Russia's 'nyet' to the internet

11:40Evgeny Pudovkin:How to go to the library. There, by the way, the last days are also on the way. Well, it's beautiful, interesting, books are there, and you can find it.

11:48Howard Gethin:Choirs of little Russian children singing songs about how great it is that finally there is no internet because now at last we can play badminton.

11:57Daria Mosolova:But not everyone is taking it with big spoonfuls. This move has sparked something very rare in Russia these days, protests.

12:10Howard Gethin:There have been dozens of cities across Russia that have submitted applications to hold protests, which doesn't happen that often anymore. So that in itself is conspicuous. Of course, all of these requests were denied. And sometimes the excuses that local authorities provided were something like we have to abide by COVID-19 restrictions. And needless to say, it's been years since Russia stopped enforcing any social distancing rules. And some people ended up coming out in Moscow and several other cities regardless. They were detained. According to a Russian protest monitoring group, Ovidai Info, we have at least 25 people arrested on various administrative charges.

12:54Howard Gethin:We've seen people holding up placards that said no to war, and it kind of became this vessel for voicing broader discontents.

13:02Daria Mosolova:Public discontent might have slipped under the radar, had it not been for a female lifestyle blogger who made a direct appeal to President Putin.

13:15Howard Gethin:Victoria Bonia is this celebrity well known for her appearances on the Russian version of Love Island. Now she lives in Monaco and runs quite a popular blog. One day she drops this 18-minute-long address to Vladimir Putin, in which she very eloquently criticizes government officials for mishandling a whole slew of social issues, including internet shutdowns.

13:50Howard Gethin:And she basically indicates that in pursuing these policies, the Russian government could push people to the brink, to the point where they're going to grow tired of being afraid.

14:02Daria Mosolova:The video gathered a mind-blowing 30 million views in the first couple of days.

14:10Daria Mosolova:Losing mobile internet or access to apps isn't just inconvenient. It can be costly, as many business owners discovered. Our colleague Evgeny Pudovkin dug into the economics of Russia's internet use. Let's start with the numbers.

14:28K...:Over 70 million Russians use Telegram every day, and that's more than 60 % of the population. According to one survey done by Procremlian Business Lobby, 40 % of businesses said that access to the internet is crucial. According to one estimate, one hour of full internet outage costs around$25 million related to digital services like, say, e-commerce or delivery. One estimate said that all the advertising market built around Telegram is worth between$550 million to$1 billion. And this market can shrink by half if the government goes ahead with the tough restrictions. If this happens, it's going to cost lots of people their livelihood.

15:20K...:Good bloggers are, in many cases, are just small businesses, and they may find it difficult to rebuild their audience on Russian platforms. But in terms of the economy itself, it's not going to be a huge deal. The advertising market that's related to Telegram, that's only about 0.05 % of Russia's GDP.

15:42Daria Mosolova:Given that some sectors are global by design, How realistic is it to unplug them from the very infrastructure they rely on?

15:51Howard Gethin:As long as there are businesses in Russia that are still engaged in trading with foreign countries, you will need to retain access to the wider network. And these players are quite influential in Russia. So one sector you can think of is the oil sector. You can't cut them off from the global system.

16:10Daria Mosolova:To future-proof business that is essential for the country, there is a coveted exemption list called a white list.

16:18K...:You need to include all the big online retailers and all the big banks in those white lists. These priority services need to be online constantly and that's where the government's focus is at, is to be able to make sure that those wide-ranging outages do not become a huge nuisance for the population. If you're not included in the white list, your business is going to go bust.

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18:42Daria Mosolova:You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. And the pushback isn't just happening at home. Some of it is coming from the frontline in Ukraine. Let's bring in Gleb Borshevsky, BBC Monitoring's expert on all things military.

19:00Gleb Borshchevski:For any listeners who might not be familiar with how military communications work, the number one most important thing about them is encryption. If your communications are not encrypted and you're talking to another military unit, then those communications will be intercepted by the enemy, without a doubt. And if the enemy intercepts your communications, the enemy will know where you are. And that is a death sentence.

19:30Daria Mosolova:You'd expect the Russian military to have its own secure way of passing on highly sensitive battlefield comms. But it turns out these assumptions couldn't be further from reality.

