How links between ‘hacktivists’ and official military are becoming blurred on both sides in the war.
When Russia initiated its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a second, less visible battle in cyberspace got under way. The BBC's cyber correspondent Joe Tidy travelled to Ukraine to speak to those fighting the cyber war, and found the conflict has blurred the lines between those working for the military and the unofficial activist hackers.
He is one of the most prominent hackers in the vigilante group, the IT Army of Ukraine - a volunteer hacking network with a Telegram group nearly 200,000-strong.Even during our visit he was running complex software attempting to take his latest target - a Russian banking website - offline. Eventually Russia's Ministry of Industry and Trade was forced to relax some rules on food labelling to allow perishables to be traded.
Officially Ukraine is defending itself from cyber attacks, aided by Western cyber military teams and private cyber-security companies - funded by millions of dollars in donations. He alleges the groups have consultants from the Russian military and are now capable of launching sophisticated cyber attacks.
The fact that hacker attacks are being carried out on Nato countries could also trigger a collective response if they caused serious harm. Killmilk insisted his group is completely independent of Russian special services, asserting that he has a regular job as a factory loader and is "a simple person".
Over the Easter weekend, Killnet's Telegram channel was used to create a pop-up team called KillNATO Psychos. Within hours, it was hundreds of members-strong and proceeded to carry out a wave of attacks which temporarily disrupted Nato member websites. The group also published a list of Nato staff email addresses and encouraged people to harass them.
"We started to communicate with state forces doing the same as us and we began kind of synchronising our operations. They basically started to give us some targets and say what to do, when to do," he says. But he said he is confident that Ukraine has the "moral right to do everything it can to protect the lives of our citizens".
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