Fedorov said Ukraine needed digital talents where operational tasks will be distributed.

"We continue to fight on the cyber front. The IT army reportedly posted its list of Russian targets — which were also translated into English "for all IT specialists from other countries."

Christian Sorensen, a former US Cyber Command official, told VentureBeat that "hacktivists around the world will be working against Russia, because they are the aggressor. I think things will ramp up against western targets, but Russia and Belarus will be targeted by these groups even more" said Sorensen, formerly the operational planning team lead for the U.S. Cyber Command.

On Friday, a Bloomberg report said that a hacker group that was now forming to bring counterattacks against Russia had amassed 500 members.

"Whether sanctioned or not, official or not, if people have or can get the right information, know-how, and desire — they can make an impact," Sorensen said prior to the announcement of Ukraine's IT army. "We'll have to wait and see what they are able to do."

Next day Reuters reported that the official website of the Kremlin, "the office of Russian President Vladimir Putin....was down on Saturday, following reports of denial of service (DDoS) attacks on various other Russian government and state media websites.

"The outages came as Ukraine's vice prime minister said it had launched an 'IT army' to combat Russia in cyberspace."

According to the Independent the cyberattacks may have been even more extensive:

Ukraine's state telecommunications agency announced on Saturday that six Russian government websites, including the Kremlin's, were down.

Hacking group Anonymous has said that it will support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and has already claimed an attack on the state-controlled TV network Russia Today

Russia Today's servers were taken offline. The broadcaster has been criticised for putting out "propaganda" to the extent that the UK government has asked media regulator Ofcom to review its output.

Anonymous claimed credit for the attack, posting on Twitter that it took down the "propaganda station in response to Kremlin's brutal invasion".

RT was briefly unavailable, before returning online without images. Currently, the broadcaster is online and appears to be operating as normal. "

After the statement by Anonymous, RT's websites became the subject of a massive DDoS attack from nearly 100 million devices, mostly based in the US", RT told The Independent.