Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

Again and again, the hackers used the all-purpose BlackEnergy malware for access and reconnaissance, then KillDisk for data destruction. Their motives remained an enigma, but their marks were everywhere.

Though he didn’t know it yet, Yasinsky had found himself in the middle of the sort of event that had defined Ukraine’s long and unkind history: a foreign invasion.

Over the last thousand years, incursions into Ukraine have taken the form of Mongol hordes from the east and Lithuanian heathens and Polish imperialists from the west.

The nation’s name itself, “Ukraina,” comes from a Slavic word for “borderland.”* Ukraine’s existence has been defined by its position, caught between powerful neighbors. But the country’s most perpetual nemesis has been the one with whom it shares not only the longest border but also the most history and culture—its larger, more aggressive, estranged brother from the same mother.

Russia and Ukraine trace the origins of their two civilizations to a common ancestor, the flourishing...

Ukrainians like to point out that his son Yaroslav the Wise built Kyiv’s iconic St. Sophia Cathedral in 1037, when Moscow was little more than a forest by the Volga River.

But geography was never in Ukraine’s favor. Kyivan Rus was destroyed in the thirteenth century by brutal Mongols riding southwest from the Urals across the indefensible landscape of the steppe, led by Batu Khan, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan. After a long siege, the invaders massacred Kyiv’s population, burned hundreds of churches, and razed its city walls.

In the wake of that massive destruction, as Russians tell it, the refugees of Kyivan Rus’s early Slavic society migrated to ...

In the Ukrainian version, their culture quietly continued to grow where it was first planted, in the rich black soil of t...

for centuries despite the successive layers of foreigners who tried to lay claim to it, from Mongols to Poles to Turk...

Over the last millennium, the country’s hopes for self-rule rose and fell three times: in the seventeenth-century rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks, stubbornly autonomous warrior settlers of the steppes; in the bloody Ukrainian civil war following Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; and again after a brief, tragically misguided alliance with Nazi occupiers during World War II.

As Anna Reid wrote in her history of Ukraine, Borderland, Ukraine’s rebellions have long been “nasty, brutish, and above all short.”

As dark as Ukraine’s history has been, its greatest litany of horrors arguably came in just the last century or so of Russian hegemony. In World War I, 3.5 million Ukrainians were conscripted to fight for their Russian rulers.

Even after Bolshevism swept Russia and pulled the country out of the war, a three-way conflict raged for years in Ukraine among the country’s own independence fighters, the “Whites,” who remained loyal to Russia’s czarist regime, and the socialist army of Vladimir Lenin.

Soldiers and bandits on all sides committed atrocities against civilians, including many of the Jewish-targeted pogroms that have made “Cossack” synonymous with “murderer” in much of the global Jewish diaspora.

In total, about 1.5 million Ukrainians died in the violent years between 1914 and 1921.

The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”

The starvation began through simple exploitation: Ukraine’s fertile black soil offered a tempting breadbasket for Russia. During its own civil war from 1917 to 1922, Russia seized as much grain as it could at gunpoint to alleviate its own wartime food shortages.

Lenin wrote in a telegram to Soviet forces in Ukraine in 1918. The secret police force known as the KGB, initially called the Cheka and then the OGPU, was formed in part to find and take grain from Ukrainian peasants by whatever means necessary.

When American Relief Administration workers were sent to Russia to help relieve the food crisis, Soviet forces kept them out of Ukraine, obscuring the fact that it was Ukrainians who were experiencing the worst of the shortages.

By 1932, starvation had become a far more purposeful Soviet tool of control. Moscow, now under the rule of Joseph Stalin, had imposed agricultural collectivization, moving peasants off the land they ha...

At the same time, the most prosperous peasants, known as kulaks, were branded as class traitors and subjected to e...

They searched systematically, using hooked and spiked poles to dig behind walls, under floorboards, and even in the earth outside homes in search of hidden food. When they found it, they piled the confiscated grain in locked warehouses. OGPU guards patrolled fields, shooting scavengers on sight.

