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The US Department of Commerce has decided to ban the use of products and services of the Russian cybersecurity and antivirus company “Kaspersky” in the United States, and has given American companies until September 29 to remove Kaspersky programs and products from their devices and replace them with other products.
This is not the first blow to Russian tech’s global influence. Over the past few years, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Russia has become “more digitally isolated” and more dependent on China in this area.
In an analytical report published on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, American analyst and cybersecurity expert Justin Sherman said that the United States and its partners must seize the political opportunities brought about by Russia’s increasing isolation and dependence on Chinese technology.
Russia’s position on the Internet began to shift in the late first decade and early second decade of the twentieth century, driven by concerns about the consequences of dependence on Western technology, particularly the potential for the West to use it for espionage, control, and revolution in Russia. The Kremlin’s “Internet awakening” was fueled by the role of Georgian bloggers during the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, the use of social media in the “Arab Spring” revolutions, and the 2011 protests against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s organization of the Internet.
In 2014, Putin announced the need to reduce Russia’s heavy reliance on foreign technology, and the Russian government subsequently introduced a series of policies aimed at finding local technological alternatives, with mixed results, as Russia made progress in developing an alternative operating system to the American Microsoft Windows system and set records for local software, while the “RosNano Nanotechnologies” company and the “Skolkovo Innovation Center”, which were once known as the “Silicon Valley of Russia”, collapsed; due to a combination of poor management, weak investment, corruption and insufficient local capabilities.
But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s increasing digital isolation has become a reality, although it is a desirable goal for Moscow. At the same time, the war in Russia has led to a serious brain drain from Russia, with more than 100,000 IT workers leaving by December 2022. The Russian Ministry of Digital Affairs has warned against conscription of technical workers into the military, who are currently exempted from the military. Western sanctions have also caused great harm to Russia in the field of electronic equipment, as Russia’s supply of technical equipment has now become “catastrophic”, and Russian security agencies have increasingly relied on purchasing electronic chips from other non-Western countries and dismantling household appliances such as refrigerators to obtain chips from her.
While digital isolation in Russia has become a growing reality, it has also become a target for the Kremlin. In 2022, the Ministry of Digital Technologies announced plans to transform Russia’s domestic software registry into a full-fledged app marketplace. Hospitals, nuclear power plants, and everything in between are increasingly using the Russian operating system Astra Linux, an alternative to Windows. The state has also established a center for testing the compatibility of Russian software with local devices and operating systems.
Russia has made some progress toward technological independence, but it has shifted some of its digital dependence to China. China and Hong Kong’s exports of U.S. chips to Russia increased by $51 million in 2021 and will rise to about $600 million in 2022, while some estimates suggest that China and Hong Kong accounted for about 90% of total chip exports to Russia from March 2021 to December 2022, and by 2023, China supplied about 90% of Russia’s total microelectronics imports. As
Smartphone companies “Xiaomi” and “Real Me” occupied first and second place in the Russian market in 2023, ahead of South Korea’s “Samsung” and the United States’ “Apple”.
Russia’s growing reliance on China creates political opportunities for the West, said Justin Sherman, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Governance Initiative, whose work focuses on the internet, governance and security, and the geopolitical dimensions of technology policy and strategy for Russia and India. The Kremlin’s long-standing goal through “import substitution” and domestic innovation policies has been to ensure that Russia does not become overly dependent on any one foreign country when it comes to digital, rather than phasing out Western technology and replacing it with Chinese technology. The fact is that Russian security analysts and technology policymakers remain concerned about reliance on China and are proposing policies to mitigate the risk of Chinese espionage… Sherman, founder and president of Global Cyber Strategies, a research and consulting firm, advises the United States and its partners to use publicly available intelligence sources to determine Russia’s specific demand for Chinese technology products and services, which can be obtained from many sources, including Russian cybersecurity conferences, public communications, and partnerships. Smartphones, computer applications, and operating systems.
This information can reveal how Chinese technology is used in specific areas and point out failure points. For example, Russia’s dependence on Chinese semiconductors has increased, and the Russian smartphone market has shifted from iPhones and Samsung phones to Chinese phones. Some of these Chinese products and services may have security vulnerabilities or weak encryption capabilities, which poses additional risks to Russia.
Analysts in the U.S. and its partner nations can also use open-source intelligence to understand Russia’s use of technologies such as the Astra Linux operating system, which is widely used by the Russian military and intelligence services and in which potential vulnerabilities could be widely exploited.
Finally, while the Kremlin may be pleased with its growing technological isolation and the construction of a Russian registry of operating systems and software, Russia’s growing appetite for Chinese technology could mean technological independence.
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