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It was only three months ago that world leaders met at the Glasgow climate summit and made ambitious pledges to reduce fossil fuel use. The perils of a warming planet are no less calamitous now, but the debate about the critically important transition to renewable energy has taken a back seat to energy security as Russia Europes largest energy supplier threatens to start a major confrontation with the West over Ukraine while oil prices are climbing toward $100 a barrel.

For more than a decade, policy discussions in Europe and beyond about cutting back on gas, oil and coal emphasized safety and the environment, at the expense of financial and economic considerations, said Lucia van Geuns, a strategic energy adviser at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies. Now, its the reverse.

Gas prices became very high, and all of a sudden security of supply and price became the main subject of public debate, she said.

The renewed emphasis on energy independence and national security may encourage policymakers to backslide on efforts to decrease the use of fossil fuels that pump deadly greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Already, skyrocketing prices have spurred additional production and consumption of fuels that contribute to global warming. Coal imports to the European Union in January rose more than 56 percent from the previous year.

In Britain, the Coal Authority gave a mine in Wales permission last month to increase output by 40 million tons over the next two decades. In Australia, there are plans to open or expand more coking coal mines. And China, which has traditionally made energy security a priority, has further stepped up its coal production and approved three new billion-dollar coal mines this week.

Get your rig count up, Jennifer Granholm, the U.S. energy secretary, said in December, urging American oil producers to raise their output. Shale companies in Oklahoma, Colorado and other states are looking to resurrect drilling that had ceased because there is suddenly money to be made. And this month, Exxon Mobil announced plans to increase spending on new oil wells and other projects.

Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, warned that high energy prices could lead to more exploration of traditional fossil fuels. Governments will want to deprioritize renewables and sustainables, which would be exactly the wrong response, he said.

Europes transition to sustainable energy has always been an intricate calculus, requiring it to back away from the dirtiest fossil fuel like coal, while still working with gas and oil producers to power homes, cars and factories until better alternatives are available.

For Germany, dependency on Russian gas has been an integral part of its environmental blueprint for many years. Plans for the first direct pipeline between the two countries, Nord Stream 1, started in 1997. A leader in the push to reduce carbon emissions, Berlin has moved to shutter coal mines and nuclear power plants, after the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. The idea was that Russian gas would supply the needed fuel during the yearslong transition to cleaner energy sources. Two-thirds of the gas Germany burned last year came from Russia.

Future plans called for even more gas to be delivered through Nord Stream 2, a new 746-mile pipeline under the Baltic Sea that directly links Russia to northeastern Germany.

On Tuesday, after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognized two breakaway republics in Ukraine and mobilized forces, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany halted final regulatory review of the $11 billion pipeline, which was completed last year.

I dont think the threat from Russia is outweighing the threat of climate change, and I dont see coal mines opening up across Europe, said James Nixey, director of the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, a research organization in London.

Certainly, the path of energy transition has never been clear. Five climate summits have taken place over the past 30 years, and progress has always fallen short. This latest setback may just be the latest in a long series of halfway measures and setbacks.

Still, without a more comprehensive strategy to wean itself off gas, Europe wont be able to accomplish its goal of reducing emissions 55 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, or to reach the Glasgow summits target of cutting net greenhouse gases to zero by 2050.

As Mr. Nixey acknowledged, this debate is changing as leaders are forced to acknowledge the downsides of dependency on Russian energy.

A rising concern. Russias attack on Ukraine could cause dizzying spikes in prices for energyand food and could spook investors. Theeconomic damage from supply disruptions and economic sanctions would be severe in some countries and industries and unnoticed in others.

The cost of energy. Oil prices already are the highest since 2014, and they have risen as the conflict has escalated. Russia is the third-largest producer of oil, providing roughly one of every 10 barrels the global economy consumes.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the worlds largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctionsdesigned to restrict Russias access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

Even in Germany, where the progressive Greens have gained a more influential voice in the government, there has been a shift in tone.

This month, Robert Habeck, Germanys new minister for the economy and climate change and a member of the Greens, said events had underscored the need to diversify supplies. We need to act here and secure ourselves better, he said. If we dont, we will become a pawn in the game.

