Mykhas, an electronic intelligence professional

Mykhas, an electronic intelligence professional: “…Suddenly, one of the Ukrainians interrupts this Russian frequency and says:
“Good morning, Muscovites!”

Listening, recording, analyzing and comparing what you hear, sharing information with colleagues – this is the chain of actions that forms the basis of electronic intelligence (REI).
One of the specialists, call sign Mykhas, from one of the best (in the opinion of colleagues) units of Ukrainian radio electronic intelligence was interviewed by Censor.NET.
We talked in Kyiv, but now Mykhas’s unit is on the front line, working for the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

• If you ask a layman what electronic intelligence is, you will most likely get something like this: they reconnoiter everything with the help of radio and electronics. But I am interested in a more functional answer. What units are included in electronic intelligence?
• Electronic intelligence is a separate unit. This is the minimum component. And then there are subdivisions that are further expanded. What is the area of interest of REI? Any source of enemy radio emissions. By the spectrum of radiation, by the type of signal, you can understand what it is, what kind it is, and so on.
• …and where it is located.
• Where it is located is a little bit more related to direction finding – an adjacent but a related unit. The area of interest of the REI is more about radio. This is when we found a frequency that is mostly analog. Analog, that is any amateur radio enthusiast can listen to it.
• So, you work in a radio intelligence unit. How did you acquire this technical specialization? Did you have any professional history before the war?
• Before the war, I was a programmer. In 2014, I fought in the Kulchytskyi battalion. When the full-scale war started, everyone went to their units. We had a
  a Kyiv-based company. We were sent to the Vyshhorod direction. We were sitting like blind mice in the trenches, and we didn’t like it very much. Then we took an ordinary Chinese Baofeng, which is the cheapest radio station; we started to turn it on and found a radio station on which orcs communicate. We listened to it. We analyzed it. We extracted some information useful to us. We realized that if some of them communicate like this, then the rest will do the same.
  We searched and found another one. And then we began to think: how to make this activity a regular one?
• In other words, you started without any understanding of what had been developed by different armies over the decades.
• Absolutely nothing. On pure enthusiasm.
• And at certain points you were reinventing the wheel?
• Yes, we did. Later, as we developed more, we began to travel to related units that have been doing this for a long time. We took some of their best practices. That is, we looked at it: aha, this business is being done in this unit, and it works. And another unit does this business in a completely different way, but it also works.
  After analyzing them all, we found our own recipe, our own version. It also works, it contains a lot of information, and you need to somehow digest it, realize it, analyze it with the main task is to save the lives of our subordinate units.
• What other units are there next to the REI?
• The REI is a minimal component. There are related units in one generalized group of technical means. These include direction finding and analytics, which are separately separated.
  We provide a certain amount of information collected by the REI for secondary processing by analysts.
• Who performs the primary processing?
• It is carried out by the REI operator. He or she must immediately know whether the information is useful or not. If it is useful then for whom and how to counteract preventing the roach from performing certain tasks.
• Please give an example.
• Let’s say we made an interception indicating that a unit is going to move from point A to point B. In cooperation with the direction finding unit, we understand where point A is, we know where point B is going to be. We know the approximate vehicle fleet or
