Inside Russia’s Hybrid War with Elizabeth Bullock

In this episode of the Entropy Podcast, host Francis Gorman speaks with Elizabeth Bullock, a frontline leader who spent three years in Ukraine during the ongoing conflict. Elizabeth shares her journey from a technology startup career to driving into Ukraine just days after the Russian invasion, motivated by a sense of urgency and responsibility. She discusses the realities of life in a war zone, the resilience of the Ukrainian people, and the importance of understanding the broader implications of the conflict beyond just military actions. Elizabeth emphasizes the need for awareness of hybrid warfare tactics, including disinformation and cyber threats, which extend beyond Ukraine and pose risks to Western societies.

Throughout the conversation, Elizabeth highlights the fragility of the systems we take for granted in the West, urging listeners to recognize the potential vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and the psychological impacts of disinformation. She calls for unity and resilience in the face of these challenges, drawing parallels between the experiences of Ukrainians and the need for Western societies to remain vigilant against external threats. The episode concludes with a powerful message about the importance of maintaining focus on fundamental freedoms and values, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own responses to outrage and division.

Takeaways

• "I had an overriding feeling of this cannot and must not be happening again."
• "The easiest way to win a war is by never firing a bullet."
• "If we let ourselves get distracted by them, we will lose the things that are the most important."
• "Russia sees Western ideology and values as a fundamental threat."
• "We have to recognize that there may be a seed of disinformation that has been planted that is slowly growing into something a lot worse for us."

Sound Bites

• "A divided nation can be conquered easily."
• "Does my outrage keep cohesion for this country, or does it benefit Russia?"

You can find Elizabeth over at: www.prammavox.com 

Transcript

Francis Gorman (00:02.267)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Entropy Podcast. I'm your host, Francis Gorman. Before we dive in, if today's conversation challenges you, sparks a new idea or shape, sharpens how you think about the world, don't keep it to yourself. Subscribe, leave a review and share this episode with someone who enjoys staying curious.

Today I'm joined by Elizabeth Bullock, a frontline leader who spent three years in Ukraine's most volatile zones, orchestrating life-saving civilian operations. Ten days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Elizabeth left a decade-long career in technology startups and drove alone to Ukraine. Her experiences offer a rare, ground-true perspective on Europe's largest conflict since 1945. Today, Elizabeth uses her insights to brief and advise senior military leaders, corporate boards and policymakers.

sharing the realities of the conflict and Russian doctrine and how it will increasingly affect Europe and the West. For senior teams, she also translates her frontline lessons into actionable frameworks for leadership, resilience and operation agility. Elizabeth, it's lovely to have you here with me today. It's lovely to have you here, Elizabeth. And I kind of wanted to start the conversation by acknowledging that this is obviously a very sensitive subject matter. So.

Elizabeth Bullock (01:13.986)
Thank you so much for having me, Frances. It's a pleasure to be here.

Francis Gorman (01:24.755)
We'll be mindful of that as we go through it, but it also a topic that we need to bring to the fore and discuss more as a society in Europe and the West. I kind of want to ask you just before we get into ground, the listeners, you worked in the technology sector and then you made a decision to move into a conflict zone as the Ukraine war started. What drove you to make those decisions? there was there an underlying, I suppose, reason or did you just feel

obliged to do something about what was happening in Ukraine.

Elizabeth Bullock (01:58.478)
Well, I should say first off that although I did of course make the decision to go, I never expected I would be there for three years. And for me, when the invasion started, and like so many of us, I opened my phone that morning and looked at the news and saw those images of tanks rolling across the border. For me, it looked just like World War II. And I had an overriding feeling of this cannot and must not be happening again.

So it felt important to do something, however small, I'm just one person. And it was very practical based. I can drive and I have a car. So I can drive women and children out across the border.

Elizabeth Bullock (02:48.654)
It's easy, think, to think about these things in macro. And whilst I did not underestimate what I was doing, I think it's easy for us to think, oh, well, I could never possibly do that. And of course, I'm a civilian. I've never done anything like this before. I had lived a normal life, a desk jockey job, like so many people, gone through COVID lockdown, got a dog.

I had a very normal existence. I was in no way trained or equipped to handle that situation.

But I had done a lot of traveling. It was something I had always valued. So I was used to getting myself around. I was comfortable getting myself around and driving in tricky areas. So that was, I suppose, what made me feel able to believe that it was something that I could do. It also felt like something I should do. Just do something.

Francis Gorman (03:55.987)
And on that Elizabeth, I suppose when I look at that from the outside in, you didn't have any military training or background. You were grounded in a technology background. Was there any skills from that life that transitioned well when you went to a war zone?

