In this Tallinn Paper, the Centre’s Senior Fellow professor Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg responds to an article by Andrey Krutskikh, senior official of the Russian Federation, and Anatoly Streltsov on the application of international law to cyber operations. Heintschel von Heinegg welcomes their article for it contributes to the on-going international discourse on the international law implications for cyber security. That said, he finds it hard to agree with many of the positions suggested by the authors. These include matters of sovereignty, the law of state responsibility, the jus ad bellum – the international law governing the resort to force by states –, and international humanitarian law. Importantly, he is unconvinced by the authors’ plea on the inability of existing international law to effectively regulate state uses of information and communications technologies. Heintschel von Heinegg concludes that “modifying and interpreting international law in the way proposed in the article would most probably serve Russian interests, but not necessarily those of other states.”