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One ladies and gentlemen, now.

— Could I please have your attention?

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Bring us your listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Come on by, check out our stuff. Become a member, save the cheerleader, save the world.

So, full disclosure, because I am nothing if not transparent to our listeners. I was supposed to have somebody else on today and then through a just a halacious, confluence of events.

We had a guest cancel and I didn't want to go dark. And one of the great things about the growing empire that is the Dispatch is that we have plenty of people who always have interesting things to say.

And so, I did not go to the break glass in case of emergency guest, Chris Starwald. Instead, I went to our in-house break glass in case of actual terrorist emergency writer, Clon Kitchen.

And he agreed a short notice to do this. And so, like literally in the last 10 minutes, we agreed to put this whole thing together. So, we're just going to play it by ear.

Clon, welcome back to the Remnant. My pleasure. So, happy to be here again.

You are a scholar and a gentleman for doing this. Thank you very much. So, I see I have not read it yet. So, you have a new piece out in the National Interest. And I figured, like since I promised you this would not be heavy lifting for you.

Why don't we sort of start there? The pieces, we'll put on the show notes, why Russia's cyber warriors haven't crippled Ukraine?

Well, I'm really glad you asked, Jonah.

But, you know, a lot of people, including myself, anticipated that Ukraine would kick off with a pretty extensive Russian cyber attacks against things like Ukrainian command and control and civilian communications, critical infrastructure, that kind of thing.

And while we did see some action against like there's this American satellite communications company called BSAT. And we saw this really limited Wiperware attack, Wiperware just being like ransomware, but instead of locking yourself up, it just deletes it and you can't get it back.

We saw we saw limited cases of those things, but generally speaking, the anticipated kind of cyber onslaught didn't show up. And, you know, now that we're two months into it, we're starting to get a sense of maybe why that was the case. And in the piece that you mentioned for National Interest, I posit three rationales as to why that likely has happened.

The first one is that it was a strategic choice by Russia, not to employ large scale destructive code. So you may remember that, let's see, back in 2017, Russian hackers unleashed the not petcha virus and that ended up spreading around the world and causing more than like $10 billion into damages, I mean, just a massive, massive thing, including inside Russia.

And it would make sense that that Putin would have thought that using that kind of software for Ukraine would likely kind of get outside possibly hit NATO countries and NATO neighbors there of Ukraine and things were already going to be tense enough. No reason to kind of introduce that type of static into the conversation, which I think was right.

I mean, NATO says that that cyber can be the kind of thing that triggers Article 5, but like how all that would work is still unclear. And so, yeah, I think it makes sense that Russian would have made a strategic choice not to kind of a big attack like that.

What specifically would just, you know, sort of illuminate it, you know, sort of, I'll use question begging correctly.

Saying why haven't they done this massive cyber attack assumes that we all know what that massive cyber attack would have looked like.

Like what was the cyber attack that you anticipated something, you know, what, what, what, what, what, what would have looked like the thing that you thought was going to happen to Ukraine?

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