Elizabeth Bullock (04:17.098)
Initially, not when I was on my own, but I quite quickly within the first couple of weeks met some other Brits and we decided to form a team and we started running mainly medical supplies into Kyiv. And this is when the Russians were trying to take the city. So they were on the outskirts. So the city was completely empty, like a ghost city. There was just army.

There was a lot of fear. You could not take photographs of anything because the Ukrainians would be afraid that you were a spy.

a lot of uncertainty in the air.

Elizabeth Bullock (05:02.963)
And even that was further than I'd ever intended to go.

Elizabeth Bullock (05:09.176)
But within a short time, we were asked by someone who became a very good Ukrainian friend, will you help us get people who are going to be trapped by the Russian advance in the Donbass? And by that, mean people who were about to be trapped under Russian occupation because they were bedridden, disabled, elderly amputees, people who physically could not escape the Russians at the gates.

Elizabeth Bullock (05:39.986)
And that was not a decision that I took lightly. None of us did. We, we sourced intelligence, we made an operational plan. had a team conversation. Was everyone comfortable with doing this? And we made a balanced decision that yes, we would do this.

And that became our MO for 2022. We were working up to a kilometer away from the Russians, which I never would have expected. And at that point, that was when my background in startups, I suppose, came through because.

Elizabeth Bullock (06:20.654)
Sadly, and disappointingly, I did witness the feelings of the large international organizations in Ukraine. Sadly, they were often absent.

even more often.

Elizabeth Bullock (06:38.582)
incompetent. I'm sorry, but there's there's no other word. The output of their work was was limited. And I found that difficult. I hadn't expected that. I didn't. I'd never seen the third sector in action before. So we I was not approaching this as well. How can we be like the charities? You know, how do other people do these things? For me, I just thought about it as if it was a startup.

just with a different MO, because in that kind of setup, you never have enough money. You never have enough people, resources, but you are 100 % output focused because if you are not, then the business won't survive. And you have this very unifying purpose. You have a really strong team spirit that you pull together. And if you'll excuse my language, you just get shit done.

And that was our ethos with this team. It was very intentionally never a charity. It was what needs to be done? Can we do it? If the answer is yes, we get on and do it. If we're not sure, what can we figure out? Because we probably can find a solution and just get it done.

Francis Gorman (07:55.411)
makes a lot of sense. you know, when you apply that kind of startup methodology and approach, you know, I can see how that can, you know, bed in and be really beneficial in those circumstances. In terms of personal resilience and what you have seen happening on the ground in Ukraine, the media in the West and Europe, find, you know, we see the pictures, we see the bombs landing, and then the next new segment comes on and we forget about it. And, you know, maybe at this point are almost immune to it, even though that's almost cruel to say.

in a way, from your time spent on the ground, how are people holding up? How have they, how have they, how is the actual individual resilience held true for so many years of the same? It must be brutal out there.

Elizabeth Bullock (08:43.424)
Yes, people are certainly fatigued and the last time I was back there for a visit, I definitely had a greater sense of that fatigue.

Elizabeth Bullock (08:59.456)
Ultimately, it is not that anyone there believes that Ukraine should surrender or that it should sentence all of the people who are currently under Russian occupation to continue that level of persecution. No matter how hard things have got, I've never met a Ukrainian who has said, yes, I believe that we should surrender territory for peace. And the reason for that is that they know that that is

a false decision because Russia would simply use any ceasefire or any pause to rearm and go again.

Elizabeth Bullock (09:40.462)
and that Russia is not actually interested in peace as it has continued to demonstrate. I think it's very confusing for people back at home because there is of course a lot of media coverage about this peace deal. We've also recently seen a lot of coverage about the Ukrainian-US agreement potentially being close to completion.

I believe firmly that Russia is only engaging with this peace process at all to placate Trump, but they do not have any actual intention of agreeing to a ceasefire. And that is because there is no way that Putin can sell anything as a victory back home that does not include a complete occupation of the Donbass.

But broader than that, if he agrees to appease and cease fire,

The entire modus operandi of him distracting his own people by maintaining an external war stops. I've heard many people say if this war stops, Putin is dead. His power will not survive. His premiership will not survive. He has to maintain this outward looking enemy and threat.

