If Russia can master the art of blocking internet connections it can carry that out in more places than simply Russia for the sake of protecting Putin's propaganda. Russia will attempt such strategies against it's own people it will carry out these strategies with other countries with implications to the military.
By Kate Irwin
Russia has reportedly cut some regions of the country off (click here) from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them, according to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets.
Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says. The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. People in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps—even if they used VPNs, according to a local Russian news site.
Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda told TechRadar that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some apparently did. It's unclear which ones or how many actually worked, though. Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia, according to Russian news agency Interfax....