Energy prices started to climb before Mr. Putin began massing troops on Ukraines eastern border, as countries emerged from pandemic closures and demand shot up.

But as Mr. Putin moved aggressively against Ukraine and energy prices soared further, the political and strategic vulnerabilities presented by Russias control of so much of Europes supply took center stage.

Europe is quite dependent on Russian gas and oil, and this is unsustainable, said Sarah E. Mendelson, the head of Carnegie Mellons Heinz College in Washington. She added that the United States and its European allies had not focused enough on energy independence in recent years.

Overall, Europe gets more than a third of its natural gas and 25 percent of its oil from Russia. Deliveries have slowed significantly in recent months, while reserves in Europe have fallen to just 31 percent of capacity.

For critics of the European Unions climate policies, the sudden focus away from greenhouse gas emissions and on existing fuel reserves is validating.

Arkadiusz Siekaniec, vice president of the Trade Union of Miners in Poland, has long argued that the European Unions push to end coal production on the continent was folly. But now he hopes that others may come around to his point of view.

The climate policy is a suicidal mission that could leave the entire region overly dependent on Russian fuel, Mr. Siekaniec said last week as American troops landed in his country. It threatens the economy as well as the citizens of Europe and Poland.

For Mateusz Garus, a blacksmith at Jankowice, a coal mine in Upper Silesia, the heart of coal country, politics and not climate change are driving policy. We will destroy the power sector, he said, and we will be dependent on others like Russia.

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Russian Conflict in Ukraine is Reshaping the Climate Debate - The New York Times

Central to much of the skepticism regarding Americas involvement in the crisis in Ukraine is the question, Who are we?

Who are we, with our long history of invasions and interventions, to lecture Vladimir Putin about respecting national sovereignty and international law? Who are we, with our domestic record of slavery and discrimination, our foreign record of supporting friendly dictators, and the ongoing injustices of American life, to hold ourselves up as paragons of freedom and human rights? Who are we, after 198 years of the Monroe Doctrine, to try to stop Russia from delineating its own sphere of influence? Who are we, with our habitual ignorance, to meddle in faraway disputes about which we know so little?

Such questions are often put by people on the left, but theres a powerful strain of the same thinking on the right. When Bill OReilly asked Donald Trump in 2017 how he could respect Putin when the Russian president is a killer, the president replied: Weve got a lot of killers. What, you think our countrys so innocent?

Trump aside, theres something intrinsically virtuous about this kind of thinking: Who is it who tells us to first cast out the beam in our own eye before we cast out the mote in the eye of another? Countries, like people, are better off when they proceed with more self-awareness, less moral arrogance, greater intellectual humility and an innate respect for the reality of unintended consequences.

But neither people nor countries are well served by the defects of those virtues: self-awareness that becomes a recipe for personal or policy paralysis, intellectual humility that leads to moral confusion, a fear of unknown risks that becomes an asset to an enemy. These are some of the deeper risks we now face in the contest with the Kremlin.

Why has Putin chosen this moment to make his move on Ukraine? As many have pointed out, Russia is an objectively weak state Upper Volta with nuclear weapons, as someone once quipped with a nominal G.D.P. smaller than that of South Korea. Outside of energy, minerals and second-rate military equipment, it produces almost nothing that outsiders want: no Russian iPhone, Lexus or Fauda. Putins problem with Ukraine, starting with the Maidan uprising of 2014, is that Ukrainians want nothing to do with him. If he were a Disney character, hed be Rapunzels mother.

But Putin has advantages his opponents dont, which go beyond the correlation of military forces in the Donbas.

One advantage is the correlation of appetites: Putin wants Ukraine under his thumb much more than the West wants to keep Ukraine in its orbit, and hes willing to pay a higher price to get it. Another advantage is the correlation of attention spans: Putin has methodically set his sights on returning Ukraine to his fold since at least 2004. For the West, Ukraine is another complex crisis of which it will eventually tire. A third advantage is the correlation of wills: Putin wants to change the geopolitical order of Europe and is prepared to take large risks to do it. The Biden administration wants to preserve a shaky and increasingly lifeless status quo. Fortune tends to favor the bold.