Elizabeth Bullock (11:03.374)
So the people in Ukraine understand this very well. So they are fatigued. They have loved ones at the front. They have their homes destroyed. They have missiles and Shaheeds coming in at night. They have, you know, even the power supply going down, it really wears you down. And I certainly experienced that.

first thing that we would do when we got home after work would be to run inside and flip the light switch because if you don't then it's dark, it's cold, you can't cook anything, you can't have a hot shower and whilst that's fine for a day or two and it's not a big deal, if it's day after day after day and in a very particularly in a very cold Ukrainian winter it does wear you down.

you do become exhausted and everything is just that little bit harder. And we were lucky, you know, we had, we had a generator, we could afford to buy certain pieces of infrastructure that lessened the impact of those things. Many people in Ukraine cannot afford those things. So that fatigue is absolutely there, but that does not mean that there is a willingness to accept a surrender.

because they know that Russia would use that to launch further attacks further into Ukraine.

Francis Gorman (12:37.543)
Talk to me about the attacks. So we read a lot about the kinetic warfare, the bombs, the tanks, all of that aspect of it. But is there a wider hybrid warfare happening where cyber, sabotage, all of those facets come into play that we need to be cognizant of, not just from the Ukrainian perspective, but as Europeans and from the West viewpoint in general? Is Russia

as a threat actor contained to the Ukraine conflict.

Elizabeth Bullock (13:11.214)
I mean, that's a great question. And absolutely, the answer is no. They are not contained to that conflict. And one of the things I think that encapsulates that perfectly is the mistakes around referring to it as the war in Ukraine. Because that implies two things. That is, it is geographically localized, and that Ukraine is the only country that Russia is interested in attacking.

Elizabeth Bullock (13:43.84)
It also completely ignores the hybrid warfare piece. Now, I did not know this before I went to Ukraine.

But Russia, Russia's view of the West.

is not limited to a recent look back of time period. What I mean by that is this goes back a long way for Russia. know, in the West we are lucky where we don't live in a society where history is weaponized. So our look back period is very short. Basically, we're taught about World War II in school, and that's about it.

With Russia, it's very different. And Western ideology and values are seen as a fundamental threat. Because if you have an autocratic power whose people can see that there are free democracies elsewhere, a better standard of living,

We all know that Russians famously send a lot of their children over to the UK for school, for example, and certainly lot of them are living in London now, increasingly so.

Elizabeth Bullock (15:08.376)
then it's harder to control those people if they can see something else as more desirable. So Russia sees those ideology and those values in Western nations as a fundamental threat.

Elizabeth Bullock (15:26.068)
I did not realize, I did not expect before I went there that Russia would be so focused on this. I've spent quite a lot of time looking at clips of Russia today. And you have to sort of search online because of course it is banned in the West. You can't just access these things, but you do find clips with English subtitles. And they talk in a derogatory way around many countries.

about many countries, but most of all about the UK. The amount of air time that they spend focusing on the UK being something that they would willingly attack, would like to attack, really surprised me.

they have very much normalized their civilian population to the concept of dropping bombs on London, for example. So there is one example where...

The Russian ski team had been banned from competing following the full-scale invasion. And the head of the Russian ski federation, her response to this, so this is an international winter Olympics body, so very much an international body. Her response to it was, if we had dropped a bomb on London, we would be able to go wherever we want by now.

Elizabeth Bullock (17:04.984)
So getting our heads around how normalized the Russian population is to attacking the West in general is something that is quite difficult for us to comprehend because we do not have narratives like that in our society. So it's hard for us to imagine that another society would.

Now what that means in reality is that the West, and particularly Western Europe or any of these stronger European nations,

are being attacked by Russia. And that is being done by hybrid warfare. They are not going to start firing missiles into London or Paris or Berlin. That will not happen. You might get some drone interference. think we're all quite familiar now with small drones flying around and surveillance drones.

But the biggest tool at their disposal is our phones. Every single one of us has a phone in our pocket. Every single one of us, or perhaps not every single one of us, but a very high proportion of us have social media. And it's very easy for all of us to believe.

that we would never be influenced. That, you know, I know what I'm looking at and I know what that means.

Elizabeth Bullock (18:26.292)
Yes, from my background in technology, I have some of the background knowledge of how online profiling works, online targeting.

Elizabeth Bullock (18:39.2)
And so I think it made it easier for me to believe that this was happening. Now, we are all familiar with the idea that Russia has interfered in the US elections, for example, or the Brexit referendum or multiple elections internationally.

But it's quite abstract. And all of us assume, well, that's not me. That must be someone else.

Elizabeth Bullock (19:07.702)
What Russia wants most of all is to divide and fracture our societies. A divided nation can be conquered easily. The easiest way to win a war is by never firing a bullet. If you have a whole population that is distracted by other issues, is more focused on local problems like potholes, there's a lot of outrage about potholes, for example.

then they're not focusing on the wider threat, which is an aggressive state. They're just not thinking about it. And to a degree, it is of course understandable. Everybody has lives to lead. Everybody has money to earn. Everybody has families to look after. Everybody has their own lives. So thinking about these more immediate problems is natural and understandable.

