Why Cyber Dogs Have Yet to Bark Loudly in Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine (Summer 2022)

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, pundits agreed that the ongoing crisis was likely to involve extensive cyber conflict. Some argued that cyber war would accompany traditional forms of warfare. Others claimed that cyber conflict would substitute for a physical conflict. However, the modest scale of Russia’s cyber attacks has fallen far short of these predictions. We explain this surprising situation by arguing that, while not directly causally related, cyber and conventional conflict are indirectly intertwined, through evolving macro-economic trends. The same factors that encourage modern states to integrate economically also increasingly cause them to compete over information rather than over territory.