But Putins greatest advantage is self-belief. Serious historians may scoff at his elaborate historical theories about Ukraines nonexistence as a true state. But he believes it, or at least he makes a convincing show of it. What, really, does the West believe about Ukraine, other than that it would be a shame, and scary, if Putin were to swallow large chunks of it? Certainly nothing worth fighting for.

Most of us understand that history has a way of turning into myth, but the reverse can also be true: Myths have a way of making history. Fortune also tends to favor fervent believers.

The United States used to have self-belief. Our civilization, multiple generations of Americans believed, represented human progress. Our political ideals about the rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, democratic governance were ideals for all people, including those beyond our borders. Our literature spoke to the universal human experience; our music to the universal soul. When we fought wars, it was for grand moral purposes, not avaricious aims. Even our worst blunders, as in Vietnam, stemmed from defensible principles. Our sins were real and numerous, but they were correctable flaws, not systemic features.

It goes without saying that this self-belief like all belief was a mixture of truth and conceit, idealism and hubris, vision and blindness. It led us to make all sorts of errors, the acute awareness of which has become the dominant strain of our intellectual life. But it also led us to our great triumphs: Yorktown and Appomattox; the 13th and 19th Amendments; the Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Marshall Plan and PEPFAR.

These victories were not the result of asking, Who are we? They came about by asking, Who but us? In the crisis of Ukraine, which is really a crisis of the West, we might start asking the second question a little more often than the first.

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Opinion | This Is a Moment for America to Believe in Itself Again - The New York Times

As their standoff over Ukraine continues, Moscow and Washington are playing an increasingly high-stakes, increasingly complex game of signaling to try to secure their aims without firing a shot.

Traditional diplomacy is just one component of this dance. Troop movements, sanctions warnings and legislation, embassy closures, leader summits, and intelligence leaks are all aimed, in part, at proving each countrys willingness to carry out certain threats or accept certain risks.

It is a form of high-stakes negotiation, conducted in actions as much as words, meant to settle the future of Europe just as conclusively as if decided by war, by telegraphing how a conflict would play out rather than waging it directly.

Russia, by shifting thousands of troops from its far east to Ukraines border, hopes to convince Washington and Kyiv that it is willing to endure a major war to secure its demands by force, so those countries are better off meeting Russian demands peacefully.

The Biden administration, by stating that a Russian invasion may be imminent, even closing its embassy in Kyiv, and vowing economic retaliation, signals that Moscow cannot expect desperate American concessions, making further escalation less worthwhile.

There have been a flurry of such gestures. Russia held Black Sea naval exercises, implying it could close off trade waters. President Biden issued joint statements with European leaders, conveying that they are not balking at American sanctions threats that would harm Europe, too.

But the more both sides try to make their threats credible, for example by relocating troops, the more they heighten the risk of a miscalculation that could careen out of control.

Each side also cultivates ambiguity about what it will or will not accept, and will or will not do, in hopes of forcing its adversary to prepare for all eventualities, spreading its energies thin.

The White House has said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could decide this week whether to invade, deflating Moscows careful murkiness, while also demonstrating, especially to cautious Europeans, that any invasion would be driven by Russia, rather than in response to some outside provocation.

On Tuesday, Moscow moved to recreate confusion, withdrawing a handful of forces even as it continued nearby war games and as Mr. Putin accused Ukraine of genocide against its native Russophone minority. By feinting simultaneously toward de-escalation and invasion on Tuesday, Moscow builds pressure on the West to prepare for both.

This dynamic is very volatile, said Keren Yarhi-Milo, a Columbia University political scientist who studies how countries signal and maneuver amid crises.

A range of factors particular to this crisis, she added differing political cultures, multiple audiences, rising uncertainty makes the signaling in this case very, very difficult.

The result is a diplomatic cacophony nearly as difficult to navigate as war itself, with stakes just as high.

With their positioning, Moscow and Washington are struggling to resolve two outstanding questions about a possible conflict, each to their benefit.

Would a Russian invasion bring Moscow more reward than downside?

