RIPE NCC

What Happens to the Internet when War Breaks Out? #ukraine #internet #BGP

The video presents a research project examining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshaped Internet inter‑peering and autonomous system (AS) dynamics from April 2021 through early 2025. Using data from regional registries, PeeringDB, Packet Clearing House, Hurricane Electric, and quarterly snapshots from KADA, the authors track AS registrations, country‑code changes, and peering relationships across both nations. Key findings include a notable drop in the total number of ASes registered to each country, with a surge of ASes flipping their country code between Russia and Ukraine between October 2022 and April 2023. Foreign AS presence in Russian facilities fell steadily, while Ukrainian infrastructure saw pre‑invasion spikes in disconnections—45 ASes in late 2021, 54 in early 2021—most of which were Russian‑owned ISPs. Conversely, Ukrainian ASes experienced disconnections just before the February 2022 invasion, largely affecting Russian‑controlled networks. To validate the raw datasets, the team cross‑checked traceroute records from RIPE Atlas and performed PTR‑record matching for Ukrainian IXPs. This effort confirmed the offline status of a small, bomb‑damaged exchange in Mariupol and yielded an overall validation accuracy of roughly 75 %. The analysis also revealed that foreign peerings to Ukrainian ASes tripled after October 2022, while Russian foreign peers and client relationships declined markedly. The study concludes that peering activity shifted months before the full‑scale invasion, with significant infrastructure loss in eastern Ukraine and a lasting reconfiguration of cross‑border Internet connectivity. These dynamics underscore how geopolitical conflict can rapidly alter the technical fabric of global networks.