But Russia will keep pushing these narratives to keep us focused on those problems. So we're not focusing on the wider thing. something that I came to realize is perhaps one of Russia's biggest tools in this sphere is the emotion of outrage. If you can create a feeling of outrage in someone.

then it takes their attention.

Elizabeth Bullock (20:27.624)
And one of the things I've started doing myself to try and check myself, I'm sure I'm susceptible to all of these things as the next person is when I read something, I, am I feeling a sense of outrage? And if so, where has that come from and who might've made this post and even things around the topic of Trump, there is huge outrage. There is huge horror.

about certain things and rightly so.

I sent a image of something to do with something that a supporter of Trump had said to a friend the other day.

It was something on LinkedIn. And then I looked in the comments and someone said, this is misinformation. So I Googled it myself and I looked into it and sure enough, it was, it wasn't true. So I'm susceptible to these things. And the reason that I sent that to a friend was because I felt a sense of outrage. my God, look at this. This is really shocking. Isn't this awful? So the best way that we can protect ourselves is to pause, take a breath. What am I looking at? Is this verified? Who has this come from?

because Russia has form for using outrage. And the reason that it's so hard to identify these things is because Russia isn't pushing something that is obvious to point a finger at that it comes from Russia. Any issue that is divisive or has any emotion attached to it is useful for them because it will be divisive. We know it has been shown now that Russia, for example, set up

Elizabeth Bullock (22:11.438)
protests protesting in favour of Black Lives Matter. That's been well documented now. Now Russia as we all know, we do not think they are advocating for black rights.

but it is a tool that they will use to divide, to fracture, to create any kind of protests, resentment against governments, fracturing. And I think we've all become a bit more familiar with some of the more traditional hybrid tactics. I think we're more aware of cyber attacks now, drone incursions, sabotage.

But the disinformation piece is by far the most prevalent and the most dangerous.

Francis Gorman (22:58.867)
I also think it can make you very uneasy. I recall when Russia simulated dropping a nuclear bomb in the middle of London. And I recall it because I was sitting in the hotel room just outside of Cannon Town at the time at a conference in London. And I looked at it on my phone, Sky News. I didn't cover it at the time. I looked at it and I went, OK, I know what this is, but it's still not making me feel super comfortable that I'm sitting right in the middle of that big red blast zone circle that's there. So it was a psychological aspect

respect to it as well as just a disinformation piece. Now, I forgot about it half an hour later, went out and went to the conference and, you know, all that good stuff. But it did make me make me pause and think a little bit about what was what was going on. And I think that's important to recognize that, you know, these things are designed to invoke a certain emotion or a certain response or to create fear or to create uncertainty.

Elizabeth Bullock (23:34.99)
Thank

Francis Gorman (23:55.987)
And a lot of people then turn inwards and they go, I blame the government. know, it becomes, it becomes the government that are at fault. Now, I understand governments are not exactly at their best across Europe and the West at the moment. You know, we could, we could do a little bit better in that space, but we have to recognize that there may be a seed of disinformation that has been planted that is slowly growing into something a lot worse for us.

In Ireland, we saw Dublin riots. We've never had that sort of thing happen. was fear city west, the same thing stirred up overnight. had all sorts of things that have been driven by social media. And if you step back, there's actors there that could potentially be linked back to government entities that are not, I suppose, do not have our interests at heart. And I think it's important then to look at this outside of the lens of just the cyber attacks and

the retail sector in the UK. think we touched on before where we said, you know, the impacts on Jaguar, et cetera, created harm to the GDP of the UK, which was phenomenal. You know, that actually that was a fundamental impact on the economy. But outside of that, are you worried about the undersea cables, the landing stations?

Elizabeth Bullock (24:58.734)
Mm.

Francis Gorman (25:14.347)
things that could absolutely cripple the economy if they were taken out.

Elizabeth Bullock (25:19.008)
Absolutely. it's, although there has been more coverage of these issues lately, and I think many people are aware Russian tanker was recently seized and shortly before Christmas and they were sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic Sea. It's can be still feel a little bit removed and a little bit macro. And if these cables are seriously damaged,

Society breaks down very quickly.

Without data, don't have, like none of our financial system will work. So no one can get paid. No one can take any money out. You can't buy food. We live in the West in an often cashless society now. How many of us carry cash around anymore? I maybe sometimes have a tenner in my wallet, but quite often not even that. So if that whole system goes down overnight, how do you even buy food? How do you buy anything?

that you need to live? How do you, if you don't have a car, how do you buy a train ticket to get to the people that you love if there's some kind of national emergency? If you have a car, how do you buy fuel? How do you buy anything that you need to function?

