Image Credit: DMITRY LOVETSKY / Contributor / Getty 
Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally said out loud what the Kremlin has been doing for months. Mobile internet can be switched off across Russian cities whenever security services want it switched off, and ordinary people will be told about it afterward, if at all.
Speaking at a government meeting last week, the Russian president addressed the wave of blackouts that have made daily life difficult for tens of millions of people.
His position is that the outages are justified, that informing the public in advance would help “criminals,” and that law enforcement gets the final word on when Russians can use their phones to check the news, pay for groceries, or call a taxi.
“Of course, if this is related to operational work to prevent terrorist attacks — and we know, unfortunately, we sometimes miss such attacks — the priority will always be to protect people’s safety,” Putin said.
The framing is the usual. Security is the justification, terrorism is the threat, and a vague category of necessity does the work of suspending access to a basic piece of modern infrastructure. Who decides what counts as operational necessity? The same agencies carrying out the shutdowns. There is no court order. No public notice. No opportunity to challenge the decision before the signal drops.
Authorities cut mobile internet in Moscow for nearly three weeks last month. They regularly do the same in other regions. The official rationale points to Ukrainian drones allegedly using cellular networks for guidance, which continues despite the blackouts. Monitoring groups say most Russian regions now face daily disruptions.
“Criminals, after all, hear everything and see everything. If some information reaches them, they will undoubtedly adjust their criminal behavior and their criminal plans,” Putin told the cabinet. Information about when the state will cut off communications is treated as a security secret that must be kept from the very people whose communications are being cut.
Notification after the fact is, in his view, acceptable. This is the procedural offer on the table. You lose access to the internet without warning, you have no ability to plan around it, you have no recourse while it is happening, and at some point afterward, the authorities might explain what happened.
When the state can switch off communications at any moment, for reasons it will not disclose until later, every business, every journalist, every ordinary user operates under the assumption that any given day could be one of the dark ones. People stop relying on digital tools for things that matter. It is a predictable consequence of unreviewable executive power over the information environment.
Russia has built a workaround of sorts. The government maintains what it calls “white lists,” a registry of permitted domestic services that remain accessible while the rest of the internet goes dark.
The registry includes the state-backed messenger Max, state news agencies, and major banks. Foreign platforms, independent media, and encrypted messengers get switched off. Services that are easy for the state to monitor or control stay on.
Putin told Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev to work more closely with the security services to keep the white list functioning. He said nothing about the parallel campaign against virtual private networks, the tool many Russians now rely on to reach the open internet. Shadayev said in late March that cutting VPN usage was a ministry priority.
The bigger picture is that Russia’s internet is being dismantled in pieces. None of this happens by accident and none of it is easy to reverse once the system is in place.
The Robotic Dictator Economy Of The Future: Universal Basic Income For Total Human Enslavement
