Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and National Cyber Security Strategies: Quantitative Compar-ison

Abstract

Shared understanding of the operational environment in the cyber domain is the key enabler of NATO’s cyber posture. However, there have been no attempts to evaluate empirically the impact of the war in Ukraine on intra-Alliance coherence. This study applies a novel methodology based on computation text analysis to evaluate the trends within the recently adopted national cyber strategies with regards to the description of threats, risks, and actors involved in carrying out these threats – in particular, Italy, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis shows that before the large-scale invasion, the congruence was low between the two continental European states vis-a-vis the UK and the US on threat and risk assessment. After the invasion, these dif- ferences became smaller and the language of the updated National Cyber Security Strategies became more homogeneous as mea- sured by the cosine similarity scores. There are still differences in the discussion of relevant actors in cyberspace. The methodology applied here can be extended to measure the cohesiveness of the Alliance’s cyber posture along other dimensions.