And, would the West have less tolerance than Russia for the pain of Mr. Bidens proposed sanctions, and abandon them?

If Moscow can convince Washington that the answer to both is yes, then Mr. Biden and his allies would, in theory, be forced to conclude that they are better off delivering whatever concessions will keep Russia from launching a war.

But if Washington can persuade Moscow that both answers are no, then Mr. Putin will have every incentive to cut his losses and step back from the brink.

Mr. Putin has been ambiguous about what he would consider a successful invasion of Ukraine. And moves like his recent visit to China or his ambassadors bluster, shrugging off sanctions, signal that he is ready and able to bear the foreseeable costs.

Of course, if war were really so advantageous, it could have already begun, one of many hints that Mr. Putin may be partly bluffing, although by how much is impossible to say.

Feb. 15, 2022, 5:59 p.m. ET

Mr. Biden, for his part, has sent weapons to Ukraine, a message that he would make any conflict more painful for Russia, and has laid out retaliatory sanctions in detail. He has implied Western unity over sanctions that may be just as much a bluff as Mr. Putins war talk.

His administration has also publicized what it says are Russian plans to fake a justification for war, implying that any such ploy would be quickly unmasked, making it less attractive.

But threats and bluffs work best when they are backed up by action, increasing the risk of a war that neither side may truly want.

And these efforts are complicated by each sides need to persuade multiple audiences of contradictory things.

Mr. Biden must persuade Mr. Putin that Western sanctions would be automatic and severe, while also convincing Europeans, who would bear much of the cost, that sanctions would not hit them too hard or be carried out without their consent.

Similarly, Mr. Putin is seeking to position himself to Western leaders as ready for war, while convincing war-averse Russian citizens that he is being dragged into one, for example with false claims of American and Ukrainian aggression.

But Western leaders often struggle to differentiate which statements Mr. Putin intends them to take seriously and which he expects them to ignore as bluster for domestic consumption, Christopher Bort, a former U.S. intelligence official, warned in an essay for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Kremlins torrent of falsehoods over Ukraine, Mr. Bort added, risks persuading Western leaders that Moscows diplomatic entrees can be ignored as cover for an invasion it has already decided to launch potentially foreclosing an offramp from war.

Your system is much more open than ours, said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. That produces a lot of misunderstanding.

Because Kremlin decision-making is dominated by a handful of intelligence and military officials, Mr. Gabuev said, there is a tendency to assume that Washington operates the same way.

Offhand comments by American military officers are given special weight in Moscow, while lawmakers who drive much of Washingtons politics are ignored.

The Kremlins position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATOs eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscows growing military presence on the Ukrainian border was a response to Ukraines deepening partnership with the alliance.

Such cultural misunderstandings, Mr. Gabuev added, have become considerably worse in recent years, as Washington and Moscow have expelled one anothers diplomats and ended many unofficial exchanges, hampering their visibility into one anothers politics.

This is not always dangerous. Many in Moscow, assuming that Mr. Biden operates like Mr. Putin, believe that Washington has ginned up the appearance of conflict with the intention of declaring a false American victory when the more reasonable Mr. Putin rolls back the deployments he has insisted are defensive, Mr. Gabuev said.

That misunderstanding significantly eases Mr. Putins option to withdraw. And many in Russia view the West as the aggressor, and so would take an averted conflict as Mr. Putin triumphing, not surrendering.

Still, the less Washington and Moscow understand one another, the harder it will be for them to decipher each others signals and anticipate each others reactions.

The Russian presidents circle of trust has consolidated over time, insulating him from information that does not fit with his prior beliefs, the scholars Adam E. Casey and Seva Gunitsky wrote in Foreign Affairs.

As Mr. Putins inner circle has shrunk, they wrote, it has grown dominated by yes-men who tell him what they think he wants to hear and by security service leaders who tend to be hawkish and distrustful toward the West.

He would hardly be alone in this: research finds that strongmen leaders like him are, for just this reason, likelier to start wars and likelier to lose them.

So what Washington takes as Russian brinksmanship or bluffing, for example shrugging off sanctions threats or implying that some Ukrainians would welcome Russian liberators, may reflect sincere belief due to political dysfunction.