19:42Gleb Borshchevski:There was a huge rearmament process in the 2010s, but it was subject to a lot of government corruption. A general was jailed over this corruption scandal, but by that point it was already way too late. And by the time the war started, what they actually had was just a set of cheap Chinese unencrypted radios, worth about$10 each. Using those in a military context was very much a bad idea. The soldiers on the ground had to turn to something that they had known to be a secure messaging platform, something they knew had encryption they knew worked in even in bad internet conditions and

20:31Daria Mosolova:that was telegram so telegram this is an app designed for public use and it became the lifeline for the russian military yes absolutely but that begs the question the commanders know this so the blocking of telegram the lifeline then how did that come about see you say the generals know

20:54Gleb Borshchevski:this. I would not be so sure about that, because the Russian military is infamous with how corrupted the reports get from the ground by the time they reach higher command. It is widely believed that Putin does not actually know what is going on in the war.

21:15Evgeny Pudovkin:As you know, under our control, he has been moved to Kupansk a few weeks ago.

21:21Gleb Borshchevski:Higher senior level officials, they might have this idea that the Russian military actually does have all of those secure communications, that they are able to operate independently of public messaging apps. But that is just simply not the case. Modern warfare is essentially drone warfare.

21:47Gleb Borshchevski:the way drone warfare works is that spotters and air defense systems try to take down as many drones as they can and then they report the drones that they did not manage to take down to the echelons that are located behind them and then they take down as many as they can and they report the groups behind them, and so on and so forth. This process was done on Telegram. But without that, groups simply cannot tell each other how many drones are left incoming. Ukrainian drones are flying very, very deep into Russian territory. In no small part, this is because Russia simply cannot take them down. This isn't just because Telegram was blocked.

22:32Gleb Borshchevski:Russia does not have the proper radar equipment, the proper electronic warfare equipment, but blocking the only reliable means of communications, it certainly did not help.

22:42Daria Mosolova:So does the Kremlin's line that the mobile internet shutdown helps countering the drone threat hold water?

22:50Gleb Borshchevski:Internet is being blocked, but somehow drones are still flying. Drones are still hitting their targets. The question is, why? How are these drones operating independently from the Russian internet? There are speculations amidst Russian war bloggers. We do not have any reliable evidence for this, but many are now saying that Starlink is now operating in some Russian regions. Obviously, Russians cannot connect to it, but what can connect to it is Ukrainian drones.

23:23Daria Mosolova:Starlink is Elon Musk's satellite-based provider of mobile internet, which played a significant role in the war in Ukraine.

23:32Gleb Borshchevski:Starlink was initially supplied for Ukrainians. Now, the thing is, there are so-called grey terminals that were used by both sides. Telegram was key to Russian operations in Ukraine, but Telegram still requires an internet connection, right? In February, Starlink cut off Russians from access to its services. And now Russians are back to using Wi-Fi extenders. They are laying fiber optic cables through the battlefield. And they are using Russian satellite internet, which is not very good.

24:08Daria Mosolova:That's why the move to block Telegram triggered pushback from a cohort normally aligned with the Kremlin.

24:15Howard Gethin:We think that Telegram is being throttled because it hosts a lot of independent opposition voices. But the majority of the channels that are really popular, they're run by some of the key propagandists like Solovyov or some military bloggers.

24:34Gleb Borshchevski:It is one of the very, very few cases where you will see generally pro-Kremlin and pro-war voices go so radically against the Kremlin. War bloggers are complaining that the war effort is now also impacted financially. Because a lot of the equipment that the Russian troops are getting on the front lines isn't actually provided by the Defense Ministry. It is provided through crowdfunding for basically everything, from drones to medkits to body armor. And they are now simply not getting that because if civilians do not have access to Telegram, and the money-raising is done on Telegram, some bloggers are now getting about 20 % of the views they used to before this whole blocking process started.

25:20Gleb Borshchevski:some commentators are saying that some local commanders are being told to use mugs for military comms others on the other hand are being told that they should in no way use mugs at all because it is not a secure messenger it is riddled with exploits and bugs and glitches ukrainians would not even need to hack it. It leaks confidential information on its own. Not just the use of telegram, the use of phones is supposed to be punished. But it is not because people who would be punishing them, i.e. their immediate commanders, they very much understand that without phones, Russian soldiers would just be cut off from any communications whatsoever, including communications from their commanders.

26:12Daria Mosolova:Some prominent figures have also taken up a fight on behalf of frontline troops.

26:23Howard Gethin:Sergei Mironov, who is the head of the Kremlin-friendly opposition party Just Russia, called on everyone who is making the decisions to block Telegram, to be sent to the front in Ukraine, because then they would know how crucial it is.