And at the moment, and I'm speaking here from a British Armed Forces perspective, so I can't speak for anyone else's, it is, there is a conversation currently happening about building our first sovereign undersea cable repair ship, which means we don't have one. If we currently have our undersea cables attacked, we cannot even repair them.

Elizabeth Bullock (27:04.972)
We already know that we cannot defend from this threat because obviously undersea cables cover a huge distance and they cannot be patrolled. is incredibly our soft underbelly. But as you mentioned, landing stations as well, you have these cables come up on land before they then divide and split out. So you have this huge concentration of vulnerability.

at a very few select points around the coastline.

And Russia knows this. And one of the things that has become very concerning is that after the full-scale invasion, as we know, a lot of Russian diplomats, et cetera, were expelled. their agents on foreign soil, that whole capability was hugely reduced. And Russia has very successfully turned to the weaponization of domestic people.

We know, for example, when there was a sabotage fire on a warehouse in the UK that destroyed about, I think it was around a million pounds worth of military aid going to Ukraine. Those were British civilians. They were recruited on telegram by Wagner. Wagner at the time was operational. It has now been taken over by the Russian state.

There have been a couple of pieces I've seen on this recently, but again, when you have people who, again, talking about the disinformation piece, when you have people who are disillusioned with their country, disillusioned with their government, that loyalty has been eroded.

Elizabeth Bullock (28:57.142)
And people being successfully, well, you know, maybe Russia isn't so bad. Then that creates an opening and then there are financial incentives. How do you protect from that? And we've seen these patterns of behavior even elsewhere. mean, we know that for instance, that it has been found that the States were looking for Greenlanders who were potentially pro-American.

to scout these things out. So Russia does not need to have operatives here. It can recruit them. And again, this is sort of one-to-one contact. My understanding is that's pretty hard to trace. These things are difficult. Essentially, going back to the honesty cables point, if you had one of those people go to a landing station and set a fire, suddenly you would have an absolute catastrophe.

across the entire nation that we are not prepared for. And, you know, we talk about a whole of society approach following the Strategic Defence Review.

Elizabeth Bullock (30:11.384)
but I think that is looked at more in terms of.

And perhaps I'm speaking out of turn for people here, but I think again, it's still thought of in a slightly more conventional warfare way. You how would society survive if a missile landed in London as you were talking about that simulation? But what do we do if our intersea cables are cut on the landing station? What do we do if there is a sabotage attack on one of our power stations? What do we do if one of the data servers for our financial system is attacked?

I saw a video somewhere that showed where would be the strategic targets for a tactical nuclear strike in the UK. And it's not our army bases. It was one of the top ones was the large data server for the city of London.

Francis Gorman (31:03.634)
And that adds up to me, you know, if you want to cause maximum impact in an Ireland context, blow up EU East one and the US one in city West, which are the key data centers for Amazon and Microsoft essentially, you know, that brings down then huge portions of data that does transfers to the States and to mainland Europe, which is UK included. And that would be devastating in and of itself.

very much like if you destroy the landing station, devastating in and of itself. you know, this is I think people because we consume a transparent digital layer almost as a fabric within our everyday lives, we don't necessarily realize the implications if that disintegrates. And it does in essence. And I don't want to sound like we're fear mongering here because this is a very

important conversation to have it in essence sends us back to a time pre-digital technology which could mean your phones are almost functionless you you can still probably make a call depending on if POTS network is still up the plain old telephone system is still alive but you can't send messages to some extent unless you've got satellite capability

It really does hinder our communications capabilities, our ability to make purchases, our ability to do transactions with each other.

Elizabeth Bullock (32:42.53)
And if I may pick up on that, that fear mongering point, Francis, because you make a very good point there, you know, is, this all just extreme, you know, and, and, the, the reason why I convey these things is that from having spending, spent time in Ukraine, my suspension of disbelief that, that could never happen is what has changed. I have seen Russia as we all have.

firing missiles on energy infrastructure, which is purely to target the civilian population of Ukraine. That's not a military target. Of course, they are also hitting military targets. But as we know, Russia has really put a focus on hitting cities and power infrastructure. And that is to try and break the morale of the civilian people. Now, if Russia is prepared to do that to Ukrainian people, people who they have historically described as their brothers,

having a shared history, all of these things. What do we think they'd be willing to do to Western countries who they see as their strategic and fundamental enemies?

Elizabeth Bullock (33:56.096)
It's that piece of getting our heads around what would Russia be willing to do.

Elizabeth Bullock (34:04.578)
I think they would quite happily do a fair bit. I think the only thing that would prevent that is unity and strength and deterrence. They know that, for example, right now, if they did destroy, for example, a major C under C cable to, let's call it the UK, they probably think that would provoke a response from Trump.