Information flows to Putin are choppy at best, and sanctions are a highly technical topic that arent even well understood in Washington, said Eddie Fishman, a top sanctions policy official in the Obama administration.

So far, both sides have avoided any obvious misreadings of each other. This may stem in part from the length of the crisis, which has allowed each capital to repeatedly telegraph its intentions and capabilities.

But that same factor time also creates more opportunities for a mistake as each side escalates.

Every day that were not resolving it, we are increasing the percentage chance that something will go wrong, said Dr. Yarhi-Milo, the international relations scholar.

Were testing the nerves of a lot of people at the same time, she added. It can take a really bad turn very quickly.

Continue reading here:
On Ukraine, U.S. and Russia Wage Signaling War to Avert Actual War - The New York Times

The future of NATO, the transatlantic security alliance, is at the centre of the standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine.

Moscow wants guarantees that its neighbour, a former Soviet state, will be permanently barred from joining the United States-led alliance. It has also called for NATO to cease all military activity in Eastern Europe, blaming it for undermining security in the region.

But Western leaders have rejected those demands. They have argued the Kremlin cannot be allowed an effective veto on Kyivs foreign policy decisions and defended NATOs open door policy, which grants any European nation the right to ask to join.

Amid the deadlock, here are five things you need to know about NATO:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949, in the aftermath of World War II.

The alliance was initially part of an effort by the US and its European allies to deter any expansion of the then-Soviet Union (USSR) and reduce the possibility of conflict on the continent by encouraging greater political integration between its powers.

In the decades since, it has steadily expanded its orbit, bringing a swathe of central and eastern European states into its ranks after the USSR collapsed.

This enlargement has troubled Moscow, which is wary of the alliance edging ever closer to its borders and hemming it in from the West.

NATO is comprised of 30 member states.

Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the US were its founding members.

The newest member state is North Macedonia, which joined in 2020.

Three so-called partner countries Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia have declared their aspirations to become part of the alliance, which says its purpose is to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means.

Ukraine has repeatedly stated its intention to become a NATO member state an objective that is written into the countrys constitution.

Joining the alliance would boost Ukraines defensive strength, because of NATOs principle of collective defence. That principle set out by Article 5 in NATOs founding treaty means an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies, committing them to protect one another.

In 2008, NATO leaders promised Ukraine it would one day be given the opportunity to join the alliance. But despite deepening cooperation in the years since, there is thought to be little chance of that happening any time soon.

Western powers are yet to be convinced Kyiv has done enough work to eradicate corruption and meet the other political, economic and military criteria required to enter the alliance, as set out in its 1995 Study on Enlargement.

NATOs members may also be wary of Ukraine joining their ranks while tensions with Moscow remain high, as such a move could draw the alliance into a direct conflict with Russia in the event it launches an attack, because of the collective defence principle.

On Monday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the issue was not on the agenda following talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, despite Ukraines president restating his countrys membership ambition.

All 30 NATO allies must unanimously approve a new country becoming part of the alliance.

Putin has said it is now time for NATOs waves of expansion to be reversed and for the alliance to guarantee that Ukraine never be allowed to become a member.

He argues that the West has betrayed Moscow by breaking alleged verbal commitments made at the end of the Cold War that NATO would not expand eastwards. The alliance denies that any such promises were made.

In a show of force, Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops around Ukraines borders and sent sweeping security demands to Washington and the Brussels-headquartered alliance.

In response, NATO, the US and its European allies have been scrambling to negotiate with Moscow and de-escalate the situation.

But the high-stakes diplomatic efforts have borne little success. Washington and NATO have rejected the Kremlins central demands that the alliance cease all military activity in Eastern Europe and Ukraine be barred from membership while Russia has refused to budge on its requests.

As tensions continue to simmer, Western leaders, including US President Joe Biden, have made clear they will not send troops to defend Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion.

But several of Kyivs allies in NATO, with the exception of Germany, have supplied Kyiv with weapons as it ramps up preparations to repel a potential incursion. Meanwhile, NATO has moved to reinforce its eastern flank with additional troops and military hardware.