Peasants responded with scattered resistance, butchering their livestock rather than give it to collective farms and taking up arms in guerrilla bands.

The Soviet government restricted travel, preventing hungry peasants from fleeing to other regions or countries. Bodies piled up in railway stations and along roads.

The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.

Roughly 13 percent of Ukraine’s population at the time died, but no Ukrainian survived the period untouched by the trauma. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine relatives in the next decade’s Holocaust and went on to coi...

“This is not simply a case of mass murder,” Lemkin said. “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals on...

Ukraine’s greatest misfortune, aside from finding itself in Russia’s inescapable shadow, was that it was destined to serve as the battlefield between East and West.

World War II was no exception. Like a bloody rerun of the country’s civil war from two decades earlier, Hitler’s war with Russia’s Red Army split Ukraine into three warring sides: those supporting the Nazis in an ill-fated hope of a life better than the one under Stalin, those conscripted into the Soviet forces, and a small faction fighting in vain for an independent Ukraine.

When Hitler seized Poland in 1939, the region of western Ukraine known as Galicia that had until then been under Polish control suddenly fell to Moscow.

Stalin and his Ukrainian Communist Party subordinate Nikita Khrushchev wasted no time in purging the region of anyone who might possibly fight the Soviet Union’s annexation: farmers who resisted collectivization, Poles, Jews, lawyers, priests, and government officials.

Between 800,000 and 1.6 million people were arrested and deported from western Ukraine to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as much ...

In the years that followed, the Nazis took their turn brutalizing Ukraine. As Hitler’s army marched east, SS troops followed, murdering as many Jewish civilians as they could find, killing them mostly with firing squads and dumping bodies in mass graves rather than bothering with trains to concentration camps.

Ukrainians who had welcomed the Germans and even aided in the Holocaust’s slaughter were rewarded with a policy that treated all Slavs, Russians, and Ukrainians alike, as Untermenschen.

The Nazis rounded up 2.8 million Soviet citizens, more than 2 million of whom where Ukrainian, and shipped them to Germany to...

In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.

In the postwar decades that followed, Moscow’s treatment of Ukraine settled into a slower-burning repression of a subjugated state.

In the 1950s, through the last years of Stalin’s terror and the rise of Khrushchev to take his place, more Ukrainians were sent to the U.S.S....

The 1980s and the rise of Gorbachev would lay the groundwork, after eight hundred years, for Ukrainian independence. But not before giving Ukraine one more lasting keepsake of its Soviet rule.

On the night of April 25, 1986, engineers were conducting a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near the northern Ukrainian town of Pripyat, population fifty thousand. The experiment was designed to check how long the reactor would continue to function in the case of a total electric failure.

Just after midnight, operators turned off the system that would cool the reactor core with water in the case of an emergency and initiated a power shutdown.

But at 1:23 a.m., a massive eruption—perhaps caused by a sudden buildup of steam or perhaps a nuclear explosion that subsequently triggered that steam blowup—tore through the plant, rupturing the reactor core and killing two engineers. A jet of radioactive material immediately shot more than three thousand feet in the air.

Firemen rushed to the scene to extinguish the plant’s burning roofs, many unwittingly receiving fatal doses of radioactivity. But no public warning went out to the citizens of nearby Pripyat, where people went about their Saturday routines unaware of the nuclear fallout spewing from the meltdown just a few miles down the river.

For weeks after, Moscow-based state news agencies made no mention of the ongoing disaster. Nor did Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade.

They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

“Ukraine’s freedom has not yet perished, nor has her glory,” they sang. “We will not allow others to rule in our motherland.” In my first hour in Ukraine, I felt I had stepped into the buzzing epicenter of a postrevolutionary nation at war.

After centuries of bloody fighting for its independence, Ukraine’s liberation had originally arrived in 1991, almost by accident. With the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, a stunned Ukrainian parliament voted to become a sovereign nation, with only the far eastern region of Donetsk, the most ethnically Russian slice of the country, opposing the decision.

But for the decades that followed, Moscow maintained a powerful influence over Ukraine, and the two countries transitioned in tandem from communism to kleptocracy.