After occupying Ukraine's territories, Russia takes over its cyberspace too

LONDON - Several weeks after taking over Ukraine's southern port city of Kherson, Russian soldiers arrived at the offices of local Internet service providers and ordered them to give up control of their networks.

Bombings have levelled cities and villages; civilians have been detained, tortured and killed; and supplies of food and medicine are running low, according to witnesses interviewed by The New York Times and human rights groups. Ukrainians in those regions have access only to Russian state television and radio.

Russia's rerouting and censorship of the Ukrainian Internet has little historical precedent elsewhere in the world. Even after Beijing took more control of Hong Kong beginning in 2019, the Internet in the city was not placed under the same kind of censorship controls as in mainland China. Russian forces are also destroying infrastructure that linked the Internet in the occupied areas to the rest of Ukraine and the global web, said Mr Mykhailo Kononykhin, head of information technology and a system administrator for a provider that had about 10,000 customers in the Melitopol area. He added that Russian forces were also stealing equipment from Ukrainian Internet providers to strengthen connections to Crimea, including laying more fibre-optic wires.

Russia is requiring Ukrainians there to show a passport to buy a SIM card with a Russian phone number, Mr Ryzhenko said. That makes it easier for Russian troops to keep tabs on people with their mobile devices, including location and Internet browsing. "But the Russians hunted people who tried to climb high places," