Impact of the Russo Ukraine war on ping response times

Table of Contents

Introduction

This page provides information on ping response times measured every 30 minutes from the SLAC National Lab (40 miles south of San Francisco in California, US) to sites in Ukraine around the time of the Russo Ukraine war in February 2022.

At the start of the war, the PingER project was only monitoring 2 sites in Ukraine: mail.kipt.kharkov.ua and ns.kiev.ua. Since then we have added 5 more sites.

In addition one of the monitored sites (mail.kipt.kharkov.us) was a PingER Beacon site that was monitored from 11 PingER sites around the world, in particular, the closest monitoring site from Ukraine was DESY in Hamburg Germany

You can click on the graphs to increase their size.

Google map of Ukraine highlighting  Western Ukrainian National University

L'vivs'ka St, 11, Ternopil, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine, 46009

Click on the map to magnify.

Snapshot Feb 28, noon California time

There is not much to see, there are notable step changes in the Round Trip Times (RTT) for the:

• Odessa I. I. Michnikov National University a step up starting Feb 27, starting around 14:00 GMT, and then a larger step down on Feb 28 around 20:00.
• the Western Ukrainian National University, which is farthest from the invading forces, a step up starting around 9:00am GMT Feb 25, 2020, then steps down on Feb 28 around noon and 20:00,

I also note that all the web servers (except ns.kiev.us) that PingER is monitoring are still serving web pages.

State of war, California time from Wikipedia (click on a map to increase its size)

Plots of PingER round trip times

Kyiv Academic University 

The times in the plots below are GMT

mail.kipt.kharkov.ua (Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, Kharkiv, latitude & longitude 50.0867 36.2522)

Monitored from SLAC

Monitored from DESY

www.onu.edu.ua (Odessa I. I. Michnikov National University, latitude & longitude 46.4875 30.7290)

ix.net.ua(Ukranian Internet Exchange, Kyiv, latitude & longitude 50.4359 30.4981)

ns.kiev.ua (Kyiv Navigator, Kyiv, latitude & longitude 50.4359 30.4981)

www.hostmaster.ua (Hostmaster, Kyiv latitude and longitude 50.4557 30.4900)

According to https://hostmaster.ua/news/?pr20220226 'As of 2/.26/2022 the .UA domain registry company "Hostmeister" has transferred to European countries servers that ensure the operability of the .UA domain. Previously, the servers were located in Kiev.

www.archangel.kiev.ua (Saint Michael's Monastery, Kyiv, latitude & longitude 50.4558 30.5208)

www.golos.com.ua (Voice of Ukraine, Kyiv, latitude longitude = 50.4558 30.5055)

www.kau.org.ua (Kyiv Academic University, Kyiv, latitude longitudee = 50.4667 30.3608)

www.wuna.edu.ua (Western Ukrainian National University, Ternopil, latitude longitude = 49.7954 27.8248)

Other references:

Ukraine struggles with Internet blackout after Russian invasion, Feb 25

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is Already Taking Down the Internet, Feb 24

https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/24/russia-ukraine/

Ukranian Internet Exchange traffic

Map of the current state of the Russian attack, from the Washington Post

Russo Ukrainian War, Wikipedia

According to https://hostmaster.ua/news/?pr20220226 "As of 2/.26/2022 the .UA domain registry company "Hostmeister" has transferred to European countries servers that ensure the operability of the .UA domain. Previously, the servers were located in Kiev."

Mariupol State University's web site  (http://en.mdu.in.ua/) has an RTT from SLAC of  around 72ms suggesting it is on the US

The Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (www.lnu.edu.ua) has an RTT from SLAC of around 161ms and appears to be served by edivirt1803.your-server.de where .de is the TLD for Germany