There I found an interesting report about one of the most important and less known war episodes in the last years, the Russian cyberattack on Estonia in April 2007.
OK, nobody was killed in those events, not even physically injured, so sure that with thousands of people dying in armed conflicts in Irak, Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan... my previous sentence could sound like pronounced by someone who does not know the limits between Second Life and real life, but that attack is one advance of how wars will be waged in the near future, and raises questions and concerns that our societies will have to address.
So, what happened and why it is so important?
Estonia, a European Union member and former Soviet Republic (well, I would better say a former Russian Colony, for me the USSR was never a union, but one of the last colonial powers in the classical sense) was attacked by Russian hackers. It was mainly a massive DDOS attack that made unavailable great part of Estonian network based infrastructure (ATMs, Government web sites, newspapers...). This attack was launched by naZionalist "hackers", probably linked to the Nashi, a proPutin Russian youth movement with some resemblence to the Hitler Youth. I wouldn't dare to say that the rusian government were directly involved in the attack itself, but it has been protecting the attackers by hampering the investigations (and of course, it's responsible for the wave of fanatic nationalism that sweeps Russia and fills the streets with ultraviolent nazi skinheads responsible for hundreds of attacks and murders each year) The main source of the attack could be based on Transnistria, a Russian puppet pseudostate broken away from Moldavia (and which "strange" legal status makes very difficoult any sort of international investigation).
The anger and hate of these zealots was motivated by the relocation of a Soviet Soldier statue to a non centrical place (for ethnic Estonians Soviet occupation was even worse than German occupation, so probably if I were them I would have relocated it to a landfill) . Well, that's simplistic, the real reason here is that there's a proportion of Russians that do not understand that they're no longer an empire. They don't understand that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia... want nothing to do with them. That these sovereign nations want to cut their ties with a past of horror and famine. That the end of WWII brought no liberation to them, but slavery...
These people still consider these countries as misbehaved children that sometimes deserve some punishment from Mother Russia (be it a cyber attack, be it cutting gas supply in the middle of winter, be it direct war...)
Worst of all is when you have the enemy within, and unfortunately this also happens in these countries. The footage in the video report showing some individuals vandalizing shops while shouting "Russia, Russia" is rather disgusting. These ethnic Russians have not understood that now they live in a sovereign nation called Estonia, and so they have 2 options, either they behave like Estonian citizens (and leverage the good things of being a European Union citizen) or go back to their beloved, destructured, maphia governed Russia... Seems like these people have forgotten that their parents or grandparents were injected into Estonia by Stalin to replace a part of the ethnic Estonian population (forcibly "relocated" out of their land) and russify the remaining ones, replacing their culture, language, myths...
This seems so important to me cause it's one of the first examples of the kind of combats to be waged in the near future. Attacks that can paralyze an entire country in a way that it's not easy to know who's the enemy (goverment, mercenaries, a self organized group of volunteers...) In 2007 EU and NATO governments did not know how to respond to an attack like this, but seems like it has given place to the creation in Tallinn of the CCD COE. Sure the near future will be riddled with similar events and we'll look back to see when all this started.
By the way, I was lucky to be in Estonia for a few days in April 2008, beatiful place really worth a visit.
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