Testing Strategic Cyberwar : an Analysis on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Cyberwar is a prominent issue of the information age, but conceptualizing and incorporating cyberwar into strategic planning is no easy task. While the idea of strategic cyberwar has been dominating political and media discourses since the end of the Cold War, empirical data are far from showing the expected doomsday scenarios (“Cyber Pearl Harbor”) coming from full-scale strategic cyber offensives. Taking the ongoing war in Ukraine as a case-study, this paper explains the reasons why Russian strategic cyberwar has failed in “knocking out” Ukrainian critical infrastructure in the first days of war and analyzes discontinuities and common patterns between cyberwar literature and empirical evidence, including the limits of strategic cyberwar, the value of cyber defense, and the use of information models and networks in cyberwar.