Elizabeth Bullock (34:33.176)
But if they thought they could get away with that without there being repercussions, or certainly not serious repercussions.

Why would they not? When they see everything that we stand for and everything that we could do as a barrier to what they want to achieve, which is ultimately expansion. It's that topic of disbelief and that being changed. That's the only difference between me as someone who spent time on the receiving end of Russia's war and any other Western person, because I've seen

what Russia is willing to do. If they are willing to, you know, I've lived in places where you've had houses burned down by phosphorus, which is a war crime. I have seen a Russian chemical grenade. I have seen in liberated territory what is left behind where the Russians have turned any police station into a torture and interrogation center, where there are people who've had their children taken out into the fields and beaten up.

And I'm not saying this to shock. I'm saying this because we have all heard these stories, but because I have seen them and because I understand what Russia is willing to do to achieve its ends, we should not have the complacency to think that in the West, we would not be treated the same way and in all likelihood potentially worse.

Francis Gorman (36:10.238)
What keeps you awake at night based on your experiences in Ukraine when you look back at the rest of Europe and the West as we are today?

Elizabeth Bullock (36:23.17)
Well, two things on that, because I don't want to sound entirely doom and gloom. It does, the hybrid threat does absolutely worry me that we...

are not aware that there are not open dialogues being had in the media from politicians. There is not an open dialogue as there is, for example, in the Nordics or the Baltics or Poland of this is a real threat we are facing as a country. Let's respond to this because

On the positive side, I do have faith in

Western people, my country, British people, that people would rally, people would unite. I think how societies reacted to COVID was a wonderful demonstration of that. People really pulled together, people helped each other, that societal resilience of saying, no, damn it, we will not be cowed by this, we will rise to the challenge. I absolutely believe that that is there.

And I saw that amongst foreign people in Ukraine. I saw that amongst, you know, British people, Swedish people, Irish people, know, people from any country who were there. It was them saying, I will not be cowed by this.

Elizabeth Bullock (37:56.456)
And I think it is possible that at some point Russia will overstep. They will do something that will suddenly click into the public consciousness of saying, that's too far. And now we get it. We get what Russia is trying to do because they can see it.

But I have no doubt that if that happens, which I think it probably will, that at that point, Europe will unify and rally because I saw the best of that in Ukraine. I saw foreigners who did that and that unity and that strength of spirit. And it might sound a little trite to say these things, but it's very easy for us to take...

those values and that resilience that we have as nations for granted, because yes, we've always had it. And it's easy for us to underestimate the value of our freedom. Ultimately, it's what it comes down to, our freedom. The fact that we can vote in free elections, the fact that we can have free press, the fact that we have freedom of expression. For us, it's almost boring. yeah, okay.

Yes, I can go outside and hold a placard that says whatever I want outside a government building.

Elizabeth Bullock (39:21.624)
But as we've seen, even that's becoming increasingly more rare in the world at the moment, sad to say. And although there are, course, problems that every single one of us has domestically, and Russia is doing its utter best to try and stoke that feeling of outrage and of discontent. And of course, the economy in many countries is struggling at the moment. People are struggling to provide that life for their families, to buy homes, all of these things.

Those are real problems. But Russia is trying to use it to divide us and for us not to unite. And if we can manage to see past those issues and say, we do have something valuable here, we do have something here that is worth protecting, then I have no doubt that as societies, as Europe, as a continent, and with some of our key Western partners, that we can do that.

Francis Gorman (40:17.746)
Take an example of that kind of whipping up the distraction is probably the immigration aspect we see across Europe at the moment, where, know, that's really nice tool to distract and find something to blame your problems on. know, people always look for someone to pin a problem on. And I think that's probably one of the one of the aspects that is out there. There's a second piece, Elizabeth, I just want to touch on before we finish up. it kind of goes back to the human resilience aspects.

And when I look at the West and I look at our kind of we're digitally dependent, know, we're probably not as familiar as neighbors as we would have been even 10 or 15 years ago. And then look at Ukraine. And I think when we were talking before, you said to me that, you it may be kind of hard work into Ukrainians from the Stalin area and historically, their pragmatism, their self resilience, their ability to curate their own food and breads and

those kind of basic skills that maybe dissipate in a bit to some extent in the West and in Europe. Can you just talk to me a little bit about that aspect, please?

Elizabeth Bullock (41:26.542)
Absolutely.

Elizabeth Bullock (41:31.244)
It's a very key point around the reason why Ukraine has such societal resilience. And there are actually two different elements of this that I would like to touch on. One is that Ukraine is much more advanced than many of us in the West, technologically. We all have heard about the drones in Ukraine and that they've been able to develop things and innovation. We always hear the word innovation.