26:43Howard Gethin:The key Kremlin propagandists like Soloveyov was saying, can you basically do whatever you want for the internet, but can you leave the Russian army out of it? And in fact, they did, because when they realized the extent of the pushback that was coming from Russian armed forces, they have come out saying, essentially, scrap that. Everyone who is on the front line can continue doing whatever they want.

27:09Daria Mosolova:You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. Russian state media is aligned with the Kremlin's narrative by design. Private newspapers toe the line. Yet even some of those went against the grain. Our Russia experts who have been observing the country's media for decades can bring us another surprising element of this story. Here's Howard Getin.

27:36Gleb Borshchevski:The fact that Russia initially started cracking down on Telegram and on the internet was no surprise really. This is part of an ongoing process ever since Vladimir Putin became president. But the surprising thing was that the government appeared to misunderstand the extent to which the public is reliant on things like mobile internet and use of Telegram. And this has caused a reaction that I don't think they anticipated because Putin himself famously doesn't use the Internet and seems to regard it as some kind of American Defense Department ploy to control people.

28:10Daria Mosolova:What was their reaction?

28:11Gleb Borshchevski:It's almost completely unprecedented. There is an unwritten agreement between the government and the media that Putin is never criticized ever. And the authorities themselves are rarely criticized. the press came out quite blatantly pointed the finger at them and said this is outrageous you can't do this this is stupid it hasn't been thought through it is quite obvious that they were talking about putin in a veiled way firstly there were two articles one was in tabloid daily called muskovsky come somalets by dmitry popov and he said that the people see everything they think we're like little kids who are too small and brainless to be trusted and that the number of incomprehensible bans this year is already off the scale.

28:52Gleb Borshchevski:And again, no sane explanations. Three days after the initial Moskovsky-Komsomolites article, there was an editorial in the Zavisima Gazeta, a more heavyweight intellectual daily newspaper, and their editorial pointed the finger at the security services. Of course, everyone knows that Vladimir Putin came from that constituency, and they delivered quite a broadside. The article said The interests of the security services should not prevent the development of a fundamental factor of production, namely the internet. The Russian state apparatus and law enforcement like to make their lives easier by limiting the freedoms and conveniences of citizens where possible.

29:31Daria Mosolova:Even more unusual was the disapproval that came from within the Kremlin's political elite.

29:37Howard Gethin:Dmitry Kuskov, who is the spokesperson of Kremlin, said, quote-unquote, we are fast losing the instruments of our propaganda work abroad, particularly in our near abroad, which is how Russia refers to countries on its borders. How are we supposed to convey the meanings?

29:57Daria Mosolova:It's worth noting that Peskov actually used the word propaganda himself.

30:03K...:Maksud Shadaev, the Minister for Digital Transformation, publicly said that he would not like for foreign services to kind of disappear and to be completely blocked. Alexander Shokin, representative of the Russian largest business lobby, recently complained directly to Vladimir Putin that businesses and citizens are very much affected by those disruptions.

30:33K...:And this is a reputational blow to the Russian government.

30:37Gleb Borshchevski:So many people in the establishment have been actually directly affected themselves. This is why there's such widespread opposition, because it isn't just the Kremlin against the public. There's a whole gamut of people in between those two, like governors.

30:50Daria Mosolova:Despite the suddenly raised eyebrows, the latest internet restrictions seem to fit into an idea that's been around for a very long time.

31:00Howard Gethin:Runet, when it first came into being, which was in 1994, it was simply a way to designate this cluster of websites that were in the Russian language and aimed predominantly at Russian-speaking audiences. When we refer to Runet today, we're more likely referring to these efforts by the Russian government to establish a more self-contained national internet infrastructure. And some of the first signs people can trace back to maybe 2012. There was an amendment to the specific law for, quote-unquote, protecting children from harmful information online, the first proposal to introduce internet blacklists.

31:47Howard Gethin:Originally, it was just content that was overly violent or glorified drug use. But soon enough, they have added that propaganda of so-called non-traditional sexual relations was also considered harmful for children. And they have then relied on this to censor a lot of LGBT content.

32:05Evgeny Pudovkin:In 2019, Russian lawmakers passed the Sovereign Internet Bill.

32:17Howard Gethin:That essentially aimed to route all of Russia's internet traffic through the specific points that were directly controlled by the Russian authorities. All internet service providers in Russia were required by law to install these systems called TSPU, technical means for countering threats. In the West, we know them as deep packet inspections. There are these boxes that you can install on a network that would allow you to take each individual tranche of information that gets transmitted over the Internet, look inside it, and then make a decision as to what you want to do with it. So if you think it's okay, you can let it pass, or you slow it down, or block it entirely.

