Olga Buzova sobs. The Russian influencer sits in a white bathrobe in front of the camera and complains: “I don’t know what to do next, maybe I have to leave Instagram. Maybe there is a way to come back with a VPN, but I still don’t understand how it works.” The video is from Sunday, when it was clear that in a few hours she would lose access to Instagram, like millions of other Russians. The country’s telecoms regulator also blocked Instagram after Facebook. Both networks belong to the US group Meta. People in Russia can only access bikini pictures and songs like Buzova’s with VPNs, i.e. virtual tunnels, bypassing the Internet blockade. The move, according to the Kremlin, comes in response to Meta’s decision not to delete calls from Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers in the country – a break with Meta’s old rule against calls for violence. On Monday, Russia also threatened to block YouTube.
So the Russian Internet these days is different from the one before the attack on Ukraine. A development that could end in the complete decoupling of the Russian network from the global network. A digital silo that the state could easily censor and monitor – at least that’s the plan.
Alp Toker operates the Netblocks.org service in London, which records internet blocks. He says: “A media war is taking place on the Internet. Each side imposes its own restrictions.” Not only the EU has banned the propaganda channels Sputnik and RT. Another arena is Icann, the organization that takes care of that part of the Internet architecture that connects websites to specific addresses. The Ukrainian Icann representative had asked the organization to block Russian websites in general. She protested against such instrumentalization in a letter to Digital Minister Mikhail Fedorov: “Icann was built to make the Internet work, not to be used to make it stop working.” You stay neutral.
The question, however, is whether Russia will decouple itself. The plan to operate the Russian Internet independently and in isolation has been worked out and prepared by law. In 2019, this isolation of the “RUnet”, i.e. a Russian island internet, was tested – according to Russia “successfully”. Doubts remain, however, as to whether the network can really be operated in isolation without major disruptions and can be censored as easily as some in the Kremlin apparently imagine.
Nikita Istomin, a lawyer at the Russian NGO Roskomsvoboda, which campaigns for a free internet, says: The state has tightened control over the technical infrastructure in recent years and hammered an idea into the country: one day there will be a situation in which that Russia will be locked out of the international Internet. In the event of a crisis, the political elites wanted a network in which information could be checked.
An official recommendation was published last week that state websites should switch to Russian infrastructure and avoid program snippets that access servers abroad when building their websites. The rumor immediately spread that Russia wanted to take its leave of the global network in the same week. But Russia is still online. In fact, the triple step towards digital self-sufficiency is primarily a protective measure against hacker attacks from abroad. Finally, Ukraine has mobilized cyberfighters around the world. Only on Sunday reported the mirrorthat people belonging to the hacker collective Anonymous stole a bunch of data from the German subsidiary of the Russian oil company Rosneft.
Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity consultant and infrastructure expert, said that Russia had to protect itself against hackers as a “ridiculous” idea when the isolation plans were introduced. But the war changed everything. The new guidelines are “not decoupling from the Internet, but their full implementation should prove to be helpful should decoupling occur”.
The forces tugging at Russia’s connection to the world work both ways. Key players in the network have begun to give the country a wide berth. The US companies Lumen and Cogent are so-called backbone operators, they take care of the central lines of the Internet, the backbone so to speak. After the invasion began, they withdrew from Russia – to prevent cyberattacks from running through their infrastructure. So far, according to the Internet analysis company Thousand Eyes, there are no signs Thereforethat the exit of the companies will make the Internet noticeably slower for Russian users. Data from Russian Internet providers continue to flow abroad, including about Frankfurt.
Klaus Landefeld wants Russia to stay online. With the association Eco, he represents the internet economy in Germany. Russian companies are also members of Eco. “Demands from us to force the separation are totally stupid,” he says. “If the people in Russia can no longer get international information, then they won’t stand up either.” But he also believes that Russia wants to cut its cord in an emergency: “They want the off button.”