Ahem.

What that means is that they have a very high number of coders and developers. So you have this huge human resource that has been pivoted very effectively into the war effort and, and, and in a very voluntary way, I've met many developers who were working in technology before and they have joined up. All they are building weapons. And we don't have that in the West. We do absolutely have some thought leadership. We do have some.

excellent developers but we don't have the volume and we do not have a high prevalence of those kinds of skills within our armed forces.

So that is where a difference lies on fighting a modern war.

Elizabeth Bullock (42:49.898)
Now on the civic resilience front that you just mentioned, because Ukraine has been through such hardship historically, it's very present in their national psyche. And again, this is where in the West we have this sort of freedom from history because

it isn't quite as traumatic what we've been through essentially, and particularly in countries like Ireland, like the UK, that whenever, for example, are under occupation for a long time, so from Nazi Germany. So those pieces from the Second World War are different experience.

Elizabeth Bullock (43:34.03)
In Ukraine, even if you look at the Second World War, the amount of loss is very high. Belarus lost around 45 % of its civic population during the Second World War. Ukraine lost around 25%. It might even have been higher. I might be slightly wrong on that figure. The point I'm getting at is a huge amount of their civilian population died.

then you have it falling under the Soviet Union. And because Ukraine had tried to gain its independence, it had fought for its independence at various points. Stalin wanted to suppress that. So when Stalin created collectivization and centralizing the power of all the farms, and it didn't work, it started to create mass poverty and mass starvation. And that spurred an idea for him. He had the idea to create

a fake famine essentially in Ukraine by taking all of the grain and the food and the livestock that was produced and taking it back to Russia, particularly around 1933. This was known as the Holodomor. So you had millions of Ukrainian civilians starving to death.

And I've heard these stories. The village that we spent the last year rebuilding, it was created by Stalin. People were plucked from all over the Soviet Union, from different areas, and just sort of dumped there and said, build yourself a house and get farming. But I spoke to women in that village about the time from the Holodomor and how one of her uncles, when her mother,

and her mother's siblings had been very small. The parents had died and so those little children had walked out from that village to someone else because a couple of other people looked after them. And her uncle, who's a small boy, he died just walking to the next village where someone was going to try and look after him and feed him. And this woman who's telling me this, talking about her uncle, she was in tears. This is very prevalent in

Elizabeth Bullock (45:46.926)
the national psyche, we just don't have these things in the West. So what this means is that that fear is still there, that fear of starvation, that fear of, need to be able to look after myself. So what that means is that people are very good at growing food, preserving food. You also have a stronger delineation between urban and rural society in Ukraine, partly just because it's larger, you have more space, so you don't have that sort of urban sprawl.

But also it is of course a very agricultural society. So within villages, it's not that you just have a house. It's that every home is a small holding. They will have some chickens wandering around. If they can afford it, they will have a cow. More likely they'll have a pig. They will grow vegetables out the back. They will have fruit trees. They will, when they have a crop of something, they will get glass jars and preserve it. And the same with, you know, pig fat. Sado is famous in Ukraine. So...

they have trained themselves and retained the skills of how to survive. You know, we think during COVID of how many of us were suddenly running out of food. I certainly was in the beginning. And yes, I was in an urban environment, so I wouldn't have had a garden to grow things in anyway. But how many people in the country grow their own food? A few do, but not many. So our ability in the West,

to survive if our supply chains were severely disrupted.

Elizabeth Bullock (47:20.482)
and particularly with vulnerabilities for Western nations that are island nations like the UK, like Ireland. Very quickly, that's not funny. And Russia absolutely does weaponize these things. One of the other things that I saw in Ukraine was the weaponization of water.

Russia in the liberated area in the south in Kherson and Mikhailov, when the Ukrainian counteroffensive happened in late 2022, when the Russians were having to withdraw, before they withdrew, they tried to make it impossible for Ukrainian life to return. And the easiest way to do that is to destroy the water supply. So they would blow up pipes, they would use their tanks to shoot down water towers, they would even drop

dead dogs or their own dead Russian soldiers down civilian wells to poison them.

and then they will go.

Elizabeth Bullock (48:19.384)
We have seen that there have, going back to the hybrid warfare, we've seen that Russians have broken into water treatment plants in NATO states. This has happened in the Baltics. We have seen surveillance over things like this. Russia is, again, just in terms of the suspension of disbelief, what is Russia willing to do to achieve its ends? We have already seen that they are willing to break into a water treatment plant in the Baltic States.

