One year of war in Ukraine: Operators rebuild networks in the back of the army

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On February 24, 2022, as many Ukrainians were stuck in traffic jams trying to flee Kiev, Olena Lutsenko stayed in the city and watched at home as traffic on her network rapidly increased. Lutsenko manages Black Sea operations for backbone operator RETN, a Tier 2 operator with a total of 116,000 km of fiber links between Europe and Asia. "I got on the phone with my team in Ukraine and with the board of directors, and we discussed the coordinates for emergency measures," Lutsenko recalls.

The threat scenarios were little different from the classic risk matrix of a backbone operator, Lutsenko explains: severed fiber, rerouted traffic, securing the network against attacks, power and access to warehouses and the seven central hubs operated in Ukraine. But the situation was different after all. It was war.

"But the problems occur in potentiation and all at the same time, and often they are difficult to fix given the external circumstances." Air alerts, the danger of being bombed while repairing a pipe, curfews that shorten the times you can work.

Isolated from the world

Dmytro Kniaziev of DEPS, Ukraine's largest network components supplier, got in his car at five in the morning. "A friend had called me and I took my daughter and drove her to my parents' house in Butscha." He had thought, "hopefully this whole thing will pass quickly and we can sit it out." But Butscha, of all places, became one of the most contested areas, and it was there that the Russian army presumably committed horrific war crimes.

"After a short time, there was nothing, no electricity, no water, no stores and no Internet or telephone," Kniaziev says. "In those days," he says, he experienced firsthand what it meant to be cut off from the rest of the world. It was an unbearable situation, he says, to sit in his apartment or in a bomb shelter, separated from the usual stream of news, unable to keep in touch with family and friends, with no information about how many missiles were coming or whether the Russians had already won. The Russian attackers had targeted the communications infrastructure, recapitulated Oleksi Zinevych, managing director of Best, an Internet service provider (ISP) active in Butcha, Irpin and the Kiev region.

Kniaziev was able to slip back through the front lines to Kiev with his parents and daughter. He was lucky. Since then, he and originally 250 DEPS colleagues have been making sure that the country's 2,000 or so small and large providers are supplied with equipment. Kniaziev is product and marketing manager at DEPS. And what does a marketing manager do in wartime? Not much marketing, he says.

Resilience of people and networks

Researchers at the IP address allocation body RIPE NCC pointed to the enormous diversity of the Ukrainian network at one of their usual meetings with governments in Brussels in January. This, together with the large number of providers in Ukraine and the persistent repair work, has made the network in Ukraine resilient to a degree that many experts find astonishing and also admiring.

Not only is there no dominant player in the provider market, so the failure of one of them does not make too much of a difference. At the same time, international data traffic is handled by more than a dozen exchange nodes, as measurements by the Internet sensor network Atlas show. The most important finding for RIPE NCC executive director Hans Petter Holen is that Ukraine still has a "robust network" despite "conditions that are hard to imagine worse."

Like the war itself, the situation of the Internet in the country has changed, as far as Holen can tell based on Atlas measurements and based on reports from Ukrainian members: in the beginning, the shock of the invasion, in which many expected that the Ukrainian Internet would suffer massive damage. "That didn't happen," Holen says. "It was anything but assured in the beginning. It was the hard work and dedication of the network operators in Ukraine that kept the country online."

From Shock to War Routine

From autumn 2022 onwards, Ukraine was particularly affected by Russian attacks on the country's energy infrastructure. Time and again, as a direct result of Russian bombardments, Atlas sensors disappear from the map in Amsterdam to this day. "But we also see that later some things reappear online." One difference from the initial shock phase and the period leading up to May 2022, he said, is that network operators now not only put out fires, but have a little more time to plan.

For the technicians and the teams of the providers, it has become a daily routine to restore the destroyed networks, Kniaziev reports from Kiev. They are moving up behind the army to repair the damage caused by Russian artillery.

In March, after regaining the areas around Kiev, Sumy and Tchernihiv, repairs were carried out mainly there. From September to October, ISP teams passed through Kharkiv, and in November through Kherson. The damage is hard to quantify, Kniaziev says. $1.79 billion to rebuild destroyed telecommunications infrastructure was estimated by the International Telecommunication Union in a January damage report that was little advertised in deference to ITU member Russia. But the calculations only extend to mid-August 2022. Kniaziev points to the unimaginable scale of the destruction. Damaged networks in Kiev, Kharkiv, Sumy and Tchernihiv and the entire city of Donetsk were completely destroyed. "We are not talking about restoration here. We are talking about a whole city that has ceased to exist."

Thousands of base stations destroyed

A customer in Bachmut had carried out significant repair work between July and August supported by the Global Network Operator Group's KeepUkraineConnected initiative. Now there has been fighting around Bachmut for four months. The postings on the Facebook account of the local provider Elite-Line in Kramatorsk read like a war diary of network operators, a frustrating cycle of destruction, reconstruction and new destruction.

The figures in the ITU report also bear this out. The major provider Kyivstar (25 million mobile communications customers, 700,000 Internet customers) reported 3,000 repairs by 450 technicians in 110 cities for its broadband network - for the month of April 2022 alone. The third-largest Ukrainian mobile communications operator Lifecell sent out 30,000 repair teams in the first four and a half months, with 80 to 90 teams on the road every day. In total, the ITU report comes to 3700 destroyed base stations until August and 20 percent damage to the infrastructure.

Some network operators are trying to keep records, says Kniasiev, in the vague hope that at some point they will be able to claim compensation from Russia. At the moment, however, they have enough other problems.