Alena Epifanova
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, headlines spread claiming that a new iron curtain had fallen across Europe. Russia’s economic and political isolation, they claimed, had come hand-in-hand with digital isolation. As the United States and its allies introduced technological sanctions against Russia, numerous Western tech companies also stopped doing business there, making their products and services unavailable to Russians. At the same time, the Russian state had moved quickly to block any websites that offered information about the war, especially those that criticized the Kremlin’s actions.
It is well-known that Russian President Vladimir Putin sees an open and free internet as one of the biggest threats to his power. For the past decade, he’s been fighting for what’s been called a “sovereign internet”—that is, state control over technology and networks within its borders.
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