelligence. (2)

Tsvetalina J Benthem of Oxford University puts it like this in her paper - Privatised Frontlines: Private Sector Contributions in Armed Conflict - delivered at the NATO CyCon Conference in Tallinn this year: ‘…the success of a military effort increasingly hinges on, among others, the security of networks supporting critical infrastructure…’  In other words, without dominant cyber security you can’t now win a war. For the US military, aware of its increasing dependence on the private technology sector, the sector’s full integration into the military industrial complex is proceeding too slowly. As they see it, there are as yet no legally binding rules of engagement for cyber space and, something several sources have stressed, no equivalent of NATO’s Article 5 for private companies. What that would look like in practice is anybody’s guess.

In a recent interview with a cyber security publication, NATO’s head of cyber policy, Christian-Marc Liflander, says NATO and civilian tech companies need far closer collaboration. In a further extension of its powers, NATO needs to act as “a political platform” and impose cyber security norms across the alliance without delay (3)

For Liflander the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is exemplary. Part of GCHQ, the NCSC has been developing partnerships with private companies for some years now through its Industry 100 (i100) scheme. “i100 is the principal initiative from the NCSC to facilitate close collaboration with the best and most diverse minds in UK industry…” Since 2017, secondees from key companies have been trained up by the NCSC and, the website says that they have “[benefitted] from government information’. That is, they have been drawn into military planning and are part of the stealthy militarisation of the whole economy. The website adds: “Every citizen, business and government department has a part to play…”  The explicit inclusion of citizens in the government’s “democratic and responsible” cyber strategy is ominous. (4)

In the same interview, and in line with current NATO management of the way its warmongering is described to the public, Liflander explains that NATO is at risk of being too accommodating in the cyber realm. “We are kind of deterred by ourselves.”, he says. But, he adds, we have to remember that cyber “is always on”, the suggestion being that NATO is now permanently at war in the cyber realm and can’t afford to stop at cyber ‘defence’. Liflander insists it must develop “threat hunting” capacity, with a view to conducting pre-emptive cyber strikes.

Raising the tolerance of ordinary people to the real violence of war is a major part of NATO’s work on social media. It’s why it describes war as if it’s a Harry Potter film and it’s why it keeps bees.

“On a bright summer day, staff joined the NATO beekeeper at the honey harvesting workshop at Alliance Headquarters in Brussels on Thursday (10/8/23) …. Around 350 jars of NATO honey were sold at the NATO Charity Bazaar in November 2022, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg gifted jars of NATO honey to ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council last December.” – it was reported on the NATO website.

There seems to be no limit to the level of violence acceptable to journalists like David Ignatius of The Washington Post, who, in a recent article about developments in the war in Ukraine, wrote: “…for the United States and its NATO allies these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians).” A sentiment worthy of a NATO tweet.

(1) Politico, July 2022

(2) Business@War: the IT Companies Helping to Defend Ukraine, 2023 NATO CCDCOE Publications

(3) The Record, 10/1/23