Impact of the First Months of War on Routing and Latency in Ukraine

Abstract: Given the fundamental role of the Internet in our lives, a better understanding of its operational status during war times is crucial. In this paper, we analyze the Ukrainian Internet during the first months of war after the Russian invasion occurred in February 2022. The analysis is carried out from two points of view: routing and latency. In terms of routing, there is a substantial increase in BGP announcements and withdrawals which can be due to both physical unavailability of facilities and cyberattacks. Latency also increased significantly compared to the pre-conflict period, especially when considering paths going from Ukraine to Russia. The increase in latency appears to be due to a partial shift from peering to transit. As far as we know, this is the first quantitative analysis about the Internet of a large country during a major conflict.