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Russian soldiers appear to be making heavy use of personal cell phones in conducting military operations in Ukraine, using them for tasks such as coordinating attacks and navigating the battlefield.
Former U.S. military officers say the trend highlights a lack of secure military communications and discipline, making Russian soldiers vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks, after Kiev previously used cellphone data to launch deadly strikes on Moscow positions.
The Russian government is aware of this problem and is actively working to crack down on this trend. The State Duma, the lower house of the parliament, recently Allowing soldiers to be punished For using a personal mobile phone during fighting in Ukraine.
“Wearing the gadget while on duty in the special operations zone is considered a serious disciplinary violation,” Russian state media reported. report “This follows amendments supported by the State Duma’s Defense Committee,” he said on Monday.
The amendment has been widely criticized by Russian military bloggers, who argue that punishing soldiers for using mobile phones would undermine battlefield operations, logistics and command and control, given the widespread use of personal devices on the battlefield, according to conflict analysts at the Institute for War Studies think tank.
The analysts evaluation On Tuesday, “Russian military bloggers claimed that Russian soldiers are relying heavily on personal devices to request fire from Russian artillery and drone pilots, to move around frontline areas and to transmit target coordinates for coordination between units.”
The dangers of personal mobile phones
Dan Rice, a former U.S. Army artillery officer and one-time special adviser to Ukrainian military leaders, said the reliance on cellphones speaks to a lack of adequate, secure military communications for Russian soldiers.
This has been a long-standing problem for Russia. “Realistically, the Russian military doesn’t enforce the ‘cell phone ban’ because they would face a huge backlash,” Rice, now president of the American University in Kyiv, told Business Insider. “So they allow the use of unsecured civilian cell phones, knowing that their use will result in Russian deaths and mission failures.”
Ideally, communications would be handled using a custom-designed, highly secure military system, says Mark Cancian, a defense expert and former Marine Corps colonel, but that would be expensive, and the fact that everyone already has a cell phone makes that an attractive option, even with the risks.
“This action says two things about the Russian military. One is that it is using civilian applications to adapt to battlefield conditions where military applications won’t work,” Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.
“On the other hand, there are a lot of vulnerabilities that Ukraine is certainly exploiting,” he said.
For example, Ukraine can pinpoint the location of Russian soldiers through cell phone data, and the use of multiple cell phones over a wide area could reveal the activities of a large contingent, potentially opening up an offensive option for Kiev.
One such incident occurred in late 2022, when Ukraine launched a devastating precision strike against Russian forces massed at Makievka in the eastern Donbas region. Moscow subsequently blamed its own soldiers for the increased death toll, accusing Kiev of using Russian military mobile phone data to locate Russian troops, but there may have been other factors as well.
Another risk for Russia, Kancian explained, is that soldiers could send unencrypted information across channels, exposing it to interception by the Ukrainian military. Encryption apps are available, but soldiers sometimes get sloppy, he said.
The Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR regularly Allegedly intercepted audio The phone is protected from Russian soldiers’ calls. But Russia is not the only one using mobile phones. The Kiev army is also Using a mobile device That was the case during the war, but Moscow is supposed to be on a higher level as a great power.
With both sides using enemy cellphones to assist in targeting, U.S. Army officers are warning U.S. soldiers about the dangers these personal devices pose on the battlefield.
“This generation of young people has built their lives around cell phones and the connections they provide, so it’s very difficult to get soldiers to give up their cell phones and internet devices,” Cancian said.
“U.S. forces will face the same challenges in the next conflict,” he added.
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