Elizabeth Bullock (48:52.93)
We've seen, for instance, that there was a cyber attack that remotely opened the gates of a dam.

Elizabeth Bullock (49:01.548)
we saw them blow up the Novikovka Dam in Ukraine. And actually, although this wasn't their first intention, the primary intention was to prevent a Ukrainian counteroffensive across the Dnieper River in the south. The byproduct of that action was that overnight it contaminated the drinking water for all of those people in the south, in that southern area. And the water in that area had been really good quality.

For us as our team, that became our focus for 2023 was actually drinking water, which we hadn't anticipated because none of those wells could be used. And again, back to the hybrid warfare piece in terms of disruption and supply chain, suddenly you have panic by the water in the shops. All the water in the shops is gone. What do people do then? The people who have cars can go and buy some and go further inland. But what about the people who don't? What about the people who are old? What about the people who can't carry things very far? Very quickly.

These things have huge effects on the civic population.

Although these causes of some of these actions in Ukraine were conventional, know, the Novikovka Dam crisis, that was Russia physically blowing up a dam, striking it.

It's thinking about what are our key vulnerability points in the West? And it is always going to be our critical national infrastructure, our communications, our power, our water. What do we need to survive? And that is where Russia is looking to attack us. But again, if they have fractured our society, if they've distracted us with other issues, if they've got us focusing on anything,

Elizabeth Bullock (50:50.786)
but the threat from Russia.

then they are already going to consider that a win and will already make their life a lot easier.

Francis Gorman (51:01.298)
Elizabeth, it's fascinating. I know it's dark. I know there's a lot of dark undertones there. But I think it's something that people need to be aware of. Cybersecurity professionals need to be aware of the increased geopolitical threat. Government ministers need to start preparing society for potential actions that may lead to discomfort across the Western and European states. And I even saw the BBC had an article today that

I think UK military reservists are being extended by an extra decade. And if that's not a signal that the UK government is worried about potential kinetic warfare, never mind the hybrid aspects, it's something for us just to be more conscious of. I think we live in a very...

Elizabeth Bullock (51:45.164)
And Russia has been doing a lot of propaganda efforts towards our army reserves because they know what an important resource that is. So I've spoken to people who've talked about this, the amount of Russian misinformation and propaganda. talked about fracturing and resentment and trying to fracture that piece. That is happening even with our reserves. Russia does not want any country in the West.

to have a reserve army that is motivated and engaged and loyal, ultimately is what it comes down to. They are really trying to break that resource and fracture it.

Francis Gorman (52:27.944)
Before we finish up Elizabeth, if you had a message to give to everyone who's listening today to help them not even prepare, but to understand fundamentally things that they may need to change or to consider more in their day to day lives with this in the back of their their minds, what would that message be?

Elizabeth Bullock (52:51.564)
I would say purely to take a step back.

Elizabeth Bullock (52:58.376)
and realize that these things that we take for granted are more fragile than we realize.

Elizabeth Bullock (53:08.696)
having, although yes, there are many issues in the West, there are issues with economy, there are things that have really irritated people, problems.

If we let ourselves get distracted by them, we will lose the things that are the most important. And we will have to make sacrifices to defend these fundamental things. We will, you know, in a real sense, need to pay tax that goes to defend our nations.

But in the most immediate day-to-day sense, something that I've tried to train myself to do, and maybe is worth people just thinking, is what I talked about earlier with that feeling of outrage. Anytime something makes me feel outrage, I just take a breath and think.

Does me feeling outraged about this keep cohesion for this country, or does it benefit Russia?

And I may still feel some outrage about that particular thing. It might not make it okay. But is it going to mean that I can see it in a way that is maybe a little bit more balanced, a little bit calmer, and ultimately trying to keep our vision focused on the important fundamentals, which is that we are free and that Europe as a continent

Elizabeth Bullock (54:45.31)
is increasingly coming under attack and

Elizabeth Bullock (54:51.626)
not only from Russia, we saw this with the US national security strategy. I would encourage people to read that document because it shows so clearly what our values are that are seen as a threat to any authoritarian nation. And I would encourage people to read that document and read it with a sense of pride of what we have, of what is worth preserving.

and therefore what is worth being our priority.

Francis Gorman (55:24.244)
Elizabeth, look, that was really inspirational. think your message is clear. We only need to take a moment, consider if we're being manipulated or if this outrage is justified. We need to understand the fragility of the technology that surrounds us and we need to be kind. And I know you're going back to the Ukraine, so stay safe. You know, I would really encourage the listeners to engage with this conversation with an open mind.

and thank you very much for coming on today. Thank you.

Elizabeth Bullock (55:53.038)
Thank you so much for having me, Frances. It's a pleasure.