KYIV (The Thursday Times) — Ukraine’s main air raid warning app was apparently hacked late on Sunday and briefly told users that Kyiv faced a radiation threat, the Ukrainian Air Force said, and hours later Russia said its own emergency app had been hit by a “massive cyberattack”.
The false alerts on the Air Alert app began at about 22:47 local time (20:47 GMT), with red-level air raid warnings issued nationwide. A radiation warning for Kyiv was followed by a message in Russian saying a nuclear alert was coming across Ukraine and mentioning Oreshnik, Russia’s intermediate-range ballistic missile. Further alerts warned of a chemical attack and street fighting in the capital. All-clear messages reached phones at about 23:53.
“There is no radiation threat,” the Air Force said on Telegram, telling people to stay calm and blaming what it called probable “hostile interference”. Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications blamed Russia for the hack. In the Lviv region, the false radiation signal was also played through loudspeakers, Ukrainian intelligence said.
Regional governors moved quickly to reassure residents, and the governor of Vinnytsia warned people not to click on a link in the message because it could be a phishing attempt. The Digital Transformation Ministry, which supports the app, said it had been taken offline for maintenance after it was “apparently compromised”, and urged people to turn on emergency notifications on their phones. A separate app for Kyiv kept working normally, city authorities said.
A few hours later, Russia’s emergencies ministry said its own app had sent “fake information to the public”. Ukrainian reports said users there received false warnings of a nuclear threat and that Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan group operating in Russian-held territory, had claimed responsibility. That claim has not been independently verified.
The first alerts came minutes before the end of a local ceasefire in the Kherson region, which was agreed last Tuesday so civilians could leave the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky. It expired at 23:00 on Sunday.
