Russia's Cyber Limitations in Personnel Recruitment and Innovation, Their Potential Impact on Future Operations and How NATO and Its Members Can Respond

While Moscow's willingness to launch cyber operations depends in no small part on how the Russian leadership interprets geopolitics, resources and personnel determine the ability to conduct them. Russia has demonstrated a capacity to craft sophisticated malware to support operations that range from espionage to disrupting critical infrastructure, to interfering instates' internal affairs through cyber-enabled influence campaigns, but the government still faces difficulties recruiting and retaining the needed technological talent to keep pace with its rivals. While some of the factors inhibiting the growth of Moscow's cyber programme are internal to the organisations tasked with executing them, such as a culture-clash between specialist recruits and the bureaucracy, the most significant impediments are exogenous to them and include brain-drain and the health of Russia's economy. Moscow's litany of perceived adversaries in cyberspace ensures continuous efforts by the state to prevent the emigration of computer science and IT specialists and expand the ranks of those serving Russia's offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. As evolving technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing carry implications for future cyber operations, Moscow's ability to marshal its resources to remain competitive in a furtive digital arms race similarly depends on many of these factors.

This chapter aims to address key questions arising from the probable gap that separates Russian cyber personnel and capabilities, especially technological innovation, from its ambitions and what effect this disparity might have on future state-backed cyber campaigns. It starts by accounting for different factors that affect the ability of Russia's military and security services to successfully expand recruiting and support technological innovation related to cyber operations. This is followed by an examination of various initiatives and strategies that Russian agencies have introduced to address Russia's cyber limitations and cultivate technological innovation. Finally, it discusses how Russia's current official policies and informal practices are likely to affect the nature of its cyber operations in the future and to what extent NATO and its members can leverage these limitations to achieve desired effects in the Alliance's cyber security efforts.