33:02Howard Gethin:That's the crucial technology that the government uses. It looks like this project for establishing a sovereign Internet is near the top of the government's priorities list. Any time scale you know of? Business paper Commerzant said that the government plans to increase the capacity of these deep packet inspections two and a half times by 2030, investing about$186 million.

33:29K...:This reflects this idea of Russia to be a superpower. The idea that Russia needs to create its own internet infrastructure is taking hold.

33:45K...:to make sure that Russian services is the only game in town. And over time, it's a hope to be able to bring the vast majority of the population into its own ecosystem.

33:58Daria Mosolova:But why is it important for Russia to have its own ecosystem in order to say, look, we are a great country?

34:05K...:What Russia is saying is that who is going to earn the commission on these transactions that Russians are doing, that all the revenue that is made in Russia stays in Russia. By on-shoring all this internet activity, you have more engineers based in Russia and making more money as a result of servicing this infrastructure. You have more jobs, you have more competences, and the government also gains more control over what's going on within its borders. Given the ongoing war, one aspect that's also important is to have a political control. So having domestically based internet infrastructure means that the government can also track down political dissent in a much more efficient way.

34:50Daria Mosolova:In a nutshell, more money stays in Russia and the government gets tighter control over the online space. It's beginning to look like China.

34:59Howard Gethin:China has very much a superior software digital service capacity and its great firewall has been around for about as long as Putin has been in power. They have had the opportunity to build a lot of high-quality replacements for whatever people might want to access. Russians, on the other hand, have already gotten used to things like YouTube and WhatsApp, and now they will have to give up these conveniences in favor of maybe some domestic alternatives that are quite undercooked.

35:35K...:Switching to the Russian alternative switch, I have tried, and it feels like you used to drive a very modern car, And now you have this second-hand car from a dodgy dealer which breaks down constantly.

35:52K...:The experience is vastly different and the glitches that you have are disproportionately more frequent. When you use Russian platforms, it's not something that's going to bring the Russian economy to a halt. but it's definitely something that disrupts everyday life of many Russians to a significant extent.

36:15Howard Gethin:I think a parallel that is perhaps most useful is one with Iran, because Iran, in a somewhat similar way to these whitelists in Russia, has their own national information network, something that people sometimes jokingly refer to as the halal internet, which is supposed to be sufficient for covering all of the basic needs of the population. On top of that, though, there exists this idea of a white sim, which is for specific individuals who can grant access to the global Internet. We see now that this might be closer to what Russia would eventually want to achieve.

36:52Daria Mosolova:Russia seems stuck between two models, staying somewhat integrated with the global Internet or building a parallel ecosystem.

37:02Howard Gethin:You can already see signs that there is some triaging going on. Some negotiations happening, there are certain groups making the call to stifle the internet, which is Putin and all of the hardliners that surround him. But they're not necessarily the most tech-savvy bunch. They just want to extend their power. But there are other quite influential players, large businesses, large media organizations, that will then need to explain that actually this is going to hinder their operations quite significantly and there needs to be some sort of compromise.

37:38Daria Mosolova:As for the situation on the front line in Ukraine, the consequences of the initial throttling of telegram may only become fully visible later.

37:47Gleb Borshchevski:The most expansive conquests happen in summertime. We will need to see what sort of an impact this has on the actual situation on the ground very soon. And then we will see if Russian generals will finally scratch their heads and ask themselves, well, why is this happening? Why are our positions suddenly so much weaker?

38:08Daria Mosolova:But the real deal-breaker might be something else entirely that you won't catch on Russian TV.

38:15Gleb Borshchevski:Bloomberg reported that the authorities are actually considering rolling back some of this clampdown on Telegram precisely because various polls have shown that Putin's ratings have actually quite sharply dipped, and this has been directly linked to the situation with Telegram. This is the first time I can remember in a very long time that the Kremlin, it looks like they have to consider public opinion.

38:40Daria Mosolova:This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Thank you to our experts Daria Mosolova, Gleb Borshevsky, Evgeny Pudovkin and Howard Gethin. This programme was mixed by Nigel Dix and produced by the Global Jigsaw Podcast team, exec producer Krista Shaturi and presenter, me, Krasi Ivanova-Twig. Thank you.