Internet outages and airport disruption threaten Putin’s deal with Russia’s middle classes

While Russians living in Moscow and other cities away from the border have suffered nothing like the kind of deadly attacks Ukrainians in Kyiv have been put through — with Vladimir Putin deploying hundreds of drones and missiles in escalating nightly barrages — the cost of the war is starting to become ever more apparent on Russian soil. That is even the case in the capital, where most people have spent almost four years pretending that nothing is happening. But security measures being taken by the authorities are starting to affect their daily lives. In Moscow, mobile internet was heavily disrupted in early July, and there were systemic outages for the popular Telegram and WhatsApp messengers. Meanwhile a collapse at airports left 2,000 flights delayed this weekend alone.

What’s going on?

Disruptions to the internet and airports are nothing new—authorities began throttling mobile internet around the May 9 Victory Day celebrations, when Ukrainian drone attacks also caused hundreds of flights to be cancelled or delayed—but the scale of the collapse in early July has hit a whole new level.