4 days ago
Putin silences Russia with sweeping internet blackouts
In the Rostov region of western Russia, Tatiana picks up her phone again in the faint hope that she will be able to make contact with her friends or family.
It has been days since she has been able to connect to the internet, pull up a map, transfer her salary, or use any other of her myriad apps.
There is good reason, Russian authorities argue.
On Tuesday, a Ukrainian drone smashed into one of Rostov's main rail hubs for the second night in a row, destroying equipment used to transport oil at a logistics hub for the military.
Without the mobile internet networks, drones like these struggle to find the data they need to navigate to their targets.
So Russia simply switches the internet off.
'There are no warnings,' Tatiana told The Telegraph, before thousands like her are suddenly plunged into digital darkness.
'It is becoming the new norm,' added the 30-year-old, who spoke under a pseudonym.
Since May, Russian authorities have – with increasing intensity – shut down mobile internet networks not just in regions bordering Ukraine, but more than 4,000 miles from the front line.
Russia experienced 2,099 internet shutdowns in July alone, three times that recorded in June and 30 times that recorded in May, according to Na Svyazi, an independent digital monitoring project.
While the official rationale is to counter increasing Ukrainian drone attacks, experts also say the blackouts are part of the Kremlin's efforts to curtail online freedom and tighten its grip on the population.
Indeed, British defence intelligence sources in July accused the Kremlin of using the regular shutdowns to strengthen its control over online information.
Russia has a strong record of cracking down on digital access, including trying to block messaging apps and YouTube. Russia has also restricted smartphone connectivity before in isolated instances such as protests.
Last week, Vladimir Putin signed new laws cracking down on Russians using VPNs to access foreign apps and banned content. And because of the recent surge in large-scale outages, Russia is now ranked fourth in the world for the number of digital shutdowns, according to Access Now, a digital rights NGO.
The Kremlin had once boasted of having one of the most open online environments. But experts now suspect it is trying to imitate China's aggressively authoritarian model of internet censorship – the 'Great Firewall' – which blocks certain overseas websites.
'Russia is trying to install the Great Firewall of Moscow,' says John Foreman, former UK defence attaché to Moscow and Kyiv.
However, the state has clearly not proven as 'technologically adept' as Beijing, which has restricted users since the birth of the internet.
Yet, the rationale remains the same: both countries perceive internet freedom as a political and internal security threat. In this way, 'the internet forms the battleground for the Russian state to control its people,' Mr Foreman says.
There are reports that Roskomnadzor, Russia's censorship agency, is already testing the activation of full nationwide blackouts.
'These developments are of course dangerous and symptomatic of the Kremlin's growing paranoia and obsession with monopolising the digital space,' Jaroslava Barbieri, a research fellow at the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House, said.
As the war in Ukraine goes on, 'we should expect Russia's attempts to control the narrative and isolate the population from accessing reality to get much worse,' she told The Telegraph.
The temporary blackouts and the slow squeeze in internet freedoms may be running in parallel or may be one and the same, depending on who you ask. In any case, the widespread shutdowns are having hugely disruptive effects on the lives of millions of Russians.
They rid Russians of the means to communicate, and in some cases, their ability to escape drone attacks, while costing the Russian economy up to $60m (£45m) a day.
Ukraine has repeatedly warned of the need to bring the war home to Russia. Its drones, which reach deeper into enemy territory each day and destroy critical defence and energy infrastructure, appear to have found a new way to do that.
'Russia is very dependent on mobile networks for everything, so these outages are a daily reminder of the war in people's hands,' said Mr Foreman.
Not even the rich can be sheltered from the shutdowns. 'It's a crude tool. A great leveller,' he told The Telegraph. 'The regime does not care about inconveniencing the already inconvenienced population.'
The trend began in May when Russia celebrated the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War and foreign dignitaries flocked to Moscow for the annual military parade.
The capital suffered severe internet disruptions for days, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed was a deliberate policy to thwart Ukrainian drone attacks.
But the internet blackouts in Moscow quickly rippled across the country, becoming longer, more frequent and reaching regions almost untouched by the war.
'The capital showed the regions that this is a useful tool and there would not be repercussions,' said Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of Russian internet freedom group Roskomsvoboda.
Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb in early June – which involved short-range drones launched from trucks attacking airfields deep inside Russia – terrified officials, Mr Darbinyan said.
He argued that the outages are not an effective response, but an 'an act of desperation' to respond to the country's rising vulnerability to Ukrainian drone attacks.
Cutting off mobile internet networks could knock a drone off course, but they can still fly using or other communication methods and sometimes autonomously.
The data are also telling. According to analysts, the pattern of shutdowns has been random and difficult to predict, often indicating a lack of logic to the decisions.
Some of the most affected regions are of clear strategic interest to Ukraine, those with high concentrations of energy or defence infrastructure, but others have rarely – if at all – been targeted, prompting many to question the official explanation.
To compound Russia's dilemma, Ukraine is having growing success disrupting the Russian state by hacking into critical systems.
Last week, one pro-Ukrainian group claimed a massive cyber attack on Russia's flagship airline that destroyed 7,000 Aeroflot servers, paralysed operations at Moscow's airports and caused nationwide disruptions.
Two so-called hacktivist groups, Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans, had been lurking in Aeroflot's systems for over a year. The Kremlin said the attack was worrying and lawmakers described it as a wake-up call for Russia.
A day later, a still-unclaimed cyber attack targeted two of Russia's largest pharmacy chains, knocking them offline and causing lasting disruptions to over 1,100 pharmacies in more than 80 cities, according to the Moscow Times.
The Aeroflot attack was a 'highly sophisticated cyber operation, exercised with a very strategic mindset', said Dr Pia Hüsch, a cyber security expert at the Royal United Services Institute.
The attack was conducted in support of the Ukrainian state, but there is no way to know to what degree hacktivists operate under its control, she said, which in turn offers Kyiv plausible deniability.
'If the hacktivists managed this, it is likely they have infiltrated other critical systems,' Dr Hüsch told The Telegraph, underscoring the vulnerability of the Russian digital infrastructure.
It is another way the war is being brought home to Russia, an aim Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to make happen a year ago.
