Brussels: The European Parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed a resolution calling Russia a state sponsor of terrorism for its invasion of and actions in Ukraine.
In a lopsided 494-58 vote with 48 abstentions, the EU legislature sought to increase pressure on Moscow to bring anyone responsible for war crimes committed from the Feb. 24 start of the invasion before an international court.
The 27-nation EU has condemned in the harshest terms the invasion and repeatedly said that several Russian actions over the past 10 months have amounted to war crimes.
Meanwhile, a punishing new barrage of Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on Wednesday caused power outages across large parts of the country — as well as neighboring Moldova — further hobbling Ukraine’s battered electricity network and adding to civilians’ misery as winter begins.
The European Parliament’s website also came under a cyberattack by a pro-Moscow group hours after lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a resolution calling Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, the legislature’s president said Wednesday.
President Roberta Metsola said in a Twitter statement that the parliament “is under a sophisticated cyberattack” and that a “pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility.”
The legislature’s spokesman Jaume Duch said that the website “is currently impacted from outside due to high levels of external network traffic.” He added that “this traffic is related to a DDOS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) event.”
In a distributed denial of service attacks, the instigators render websites unreachable by bombarding them with junk data packets. DDoS attacks do not damage networks because they do not penetrate them. But they can be a major nuisance, especially when targeting sites the public depends on for vital information and services.
