US indicts Russian intelligence officials
6/9/2024 6:13
The U.S. on Thursday
charged five Russian intelligence officials and a Russian
civilian with conspiring to launch cyberattacks against Ukraine
and its allies in a bid to hobble Ukraine.
In a revised indictment unsealed on Thursday, the Justice
Department said a cyber unit of Russia's military intelligence
agency conducted "large-scale cyber operations" starting as far
back as 2020, before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The original indictment, filed in June in the U.S. District
Court for the District of Maryland, only named a single
defendant: Amin Stigal.
It accused him of conspiring with Russia's military
intelligence agency, known as the Main Intelligence Directorate
of the General Staff, or GRU, to launch cyber attacks against
computer systems in Ukraine and other countries, including a
computer network maintained by an unnamed U.S. agency in
Maryland.
Thursday's news comes just one day after the U.S. took
several legal actions against Russia to combat alleged efforts
to meddle in the 2024 presidential elections, including charging
two employees of the Russian state media network RT and
sanctioning RT and its top network editor.
It also came on the same day that the Justice Department
announced it had secured two indictments against Russian TV
contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife over sanctions violations
and money laundering.
Earlier on Thursday, intelligence agencies in the U.S. and
the United Kingdom warned that a cyber espionage group located
within Russia's GRU known as "Unit 29155" was destructively
targeting critical national infrastructure.
Unit 29155, which is the group at the heart of Thursday's
indictment, is a covert part of the GRU which carries out
subversion, sabotage and assassination missions outside Russia,
Western officials told Reuters.
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