  infantry group that will be moving. Then we notify the neighboring aerial reconnaissance unit that there will be a movement of vehicles or infantry; please conduct additional reconnaissance. They conduct additional reconnaissance with the help of drones. And then there is interaction with the artillery. That is, if we see a convoy moving, they work on it.
• You should teach at the academy, you explained everything very clearly.
• Well, I am a teacher by education.
• That’s how it feels. To summarize: what does an efficiently working REI unit give a brigade?
• A lot of information.
  And at the same time, it is most effective when all these branches work in cooperation with each other, right?
• Interaction is everything. If there is a well-established interaction, then the unit is alive, effective, and working. What does it give to the team? Again, I will answer by my own example. We made an interception where the artillery commander of the russian federation units provided coordinates for the gun commander to be impressed. They transmit them in encrypted form. I promptly decrypted it – I was lucky here – and transmitted it to the point where the attack was to take place. People managed to hide the equipment.
  An important nuance. After they had been hit, they reported that they had been fired upon by such-and-such means. I confirmed my decryption by doing so, and the decryption key, and for the next 2-3 hours, when the occupation forces got the encryption, we already knew all the coordinates where the artillery would fire.
  That is, saving lives. It’s very clear.
• Are you one of those who are listening to all this live?
• Yes, I am one of those who listen.
  It’s clear that we don’t have day to day. But what is the approximate percentage of what you listen to every day seems unimportant, and how much of it is gems of information?
• All information is inherently important. There is information that is important right now, and there is information that is important in the longer term. There is information that at first glance seems uninteresting, incomprehensible, and generally unnecessary.
• Let’s start with some examples.
  Let’s take, for example, the spherical forest of Kreminna – this is the Serebrianka forestry,
  where active hostilities took place. From there, a certain number of orcs are sent to wash. They are asked to drop a radio station to a certain Vasya on the way. We understand where this position is, where they are coming from.
  We understand that they will go to Kreminna for washing. And on the way, there is a certain Vasya without a radio station. So there is some position there we don’t know about. We make a note on the map that, yes, there is something there. Then there was an interception where the rear services said that the third company needed so many sleeping bags, so many cots and three stoves in the dugout. For the others – a different amount.
  At first glance, this information is not important.
  But for a more detailed analysis, it’s just wow, because it builds the structure of the unit. That is, we know that there are so many soldiers from a specific unit in a given place, and so on…
• Well, it looks like Sherlock Holmes. First: you shouldn’t forget anything, you should keep any information.
• Experience has already taught me that everything is interesting, including numbers, call signs and proper names – you have to grab it.
• And secondly. That the devil is in the details.
• Again, from my own experience.
  It’s New Year’s Eve, and everyone on the other side is drinking and partying. But at this time, they got talking. They started to communicate with each other in an
  open way to wish each other a Happy New Year. As if the information was not very important. But: “Happy New Year to our commander (call sign, first name, surname)” – check. And so on. As a New Year’s gift, they drew the entire structure of some units
  for New Year’s Eve!
• I’d also like to ask about how our guys fed the Russians in Makariv on New Year’s Eve.
• Do you think it was a similar story?
• It might be.
• After the chimes, they all came out with their phones and it started: Mom,
  Hi, I wish you a Happy New Year…
• They were not calling their mothers. They were sitting and waiting for the president’s greetings. They were all gathered for this greeting. And they got it.
• That is, we took advantage of their rigid vertical organization of their army.
  - Yes, they have a very verticalized army.
  - Unlike ours.
  
• Ours is also verticalized, but not so critically. When our vertical, the command and control branch, is ruined, the economic nature of Ukrainians wakes up. They say, I am my own boss, and my neighbor is also smart, let me work with him without waiting for orders from the top.
• What does your work look like in practice?
  You mostly sit somewhere in basements or dugouts among cords and laptops
• We, our unit, have done one thing that sets us apart from the way other REI groups of the Armed Forces and so on.
  Because usually, the Armed Forces’ REI groups
  sit 15 kilometers from the ground and with huge antennas listening.
  - And what about you?
  - We used antennas made of shit and sticks, as they say. Which are as unlike antennas as possible.I t looks more like a fishing rod sticking out of a window. And they put them 60 meters away from the positions of the occupation forces. 60 meters they could reach them with a grenade. We set up the antenna, stretched the cord, hid in a dugout somewhere.

We set up the equipment, and sit and listen. The thing is, it’s a bit of a chutzpah,that when you’re sitting 15 kilometers away, you don’t hear ordinary radio stations. You hear repeaters that are more powerful,
they have a stronger signal. And all the attention goes to them. And here you are sitting so that visually you see the enemy and hear the portable radio. Portable – they don’t go through a repeater. That is, the connection there is between the two of the nearest trenches. The repeater is more for the leadership – for the CPC, for the unit headquarters. And when you talk from trench to trench, you get a lot more interesting and tasty information.

• From this, we conclude that, as a rule, you work in basements and dugouts, but there are quite a few moments when the soldiers of your unit themselves are exposed to danger.
• We have perfectly healthy people in our unit – only freshly recruited. And we continue to recruit people. We need brains because this is more of a brain work. You don’t have to be strong, you have to be smart. And so everyone is shell-shocked. Some of them 2 times, some 3 times.
  - Are you a shell-shocked?
  - Yes, twice. One contusion is very old, from 2014. And the second one was a full-blown one, on June 1, during the orcs’ assault on Sviatohirsk. Everything that could fly was flying at us. It was no longer about performing tasks. It was saving our own lives. It was a period when they could fire 40 of 120s at two infantrymen in the field and not even hit them.
  - What is fatigue for an electronic intelligence fighter?
  - Let me tell you by my own example. Working 24/7… It’s a big word, because you need to sleep.
• But I could not sleep more than three hours a day.
  - What do you dream about?
  - Nothing. I just switch off and on.
  I am so tired that I just lay down and pass out. I am wearing armor, a helmet, and I just lean against the wall and fall asleep. And while you’re sleeping, you can be crushed. We have our local meme: the war has begun! It was one of the frequencies that one phrase was heard on the day the Kharkiv counteroffensive began – and then this frequency was silenced forever. That phrase was “the war has begun”. It is now a local meme in our country. As soon as some kind of sharp fighting starts: the war has begun!” That’s when “the war has begun,” I am woken up at any time, whenever it is, however it is. And again, relying on a fellow soldier from our unit, formerly from Kulchytskyi’s battalion, now we have moved to another brigade: he was caught up in the war – He died from energy drinks. Energy drinks – buckets of it. Coffee – in even bigger buckets. We even had an idea to brew coffee with energy drinks. Because you want to sleep so badly, but you have to work.
  - Coffee with energy drinks?
  - Yeah, just to make it work.
• They don’t show that on cooking shows.
  - No. In peaceful life, they don’t make such things.
• Tell us about a typical situation or task that you have to work with as an REI specialist.
• Typical tasks are constant analysis and monitoring of all frequencies, search for new frequencies, used by the occupiers. There are atypical tasks. They are completely atypical.
  - Give an example.
  - An attack on our positions. They were attacked and destroyed. Two men are missing. Our task is to completely go through everything that “our” orcs opposite us and adjacent units have said about tongues or prisoners taken.
  To determine whether our guys were captured or killed or buried somewhere. To find out the fate of the fighters, the fate of those who were captured in captivity. Because before, they used to get people and take them somewhere to Russia. It all depends on the unit. Wagners most often do not play with captives, they shoot them. Either they take the most interesting commander or the most tongue-in-cheek, and shoot the rest.
  - Do the Wagners also have their own REI unit?
  - I have never heard of Wagner’s REI units. I’ve heard of REI units in the regular troops, yes.
  - What about aerial reconnaissance?
• They have aerial reconnaissance, like controlling airborne troops. They raise a drone and it monitors the assault operations. The commander sits somewhere far away and uses his “eyes” to control the assault operations via radio.
• There were days when you were proud of your unit and yourself, and you said to yourself: “Today is not a day lived in vain”?
• Yes, there were. We accompanied the movement of a column of the occupiers who were leaving Studenko during the Kharkiv counteroffensive.We would go out in a column and report that there was a column, so many vehicles, so many people.
  - Were they already running away?
  - Yes, they did. They were being chased from Studenka. They could not go through Sviatohirsk because it was already occupied. So they took a detour through Sosnove. And in Sosnove, our forces had already approached. The orcs were drawing fire from their own artillery, adjusting it. Аnd we adjusted our artillery to theirs. As a result, the column was broken, and 15 infantrymen escaped on foot through the forest. From the entire column. Then there was another situation. In which settlement, of course, I will not say. A certain number of vehicles were moving across the dam. They announced the order in which they would drive and the gap between vehicles. This was the only way for them to move.Our artwork was already shot there. They said: the first car has gone. We are the art, that the first one went. At that time, aerial reconnaissance was already correcting and confirming the situation. The first car was hit. The second vehicle was hit. The third vehicle missed. The fourth one was hit. The third one was coming back for the wounded, and we hit it again. This is another moment when we were really proud of it all.
• Do you ever have to take up arms and work in direct fire with the enemy?
• We always take up arms. Every time,
  whenever we go to the very ground, we must always have our weapons with us. You never know how the situation will go. But fortunately, we did not have to use it. We have the type of unit that if we have to engage in fire, it’s really bad.
• First of all, if we take ordinary units, not Wagner, what distinguishes Russian electronic intelligence from ours? We discussed at the beginning that they are very vertical.
• Vertical is a matter of course. А what makes it different is the means. Because they were preparing for a full-scale war. Very much. They invested extraordinary funds in it . If I had been given such means, our unit would have been even more effective. But we have to make do with what we have.
  - Well, these are the advantages of their vertical state funding. But they don’t have such small mobile groups. So that a small group with something that doesn’t look like an antenna to break even, it’s impossible for them.
  They have huge complexes with huge antennas. From the very beginning, they were thinking more about the global.
• Where did you get the money for equipment last year? Your means of production are very expensive in principle. And the state did not help you much then.
• The nuance here is that not all inputs are very expensive. There are cheaper analogs, and we used them. Where did you get the money from? From shit and sticks, as they say. It’s the most efficient method. It works. This is a method used in general for the whole REI work. “Where did you get the money from?” – We received a salary. Everyone is shouting about 100 thousand. But out of this 100 thousand, 80 thousand are spent on equipment or vehicle repairs.
  -Did you dump everything into a common pot?
• Yes, we did. For example, I had my own financial cushion. Fortunately, my job allowed me to do that. I am a programmer. I had a cushion, but it’s gone to zero. But a lot of things were bought.
  Then good people helped. I’m talking about our volunteers. Good people chipped in, and bought us some kind of wunderwaffle. We took this wunderwaffle and began to use it more actively.
  -What do you have to buy most frequently?
• Spare parts and components. Cables. It’s gross – it’s winter, and we had trouble with cables…
• Do you share all this good stuff with other divisions?

-No. Typically the information. Everyone values their equipment. Because when you buy this
equipment you spend your own money on, and you know what you need it for – it’s yours, you will not share it.

• Now, when you are operating as part of one of the newly formed brigades of the Guard
  offensive, is the supply on the same level? Has it improved a little bit, or not?
• So far, it’s at the level of promises, but they promise a lot. We haven’t had time to deliver it yet, maybe it’s all perhaps, because we have recently moved to one of the units of the offensive unit. But the promises are good. At least they listened to us. So what do you want? We have submitted a list. Yeah, okay, we can do this, we can do that, we can’t do that…
• During the offensive, how does the work of the REI department differ from the period of steady
  deployment? How is the work restructured? Let’s compare, for example, your Sviatohirsk days and the offensive in the Kharkiv region.
• When times were good in Sviatohirsk, we set up a post. It stood static for several months while the war was on. As soon as the offensive started, we first moved the main REI post to a higher place. Because the terrain is our main friend. Aerial reconnaissance is not so dependent on the terrain. Then we adapted the antennas in the direction of interest.
• That is, the landscape is very important to you.
• It’s huge. This is physics, the theory of radio wave propagation.
• What will be the difference between working in Sviatohirsk forests and working in the steppes of Kherson region?
• The steppes of Kherson region have a flatter surface. It’s a flat area with few forests. The forest is a radio interference. All the hills and mountains are radio interference. All buildings are large, factories are radio interference. Anything that is radio interference is inconvenient for the REI.
• On the other hand, in football, if two teams play on a bad pitch, it’s bad for both. So the russians must not like it either.
• Yes, but we, for example, may be in a lowland, and they are at a height. It’s easier to work from the heights. Not from the lowlands. It’s unrealistic, it would be inefficient.
• Not to mention the fact that artillery can cover low-lying positions much more successfully.
• That’s why the terrain is our friend. We have to be friends with it. When we are friends with it, we work effectively. – Have there been any cases of direct contact between our radio scouts and theirs?
• There were no such contacts. We had other cases, both funny and those that made us want to cry, two in one. This is when we found a frequency where there was an active conversation, active radio conversations, and a lot of useful information. But at one point, someone from Ukraine interrupts this frequency and says: Good morning, muscovites! And all this frequency changes. Months of work go down the drain!
• Who was the smart one who did this?
• Some Ukrainian who also tuned into this frequency and heard it. For him, it was five minutes of giggles, but for me, it was my hair being pulled out… It happens. During the assault, we heard one of our soldiers addressing the orcs in several adjacent trenches. He seized a radio station in one of them and called the orcs from another trench, forcing them to surrender. We were sitting there listening, because it was interesting! We knew that tomorrow this frequency would be inactive. But at least 5 minutes of respite, when our guys were bugging them!
• How was it? Was it cool, with humor?
• He forced me to come out of the trench. He said if you don’t come out, I’ll throw grenades in there. I persuaded them to come out for 20 minutes. Eventually, the orcs came out and surrendered. Everything is fine. The situation ended positively for us.
• He did a good job for himself, and a sh**ty job for you.
• God be with him. Every time there is an assault on the orcs’ position, they know that they have lost radio stations, a certain number of them. And they change frequencies. We understand that there is an assault, so we say goodbye to these frequencies and look for the frequency they will switch to.
• 3 of what you listen to in the intercepts, what do the russians call Ukrainians?
• It depends. Most often, they call them “ukry”. Then there are Germans, blacks.
• Why Germans?
• This is a continuation of the Second World War. There are both Germans and fascists.
• You can go crazy… I mean, they are re-enacting the real war as well.
• For example, when they promised us German tanks, they made a parallel, saying that we would be fighting against German tanks again. For them, the Second World War is still going on, they are burning with it, they are sick…
• And who is the most detached from reality in this sense?
• The most detached from reality are the same Wagners and the same Cossacks.
• I understand why the Cossacks are so out of touch with reality, because they are raised to be crazy Black Hundreds from a young age.
• They have their own special ways of speaking and greeting: ‘Dear brothers, this is their speciality. This is what distinguishes their units.
• And the Kadyrovites?
• We rarely hear about them. They have no specifics of their own, except for a pronounced Caucasian accent.

-And why are the Wagners detached from reality?

