- Russian soldiers rely heavily on their personal mobile phones to conduct operations in Ukraine.
- Former US military officers say the practice shows a lack of secure and disciplined communications options.
- This also leaves Russian forces vulnerable to attack — something Ukraine has exploited before.
Russian soldiers appear to be relying heavily on their personal mobile phones to conduct military operations in Ukraine, using them for tasks such as coordinating attacks and navigating the battlefield.
Former U.S. military officers say the trend underscores the lack of secure or disciplined military communications options and leaves Russian troops vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. Kyiv has previously used mobile data to launch deadly attacks on Moscow positions.
Recognizing the problem, the Russian government is actively trying to curb the trend. Its lower house of parliament, the State Duma, recently proposed an amendment that would allow its soldiers to be punished for using their personal phones while fighting in Ukraine.
“Wearing gadgets while on duty in special operations zones will be considered a serious disciplinary violation,” Russian state media reported on Monday, saying “this follows amendments supported by the State Duma Defense Committee.”
According to conflict analysts at the Institute for War Studies think tank, the amendments have been heavily criticized by Russian military bloggers, who argue that punishing soldiers for using mobile phones would disrupt battlefield operations, logistics and command and control, given the widespread use of personal devices on the battlefield.
The analysts wrote in their assessment Tuesday that “Russian military bloggers claim that Russian servicemen rely heavily on their personal devices to transmit target coordinates to request fire from Russian artillery and drone operators, to navigate front-line areas, and to coordinate between units.”
Dangers of personal phones
Dan Rice, a former U.S. Army artillery officer who previously served as a special adviser to Ukraine’s military leadership, said the reliance on phones showed a lack of adequate and secure military communications for Russian troops.
This sort of thing has long been a problem for Russia. “Realistically, the Russian military doesn’t enforce a ‘cell phone ban’ because they would get a backlash,” Rice, now president of American University Kyiv, told Business Insider. “So they allow it, knowing that unsecured civilian cell phone use would result in more Russian deaths and mission failure.”
Mark Cancian, a defense expert and retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel, said the ideal thing to do would be to use a specially designed — and highly secure — military system for communications. But that’s expensive, and everyone already has a cell phone, making it an attractive, if risky, option.
“This behavior shows two things about the Russian military. On the one hand, they adapt to battlefield conditions, using civilian applications when military applications are not working,” Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told BI.
“On the other hand,” he said, “there are a lot of vulnerabilities that Ukraine is sure to exploit.”
For example, Ukraine can determine the location of Russian troops through their cellular data. Multiple phones used in an area can reveal the activity of a larger force, making it a possible attack option for Kyiv.
One such incident occurred in late 2022, when Ukraine launched a devastating precision strike on Russian forces massed in Makiivka, in the eastern Donbas region. Moscow later blamed the high death toll on its own soldiers, saying that Kyiv had located them using their mobile data. However, there may have been other contributing factors.
Another risk for Russia, Cancian said, is that soldiers would send information over unencrypted channels, leaving the data vulnerable to interception by Ukrainian forces. He said that even with encryption apps available, troops are sometimes careless.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, routinely publishes audio recordings of alleged intercepts of Russian military phone calls. But Russia is not alone in its use of mobile phones; Kyiv’s troops have also used their mobile devices during the war. But Moscow is supposed to be on a higher level as a great power.
With both sides using enemy phones to aid their targeting, US Army officers have warned American troops about the dangers these personal devices can pose on the battlefield.
“It’s very difficult to get troops to give up their phones and internet devices because this younger generation has structured their lives around the phone and the connection that the phone can provide,” Cancian said.
“The United States military will face the same challenges in the next conflict,” he added.
