Ukraine and Estonia both requested to buy the spyware in order to gain access to Russian phones because of tensions with Russia in the past years.
Ukraine has been trying to buy Pegasus for years since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, but Israel put a sales embargo on the spyware to Ukraine, according to the report.
Estonia started negotiations to purchase Pegasus in 2018, and Israel at first authorized Estonia to have the system, apparently unaware that Estonia planned to use the system to attack Russian phones. The Estonian government made a large down payment on the $30 million it had pledged for the system. A senior Russian defense official contacted Israeli officials and told them that Estonia had used the spyware on his phone. Israel then blocked Estonia from using the system.
Israel’s government has authorized Pegasus to be purchased by authoritarian governments, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that have used the weapon to spy on dissidents, human rights activists and journalists in those countries. Democratically elected leaders in India, Hungary, Mexico, Panama and other countries also abused Pegasus to spy on their political opponents.
NYT contacted representatives of the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but both parties declined to comment.
More about Pegasus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
