Cybersecurity and cyberwar writ large are interconnected subjects that create serious challenges for policy makers. On an individual level we are far more likely to be the victims of cybercrime than of cyberwar. But the cyber challenge spans the entire gamut of security. From state-authorized attacks against another state, such as the deployment of Stuxnet against Iran, to the targeting of private industry like North Korea’s assault on Sony Pictures Entertainment, down through to the proliferation of cybercrime that impacts the everyday security of citizens sent a phishing scam via email, any way you cut it the cybersphere has a big impact on security. Indeed, if you live in a Western democracy, the chances are that you have also been at the individual level, as well as the societal level, at best an unwilling participant and at worse a victim of cyberwar via social media.

Political technology' is the means by which the Kremlin achieved a monopoly of political control after the chaos of the 1990s. It then metastasised to take over other areas: civil society, history and foreign policy. Political technology produced the propaganda that produced the war against Ukraine. Political technology will outlive the end of real politics in an increasingly authoritarian Russia; it influences everything else that Russia does.