• Again, there are Wagners, who were mercenaries in Africa before that, who are more professionals. And there are Wagners, who are currently being recruited among convicts, athletes, and so on. They differ very specifically in the manner of communication and in the manner of work.
• Give an example.
• Those old Wagners, there are fewer of them left, but they are more specific, more laconic, more clear. Those who are new can state in one sentence everything that is relevant to the case, and that is not relevant, and a lot of unnecessary stuff. It is superfluous for them, and useful for us. Sometimes too much for us. But that is the prose of the work.
  That is, the more experienced a person is, the less he rambles and the more clearly he speaks on the matter.
• In them, some units try to communicate in phrases for up to two seconds,
  hoping we don’t hear it. We didn’t hear that (smiles. – E.K.)
  Enough about this evil. I wanted to ask about your guys who died…
• I would rather not talk about it. I know and remember all our dead. Some people died – it was very painful for me. I have known some of the boys since 2014, we slept in the same trench, we dug dugouts together. Here I find out that the guy is gone – the shell hit…
  Did they die mostly from shelling?
• Too lazy to dig. A soldier’s main ally is not a weapon, it’s a shovel. If you dig in well, you live longer than if you dig in badly. As we joked, the gentry don’t dig.
• A question that will finally have a professional answer. Given how much resources russia is throwing away on bots and various hackers, I ask: what messenger do you recommend using?
• As they say, the Ministry of Defense does not recommend any messenger in our country. Everything else is at your own peril and risk. But you cannot use all messengers that have even the slightest relation to russia. Telegram – including. Although it is indicated as conditionally safe. But no.
  When volunteers or journalists or anyone else goes to the front, what rules would you advise them to follow so as not to put themselves and those around them in danger?
• The first golden rule: at a distance of 15 kilometers, and better at a distance of 20 kilometers from the demarcation line, turn on airplane mode. If you have an iPhone, turn it off completely.
• Why?
• Because the iPhone exchanges data even in airplane mode. There are Russian stations of the Leer-3 type, which simulate the operation of mobile base stations. They see that three or more telephones are coming towards him from the forest. Because if there are 3 or more telephones in the forest, it means that some unit is sitting there. If there are three or more, then there are really more of them. Because someone is in airplane mode.
  You said that you are still looking for new people for your unit. You better know the requirements for such people. Can you give a professional and psychological portrait of such a person?
• Analytical mindset, preferably specialized skills – ideally some radio amateur. Working with a soldering iron and basic knowledge of physics and electricity. And the desire to learn. Willingness to learn and reluctance to leave the combat zone before victory.
• Indeed?
  Because if you came on rotation schemes (as is most often the case in the National Guard) for a few months, then left for a month, came again for a few months, this is bad for business. You lose your immersion in affairs for a month outside the combat zone. You come – and for a month you understand what is being done here. And during this time, everything can change. Reconnaissance will take a lot of time. You drove in – and then half a month, or even a month, you get involved. And then when you know that you’re going home in two weeks, you’re already sitting on your suitcases, you don’t need that job at all. You want to go home, to your wife, to your children. We are sitting until the Russians leave our territories. I have a wife and children at home. I talk with them via video link, say hello, say that I love everyone – and on to work. And not every day. Someone, as soon as they got to the starlink, talk for half the day. I give the news once a week that I am safe, alive, and healthy. It’s all.
  That is, you don’t have any evening or morning ritual of communicating with your family via video?
• No. There is nothing like that. When I arrive, the children hug me and don’t get off me for a couple of hours. Hanging on the neck, on the hands. When I go – the same ritual. And when I’m at home, everything is normal.
• The last question I ask everyone. Do you think we will win this war?
• Yes. No doubt.
  And why will we win?
• We are fighting for our land. On our land, for our land, for our beloved ones. Losing this war would mean physical destruction for us.
• Is it possible to characterize the love for our land? This is such a thing that you can’t touch it.
• We are not fighting for the land, but for our children, women, relatives. Even the same Donbas – I have a friend, godfather, from Donbas.
• What advantage does this give in combat actions, can you formulate? This may be a stupid question…
• This is a difficult question. I will say this: we are not fighting for some phantom ideas of some crazy leader. We fight to survive. Ours is not a war of occupation, but a war of survival.

Those willing to help Mykhas and his brothers can use the following information:
Bunnies of Cherkes, NGO Current account UA553052990000026009046306320
EDRPOU 45099977
https://linktr.ee/zaichyky.chrkessa – here is this link – all forms of help for guys that you can think of. Open and donate!
Yevhen Kuzmenko, “Censor.NET”

https://censor.net/ua/resonance/3426078/profi_radioelektronnoyi_rozvidky_myhas_raptom_na_tsyu_chastotu_rosiyan_vklynyuyetsya_htos_iz_ukrayintsiv