EU just slapped travel bans and asset freezes on every member of Russia’s State Duma
If (starting to look like “when” now) Russia makes a move outside of rebel held areas of Donbas, exact major cyber attacks not only in Ukraine, but possibly globally targeting banks and power infrastructure. Ukraine has been known as the “cyber playground” of Russia for years and all of the recent attacks appear to be testing the waters for something larger. NotPetya wreaked havoc abroad and something similar, or even more powerful, can possibly lead to world wide economic disruption.
Zelensky is still pushing to resolve this diplomatically above all else. I don’t know how much longer a diplomatic window is open, if at all, considering Russia’s rhetoric about taking back the entirety of Donbas.
Another very concerning indication of further Russian military action: OSINT pages across social media platforms are being attacked with mass report spamming, which is causing them to be temporarily taken down. I’m sure many of you know that if a page gets reported a certain amount of times in a short period it is automatically blocked before it can be reviewed and restored. It’s happened to me once before but regarding posts being mass reported and not necessarily my page as a whole (just to clarify this is completely different from Instagram algorithms taking down my pages over the past year)
OSINT= Open Source Intelligence. It’s an intelligence tradecraft of exploiting publicly available information, namely social media, to provide updates on events and collect information. I myself have considered Atlas as an OSINT page for some time due to how I collect information. That being said I consider myself an OSINT analyst rather than a journalist.
Bomb threats popping up around Kiev. They are likely fake to cause panic in conjunction with the cyber attacks.
Reuters reporting that two armor columns are moving into the Donetsk region from Russia
I don’t think “human error” is to blame for the nearly simultaneous and coordinated take down of dozens of credible OSINT accounts as Twitter is being flooded with Russian bots
Took down the Blinken post because I got the info from NBC but they horrendously took what he said out of context
I have a really bad feeling about tonight. Say what you want about things happening or not happening, but this is the first time throughout covering the Ukraine situation where I genuinely feel uneasy about what’s to come.