He was referring to another hill, where the battle was so intense, it changed the hill’s shape. “Have you been to Mamayev Kurgan yet?,” Minin asked me. Once, this was Stalingrad, a city made famous by the grueling battle fought here in the winter of 1942–43, when more than 1 million men died before the Germans lost the fight and a field marshal and the momentum of the war. Once, the river was blood, and the hill was shrapnel and pillboxes and bones. The university, a complex of stark white buildings, sits atop a steep hill with the city and the Volga River below. When the Capture the Flag competition broke for lunch, Minin and I stepped into the brightness and the wind outside. I asked whether government agencies, like the security services that conduct cyberoperations abroad, did the same. He said Russian tech firms regularly come to him to find talent. The hacking competitions are Minin’s way of preparing future generations, of “passing my accumulated knowledge on to the kiddies,” he told me.
“Do you think anything has changed? And that I’d say it to a journalist?”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. “At the time, I signed a gag order,” he told me, smiling slyly. He wouldn’t say in which part of the army he’d done this work. “I’ve been doing cybersecurity since I was 18, since I joined the army in 1982,” Minin told me after we’d ducked out into the hallway so as not to distract the young contestants. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian.
Julia ioffe speaking russian full#
Otherwise you can be absolutely sure he will cross it.To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Ĭlustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Putin needs to know that there is a line he cannot cross.
Of course autocrats have their reasons, but are they reasons we have to accept as justifiable? There is no moral equivalence between the ambitions of a repressive state and those of a repressed people. Ask most Ukrainian citizens, yearning for western democratic freedoms, whether Putin has a right to deprive them of those freedoms in the name of some bogus historical affinity. That’s the voice of the non-interventionists but haven’t they been duped? Is a man who sends undercover troops into Crimea and then swears that they are locals defending their homeland really to be trusted? Ask the people of Georgia, whose country has been carved up by Putin, whether they think he has no interest in expansion. So cut him some slack: we need more diplomacy and fewer threats of reprisals. He couldn’t survive the national humiliation of it becoming yet another western outpost.
Putin isn’t being expansionist: he just wants Ukraine to remain a non-aligned buffer zone between Russia and the West. It has backed the overthrow of a democratically elected president. The West has tried to influence elections in Ukraine. Not only have Nato and the EU broken that promise, they have even sought to bring Ukraine – for centuries seen as umbilically tied to Russia – into the western fold. The promise that Russia managed to extract from the West, as it watched its old empire crumble, was that NATO would not expand eastward and that the Baltic states and Poland would not be absorbed into the EU. You don’t have to like Vladimir Putin, or doubt that he’s a nasty piece of work, to recognise that the Russian president’s reaction to the crisis in Ukraine is largely justified.
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