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Russian soldiers appear to be heavily relying on their personal cellphones to conduct military operations in Ukraine, using them for tasks like coordinating strikes and navigating the battlefield.
Former US military officers say this trend underscores a lack of secure military communication options or discipline and leaves Russian soldiers vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. Kyiv has previously used cellular data to then launch deadly strikes on Moscow’s positions.
Recognizing the problem, the Russian government is actively working to clamp down on this trend. Its lower house of parliament, the State Duma, recently proposed an amendment that would allow its soldiers to be punished for using their personal phones while fighting in Ukraine.
“Wearing gadgets while serving in a special operation zone will be considered a gross disciplinary offense,” Russian state media reported on Monday, saying “this follows from the amendments supported by the State Duma Committee on Defense.”
According to the conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank, the amendment has widely been criticized by Russian military bloggers, who suggest that punishing soldiers for using their phones would interfere with battlefield operations, logistics, and command and control given the extensive use of personal devices on the battlefield.
The analysts wrote in an assessment Tuesday that “Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian servicemembers significantly rely on their personal devices to transmit target coordinates to call for fire from Russian artillerymen and drone operators, to navigate frontline areas, and to coordinate between units.”
The dangers of personal phones
Dan Rice, a former US Army artillery officer who previously served as a special advisor to Ukrainian military leadership, said relying on phones speaks to a shortage of adequate, secure military communications for Russian soldiers.
This sort of thing has long been a problem for the Russians. “Realistically, the Russian military not enforcing ‘no cellphone use’ is because they will receive tremendous backlash,” Rice, now the president of American University Kyiv, told Business Insider. “So they allow it, knowing use of unsecure civilian cellphones will result in more Russian deaths and mission failures.”
Mark Cancian, a defense expert and retired US Marine Corps colonel, said the ideal thing to do is to use custom-designed — and highly secure — military systems for communications. But this is expensive, whereas everyone already has their mobile phone, making that an attractive option, even if it’s risky.
“This behavior says two things about the Russian army. On the one hand, it is adapting to circumstances on the battlefield, using civilian applications where military applications are not working,” Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told BI.
“On the other hand,” he said, “there are a lot of vulnerabilities which the Ukrainians are certainly exploiting.”
For instance, Ukraine can pinpoint the location of a Russian soldier through their cellular data. Multiple phones being used in a general area could give away larger troop activity, making it a possible strike option for Kyiv.
One such incident occurred at the very end of 2022, when Ukraine launched a devastating precision strike against Russian troops gathered in Makiivka, in the eastern Donbas region. Moscow then blamed the high death toll on its own soldiers, saying that Kyiv found their location thanks to their cellular data. There might have been other contributing factors, though.
The other risk for Russia, Cancian explained, is that soldiers will send information across channels unencrypted, leaving the data vulnerable to interception by Ukrainian forces. He said that even though there are encryption apps are available, troops are sometimes just sloppy.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, regularly publishes audio of purported interceptions from calls made by Russian soldiers. However, Russia is not alone in its cellphone usage; Kyiv’s forces have also used their mobile devices during the war. But Moscow is supposed to be at a higher level as a major power.
With both sides using enemy phones to aid in their targeting, US Army officers have been warning American troops of the dangers that these personal devices could bring to the battlefield.
“It’s extremely difficult to get the troops to give up their phones and internet devices because this generation of young people has organized their lives around their phones and the connections that the phones can bring,” Cancian said.
“The United States military will face these same challenges in its next conflict,” he added.
