December 10, 2024: Russia is trying again to create a national intranet that would only be used by people in Russia and unavailable to those outside Russia. This effort involves plugging the many holes created in a prior intranet by those who want to maintain access to the world wide web. When Russia invaded Ukraine the second time in 2022, the West imposed economic sanctions that included making Russian access to the global internet more difficult. This did not work because while Russia was officially sanctioned, they still could obtain electronics and other items via internet based smugglers. Russia needed these items to keep their economy going and to produce weapons that required imported components.

Despite their realities, in 2019 the Russian parliament passed a Sovereign Internet law that created an Internet infrastructure that restricted Internet use within Russia by confining most Internet users within Russia to web sites within Russia and funneled all Internet traffic from Russian users through Russian censors who would screen traffic for forbidden activity, particularly soldiers of civilians posting pictures and video of military operations to social media.

Those who backed this plan were told that such a plan was technically impossible and would reduce Russian internet users to the sort of local intranet found in North Korea. The North Korean approach ensures that only a select few users have access to the worldwide Internet. But even in North Korea civilians found ways around that. Moreover, North Korea has a primitive and much less productive economy that can function without free access to the global Internet. The Russian economy could not function with such restricted Internet access, something China has discovered and is still trying to overcome.

The Russian legislators were outraged at the inability of the military to halt these often embarrassing leaks of military information via the Internet despite numerous efforts to deal with the problem. Legislators proposed simply making it illegal to post military information on the Internet and prosecute those who violate these rules. Military experts responded by pointing out that this would be ignored or evaded by many military personnel and would make it even more difficult to recruit Russians for the military.

Russian Internet officials point out that the technical aspects of this proposed law would be impossible to implement and passing a law would not change that. The Russia-only Intranet law was adopted in 2019 and proved to be useless. Russian civilians as well as government and military personnel continued to do whatever they wanted on the internet despite the new censorship law.

What sparked this effort to censor the Russian internet was how easily Russians found out about what the military was really doing in Syria and, after the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in Ukraine. The Russian military was breaking a lot of Russian laws, and promises to the Russian people, in order to keep operating in Ukraine and Syria. Earlier efforts to impose rules to plug these leaks failed.

For example in mid-2018 Russia ordered bases where Russian forces operate in Syria, including major ones like Hmeimim airbase and the naval facilities at the port of Tartus, to jam signals used by cellphones capable of handling 2G and 3G speeds. All Russian personnel have been ordered to only use older cell phones without cameras and GPS. These orders were issued in February 2018 after several ISIL attacks using fixed wing and quadcopter UAVs. These mass attacks were made possible by using the features and capabilities of modern cell phones. This ban also sought to solve another problem that has long caused headaches for Russian propagandists as well as military commanders. That is, the new law sought to, and failed, to make it more difficult for Russian civilians and military personnel to post sensitive or embarrassing information on the Internet.

The 2018 ban only slowed down the battlefield information leaks because the Russian soldiers and civilian contractors still had their smartphones for taking pictures and writing email to the friends and family back home. Whenever they got into a jamming free zone they could and did, send that material or post it to social media sites where most of these leaks tended to appear.) Jamming made improvised mass attacks by cheap commercial drones carrying explosives more difficult to carry out against the Russian airbase Hmeimim that was located near the Syrian coast. Several such attacks occurred between the end of 2017 and early 2018, causing two deaths and a lot of property and equipment damage. Improved air defenses and airstrikes against the Islamic terror groups responsible seemed to play a larger role in halting the attacks but intel sources and interrogations indicated the jamming helped.

What happened in Syria was unusual because normally it was the Russians who were exploiting cell phone technology on the battlefield although the information leaks because of Russian troops with cell phones has long been a problem, but not as serious as enabling aerial attacks on major bases.

The cell phones have become a major intelligence problem in Russian occupied areas of Ukraine as well. For example, in late 2017 the Russian backed Donbas rebel government in eastern Ukraine sentenced a local man to ten years in jail for distributing a cell phone photo via Twitter that showed Russian Army vehicles and other equipment in the rebel-controlled half of Donbas. Russia denied they have troops there but it had been an open secret because of cell phones, Internet access and most Ukrainians there wanted the Russians gone. Sending this fellow to prison and publicizing it was expected to make the population less ready to do this sort of thing. Little changed as the leakers became more proficient at leaking without getting caught.

In 2019 the Russians had been in Donbas since 2014 and, from mid-2015 until Russian’s second, bigger, invasion in February 2022, Ukraine become a secondary operation for Russia with Syria, the rest of the Middle East plus North Korea demanding more attention. This made it easier for Ukrainians to document the presence of Russian troops inside Donbas. This was possible because Donbas had cell phone service and a lot of people in Donbas took pictures and shared them. Although the Russian soldiers in Donbas were supposed to remove all identifying items from their uniforms, not all the troops did that completely. They were not supposed to spend too much time socializing with the locals but did anyway and often shared those experiences on Internet-based social networks. Russia denied everything and, since Russia had state-controlled mass media most Russians saw only the official version of who was in Donbas, not the reality.

While Russia decreased military support for their forces in Donbas Russia continued using Ukraine as a test site for new Cyber War tactics and techniques. Thus by the end of 2016 Ukraine accused Russia of employing hackers to insert trackers into cell phones used by Ukrainian military personnel fighting in Donbas. Ukraine also found evidence of the same or similar hackers, usually civilian groups working as contractors for the Russian government going after numerous government and commercial networks in Ukraine. Some of these hackers were also identified as going after targets in the United States. The hacking of Ukrainian military personnel cell phones is believed to have been the cause of several recent accurate and fatal attacks on Ukrainian troops in Donbas. The hackers made it possible to track the location of the phone owners and accurately fire shells at them.

These capabilities had already attracted the attention of the U.S., which was supplying Ukraine with military equipment and technical assistance. American and NATO electronic warfare experts paid close attention to what the Russians were up to in Donbas and the cell phone hack was not unexpected. When it did arrive it was scrutinized and dissected.

Russia considers any such revelations as harmful to Russian military capabilities. There is some truth to that but worldwide it should be noted that even the most oppressive and proficient police states like China, North Korea and Cuba have found that the need for an operational Internet is more than one that is crippled.

As long as there is any freely available wireless communications in a country, some of your citizens will risk the most severe penalties to get access to the world wide web and share what they found. Russia legislators did what legislators often do; passed a law, declared the problem solved and then tried to ignore contrary evidence for as long as they could. Russia lost, the internet won and life went on.