Web pages in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine stopped charging people’s devices at 2:43 p.m. on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone who connected to the Internet with KhersonTelecom, known locally as SkyNet, could not call loved ones, find out the latest news or upload images to Instagram. They were blocked in communication. When the web pages started coming back to life at 3:42 p.m., everything seemed normal. But behind the scenes, everything had changed: all Internet traffic now went through a Russian provider and Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.
Since late May, 280,000 people living in the occupied port city and surrounding areas have faced constant online outages as ISPs are forced to route their connections through Russian infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now being forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast network of surveillance and censorship, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis reviewed by WIRED.
Internet companies have been told to reroute connections under the watchful eye of Russian occupation forces or cut their connections altogether, officials say. In addition, new unbranded SIM cards for mobile phones using Russian numbers are being distributed in the region, further pushing people to Russian networks. Seizing control of the servers, cables and cell phone towers – all classified as critical infrastructure – that allow people to freely access the web is considered one of the first steps in the “Russification” of the occupied territories.
“We understand that this is a gross violation of human rights,” Viktor Zhora, deputy head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, known as the State Services for Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP), told WIRED. “Since all traffic will be controlled by Russian special services, it will be monitored and Russian invaders will limit access to information resources that share true information.
KhersonTelecom was the first to switch its Internet traffic to a Russian network on April 30 before switching back to Ukrainian connections for most of May. However, things seem to have changed permanently since May 30. All of KhersonTelecom’s traffic is now routed through Miranda Media, a Crimea-based company that is itself affiliated with Russia’s national telecommunications provider, Rostelecom. (Miranda Media was created after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014). A day after KhersonTelecom made its latest switch, state-controlled Russian media RIA Novosti said the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye were officially moving to Russian internet connections – days earlier the publication said the regions would also start using the Russian dialing code + 7.
Zhora says that in the occupied regions of Ukraine – including Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhia – there is a patchwork of about 1,200 different Internet providers. “We understand that most of them are forced to connect to Russian telecommunications infrastructure and reroute traffic,” Zhora told WIRED. “Unfortunately, there are cases of mass traffic diversion of Ukrainian operators through Russian channels,” said Lilia Malon, commissioner of Ukraine’s telecommunications regulator, the National Commission for State Regulation of Electronic Communications. “Ukrainian networks are partially blocked or completely shut down.”
