The Kremlin Built a Digital Prison. Now It's Trapped Inside It.
The very real struggle of controlling the flow of information without crippling your own military
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In early 2019, I wrote an article for In Cyber Defense magazine with a premise that my editor at the time called “a little alarmist.”
The piece argued that an increasingly hostile Russia would likely build itself a self-contained internet, like a sealed domestic network, that could be cut off from the global web at will.
I laid out the evidence: Russia’s sovereign internet law, the annual disconnection tests Putin had ordered, the Closed Data Transfer Segment military intranet, and the deep packet inspection equipment the Kremlin was quietly requiring every Russian internet provider to install.
My conclusion was that Russia was doing it to prepare for a war. Specifically, a war in which controlling information would matter as much as controlling territory.
Later that same year, in October of 2019, Defense One confirmed my hypothesis.
Now we’re seven years down the road and Putin has finally pulled the plug on many internet and cell phone signals inside Russia’s borders, presumably to prevent Ukraine from navigating attack drones through Russian airspace.
But also, conveniently, to allow the Kremlin much greater control of the flow of information in Russia.
Back in 2019, Russia was watching China’s Great Firewall and taking notes. It was running annual disconnection tests on its RuNet infrastructure.
It was requiring all internet traffic to route through state-installed chokepoints where deep packet inspection equipment could control, slow, or terminate data flows in real time.
I wrote: “Putin wants Russia’s internet completely independent from Western society. Does he simply want to be able to limit and monitor the flow of information? Or is Russia preparing for a potential doomsday scenario where a devastating cyberattack brings down the internet, leaving his country untouched?”
(Okay, I admit, that does sound a little alarmist now that I read that back to myself seven years later…)
But the answer, it turns out, was both. And neither of those scenarios required a cyberattack to trigger.
All it required was a war Russia started itself.
Here’s the state of Russia’s massive communication woes in 2026.
Russia Just Shot Itself in the Head. With Its Own Telegram
According to Politico, Russian soldiers scrambled for alternatives when Elon Musk’s SpaceX cut off access to Starlink terminals.
None of them had unlimited data. None of them covered the areas of Ukraine where his unit operated.
That disruption alone was significant. SpaceX tightened Starlink authentication on February 4th, effectively blocking Russian forces from unauthorized terminal connections and cutting Starlink traffic inside Ukraine by roughly 75 percent according to internet traffic analyst Doug Madory at Kentik.
The move threw Russian operations into visible disarray and allowed Ukraine to make battlefield gains that I covered on YouTube.
