Among Joe Biden’s options to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are disruptive cyberattacks—the kind that Russia itself often unleashes on other countries. Even more broadly, sanctions experts have discussed the possibility of cutting countries off from the global internet entirely, the way governments do to stifle unrest in domestic regions.
But Russia has been preparing for precisely this kind of contingency for the last half-decade. In 2019, Vladimir Putin signed a Sovereign Internet Law, which gives the Russian government more control over internet content but also to counteract threats to the stability and security of the internet in the country. On three instances, most recently last summer, Russia disconnected itself from the internet so that it could perform tests on Runet, a locally based network designed to step in to serve web pages in the event of a cyberattack or a deliberate outage, said Karen Kazaryn, the director of the Internet Research Institute in Moscow.
Russia has been preparing to have its internet cut offRead More
