How Putin’s allies benefit from internet shutdowns

Hello! This week we report on how businesses loyal to the Kremlin are winning out as mass internet blackouts become a feature of daily life for millions of Russians.

On again, off again: How the authorities keep their friends online after switching off the internet

With Russia having got used to switching off the internet in a bid to thwart Ukrainian drones, the country is fast setting new records for the precedence of the shutdowns. There are now more internet outages in Russia every month than there were in the entire world last year. To restore at least some online order to life in Russia’s cities, the authorities last month introduced a whitelist — a set of online services that must remain accessible even during mobile internet shutdowns. As The Bell discovered, the list was initially driven by businesses, but soon became a way for the Kremlin to reward loyal internet companies by getting them a coveted spot.

‘Digital detox’

“It feels like we are just living without mobile internet. I no longer expect notifications when I’m outside, I always carry cash and I don’t even look at apps anymore,” a source in one Russian region told The Bell. Over the summer, shutting down mobile internet became so commonplace that it is now hard to believe that any outage used to be seen as a rare emergency. For comparison: in April there were two mobile internet shutdowns in the whole of Russia, in May that leapt to 69 and by August there were 2,129, the Na Svyazi project calculated.

The first official warnings of mobile internet outages for people in Moscow and Central Russia came in the build-up to May 9, with authorities, including the Kremlin, citing the importance of protecting “events in honor of the 80th anniversary of Victory Day” that would see the arrival of “many foreign delegations” to the Russian capital. Experts attributed the shutdowns to increased Ukrainian drone activity, which often use modems equipped with Russian SIM cards to connect to local base stations for their tracking while in flight.

At the time, pro-Kremlin media unanimously dubbed it a “digital detox” and advised people to simply relax and enjoy the holiday without online distraction. Since then, shutdowns have become widespread, even constant in several cities. For instance, in the defense industry hub of Dzerzhinsk and several districts of Nizhny Novgorod, with its million-plus population, mobile internet basically no longer works.

As they became commonplace, the authorities started trying to “correct” the heavy-handedness of blanket blackouts back in September. The shutdowns were not subject to more regulation, nor was the decision-making process any more transparent. Instead, a whitelist of “in-demand” internet services that should remain always online was drawn up.