You can't see it or touch it, but it's

vital to every aspect of decision making in warfare.

This invisible layer is the radio noise.

And hidden in the radio noise are signals.

We're going to look at three aspects of radio

in Ukraine, the interception of communications

between Russian soldiers--

--how broadcasters are using radio

to combat censorship online, and the mysterious silence

of a number station known as the Russian Lady.

Why would a 21st century Russian army

send so many unencrypted radio signals

on the battlefields of Ukraine?

And how can we confirm their legitimacy?

This, as far as we can tell, is a recording

of a Russian soldier in Ukraine, but the people who captured it

were far away and weren't using radio equipment directly.

A software-defined radio is a computer with a radio receiver

and an antenna attached.

It can pick up radio transmissions

across a wide range of frequencies at the same time.

The cheapest ones are about 30 pounds.

So you can watch a waterfall of radio signals

from across the spectrum and spot

one you're interested in, then choose exactly how you want

to decode the signal just with the click of a button,

no extra equipment required.

Connect it to the internet and, suddenly,

100s of people from around the world

can stream any radio signal your antenna can pick up.

And many people are very interested in monitoring them.

Couple those web servers with a chat room app like Discord,

and you can create an open-source intelligence

team of volunteers, which is what Boyan Malashev did.

My name is Boyan Malashev.

Well, Ukrainian Radio Watchers is a really brilliant community

that it's made by a lot of people

who give a lot of their time and their efforts

in trying to listen the Russian communications.

When the war could get so intensive,

many people actually started to join.

We were shared in platforms like Reddit and Twitter,

so many people started to understand

about us, started to join because most of them

wanted to get translations about what is happening.

And we had pretty active translators doing this.

I think in the server we have 100 translators.

Sometimes, I listen, and sometimes I record.

But the main thing I do in the server

and how I help the server is by developing the Discord server

and making the website.

The recordings and the main function of the community,

it's made by the people who are in it.

I do not know anything about radios and communications,

but it's important because we are dealing with war crimes;

we are dealing with deaths; we are

dealing with trying to help people who

are actually in war right now.

We heard how commanders and officers are arranging

airstrikes with locations.

We are trying to find the call signs of them.

The question of whether we can trust the recordings

is a bit of an open one.

This is obviously still a conflict, and what we do know

is that Ukrainians themselves have been exceptionally good

in terms of their information warfare,

in terms of their communications about how successful they've

been versus the Russians.

That said, there, I think, is very little doubt

that some of these communications are genuine.

Some of the content would be exceptionally hard to fake.

And when you put together all of the other material

that we've seen, for example, pictures

on social media of captured Russian troops,

pictures of the radio equipment they were using, all of that

together paints a picture that would be very hard to fake.

When you hear the conversations, you can feel it first,

and then you have-- we have the experts who can check

if this could be manipulated or not.

And as we're monitoring a whole day of conversations,

we can know that what is happening,

it's not fake because sometimes something is happening

and-- while they're arranging attack.

And in the next seconds, attack actually happens.

We could see that in the news.

We could see that the airstrikes actually happened.

So yes, we have some evidence that the conversations

we monitored are authenticated.

Both sides are fighting quite an aggressive information

campaign, so you do have to be wary of that within analysis.

Do the things that we're hearing in these transmissions marry up

with what we're seeing on the ground?

Do they compare well with what other sources are reporting?

So if we have seen that there are Russian soldiers carrying

unencrypted radios or notionally unencrypted radios, and now

we are hearing unencrypted transmissions

that have been intercepted, that all points

towards that information being something

that we can use to form an assessment

and begin to construct analysis.

The image of this pretty invincible, very tough

Russian war machine has taken a huge knock.

I mean, even Western intelligence analysts

expected Russia to win pretty easily.

They thought that Russia had overwhelming military might,

far superior technology, and battlefield experience

in places like Syria and, before that, in wars in Georgia,

and so on.

As it turns out, the Russian military effort

has been much more chaotic than anybody anticipated.

And I think that is a big blow to the image

of the Russian military and indeed to the image of Russia

that Putin has so carefully sculpted because I think

a lot of what Putin is trying to do

is to say, take us seriously as a great power.

He couldn't really do that on an economic level,

but Russia could always point to its enormous military might.

And now, even that looks slightly less credible

than it did before this conflict.

There is another group listening to Russian troops in Ukraine.