Link:
NATO and the Ukraine-Russia crisis: Five key things to know - Al Jazeera English

The outage hit the website for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, shown here during a ceremony last October. Ukrainian Defense Ministry/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images hide caption

The outage hit the website for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, shown here during a ceremony last October.

WASHINGTON Amid heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine, multiple Ukrainian government websites and banking systems were temporarily inaccessible to users Tuesday afternoon. But so far it remains unclear who was behind the disruption, and the overall intent.

The outage, which impacted the website of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the Armed Services as well as two large Ukrainian banks, Privatbank and Oschadbank, was the result of a digital denial of service attack, according to multiple Ukrainian government agencies.

The reports quickly generated concern, especially given ongoing U.S. government warnings that Russia might launch a massive cyberattack impacting critical infrastructure in Ukraine, such as communications or banking, prior to an invasion.

Digital attackers targeted the organizations' online services to prevent them from functioning properly, but the intrusion fell well short of any kind of massive cyberattack which would typically involve visible manipulation of content on the websites, penetration of servers, or apparent theft or destruction of data or devices.

The Defense Ministry shared in a tweet that it received an unusually high volume of requests to load the website, suggesting attackers were flooding the servers with illegitimate requests in an attempt to overload them and prevent citizens from accessing the site.

The State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine, which was leading a recent investigation into a website defacement and data destruction campaign linked to Russian hackers last month, published a statement claiming "there is a powerful DDoS attack on a number of information resources of Ukraine," though it also noted that as of Tuesday evening, banking services have already been restored.

There were also reports from the Ukrainian Cyber Police on Tuesday morning debunking a wave of fake SMS messages sent to Ukrainian citizens claiming ATM services were down.

Given that only a few organizations experienced disruptions and the outages were not long-lasting, the impact on Ukrainians' access to their banks and government websites seemed extremely limited. People in Ukraine posted tweets about still being able to access their bank accounts through ATMs, or by using their digital bank cards, and the government agencies were able to communicate with the world through social media during the outage.

But given the heightened tensions in the region and the looming threat of a Russian invasion, these kinds of attacks could have a bigger psychological impact.

Olena Prokopenko, a visiting fellow for the public policy think tank the German Marshall Fund and the co-founder of the Transatlantic Task Force on Ukraine, told NPR these kinds of digital attacks "have been our major concern" over the past few hours. "Hybrid warfare in action," she continued.

For the people of Ukraine, she said, there's some uncertainty because the government has not been communicating clearly about what to do in an emergency.

"People don't understand what to do in case of escalation, so they just choose to carry on, hoping that the military and the government will take care of things," Prokopenko said.

This attack, while rather unsophisticated and short-lived, could be one of the early salvos in a Russian invasion, though it hasn't yet been linked directly to Russia.

"Though we've anticipated disruptive Russian attacks against Ukraine, we've seen no evidence of responsibility at this time, and denial of service attacks are notoriously difficult to attribute," said John Hultquist, the vice president of intelligence analysis for the cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

Ukrainian citizens, however, have become used to regular digital attacks from Russia since at least 2014, often much more serious ones, including shutting off the power grid.

John Graham-Cumming, the Chief Technology Officer of Cloudflare, a company that specializes in defending against denial of service attacks, told NPR that his company has actually not seen a huge uptick in malicious traffic on Tuesday that has impacted its customers in Ukraine. The websites and banks impacted, however, are not Cloudflare customers, he said, and Graham-Cumming said it's possible attackers chose to avoid organizations protected by Cloudflare purposely.

Graham-Cumming noted a small uptick in broader attack traffic around lunchtime, but nothing "particularly noteworthy," as well as an increase in digital congestion across the Internet in Ukraine around midday, potentially suggesting an increase in internet searches.

Cybersecurity company Akamai also specializes in defending against denial of service attacks, though it had limited visibility into the attacks in Ukraine on Tuesday. Still, according to Akamai's Chief Security Officer, Boaz Gelbord, "In times of international conflict, DDoS is often the attack tool of choice of threat actors."

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Ukraine says government websites and banks were hit with denial of service attack - NPR