An exercise of the Russian army today. Photo: Russian Ministry of Defense
Preparedness for fear of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of war continues today (Tuesday) in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the Belarusian hackers’ organization has announced that it has carried out a cyber attack on Belarus’s national railway company in an attempt to disrupt train traffic bringing Russian forces into the country.
The sending of troops to Belarus comes when there are more than one hundred thousand Russian soldiers on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Russia has in recent days begun sending troops into Belarus claiming that it and the regime of dictator Alexander Lukashenko are preparing to hold an exercise there, however, the West fears that Putin actually plans to invade Ukraine from Belarus.
The hacker group that issued the announcement of the attack on the systems in Belarus calls itself the “Belarusian Partisan Cyber Fighters”. According to team members, they flooded several servers, databases and stations, and managed to disrupt ticket sales.
The group said that the attack was carried out yesterday, and that it is now working on repairing the faults it caused – because it does not want to disrupt the daily routine of innocent passengers. The state-owned Belarusian railway company announced yesterday that “its website is not accessible to the public and that ticket sales have been stopped for technical reasons.”
A spokeswoman for the hackers’ organization, Juliana Shmetovetz, who operates from New York, claimed that the attack mainly affected freight trains: “We hope that the Russian forces have been hit, but we still do not know for sure.”
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden tonight claimed at the end of a virtual conference with European leaders that there was “complete consensus” between the leaders regarding the response to Russia. The meeting was attended by the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the European Union, as well as the secretary general. NATO Jens Stoltenberg.
At the end of the meeting Biden again threatened Russia with “severe and unprecedented sanctions if it dared to invade Ukraine”, claiming that the conference was “very, very, very good”.