They call themselves ShadowBreak and were originally

a VC-funded security company focused

on mapping and other intelligence services.

Samuel Cardillo is their founder and head of technology.

We're ShadowBreak.

It's a company created, like, three years ago, founded by VC.

We're mainly a geospatial intelligence company.

Intelligence is our core business.

The thing here is that everything

we're doing concerning Ukraine has being totally free.

The company has unlocked $500,000 of personal money

to help Ukraine.

We started a logistic supply run and all the things

to serve people within Ukraine, and we're

trying to help because I think it's our duty.

In terms of military backgrounds,

well, I've been serving in the army for three

years in the intelligence--

in the Israeli Army.

I've been doing intelligence for a very long time.

I have a family background in intelligence.

There's been a shift in the last few years,

certainly since the Syrian civil war,

towards a real prominence of open-source intelligence,

open-source reporting.

And of course, the great example of this

is Bellingcat, which began reporting on munitions that

were being photographed by Syrians in the very early

stages of the Syrian conflict.

Ever since then, we've seen this proliferation

of open-source intelligence outfits, websites

piecing together information about conflicts

and making it public sometimes for commercial gain,

sometimes simply because it's viewed

as a sort of public good.

And a lot of these organisations are funded by donations,

by charities by government grants that kind of thing.

There is an open question about all of this, this new world,

this frontier, about where the money does always come from

and then whose interests might lie behind some of these

organisations.

Russia, in particular, has repeatedly and baselessly,

I should add, slandered organisations like Bellingcat

and accused them of being stooges for Western

intelligence agencies.

Ultimately, a lot of these organisations you have to judge

on the content that they are putting out there and the stuff

that they are making available.

And I guess that the fundamental factor

is that this is publicly available information.

It is open-source intelligence.

And the better of these organisations make clear what

their workings are.

They show why they have arrived at certain assumptions,

and then, sort of in a kind of Wikipedia format,

invite others out there to challenge their conclusions.

The fact that we're kind of expanding within the signal

intelligence is a little bit weird.

We had to kind of understand a lot of new things and recruit

translators, and it's completely new for the company.

Right now, most of the people are

working with us are volunteers.

We have few people who are on full-time salary

but very few at this moment for this operation.

There's a big question about where the aerials

and where the SDR systems themselves

are located because the nearer they are to the battlefield,

the clearer the signals they can intercept.

So there is public web SDR which are located outside of Ukraine.

And then, we have secured logistical supply

at this point.

And we're doing things to have web SDR within Ukraine which

gives us access to UHF frequencies, which

let us listen as well to radio handles,

which are shorter waves basically, like nearer troops.

Both ShadowBreak and Ukrainian Radio Watchers

say that there have been cyber attacks against many

of the servers they use for listening.

I don't know who is behind that, but we've

seen clearly cyber attacks against some web SDR.

They get hacked and stuff like that.

So we could assume it's like either trolls or people who

don't want all the people to listen to those frequencies.

So we don't know.

But yeah, we made our own, and we're still

working on making our own kind of private web SDR

things, which is also part of the money we've unlocked.

I think many of them are under DDoS attack, which

is attacking of hackers so they can stop their services.

Maybe some of them were bombed and--

for example, the antenna is broken,

or the whole equipment is dead.

The number of the web SDRs in Russia and Ukraine are going

down, which is a big problem for us because without the web SDRs

we cannot do anything.

Boyan also says he's planning to go into Ukraine in order

to set up an SDR.

We are thinking to do our own web SDR.

I got some connections in my country with people who are

actually travelling to Ukraine to bring supplies.

So we can-- some day in the next two weeks,

we are setting up a web based here in Bulgaria,

and we are setting up SDR in Ukraine.

Setting up a system like this was risky even

before the current invasion.

Last year, Stanislav Stetsenko, a resident of Crimea,

was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service

under suspicion of being a Ukrainian informant

and was facing up to 25 years in prison if found guilty.

So we know how people are tuning into these transmissions,

but it still leaves the question, if they know

they can be intercepted, why are the Russians

using unencrypted radios in a war zone?

The amount of communications we're hearing in clear

seems to indicate that Russian military may

have a problem with crypto and key distribution

as secure communications require some form of encryption.

And how that encryption typically

works is a series of keys are provided to anybody

on the network, and the traffic can only

be encrypted or decrypted using those keys.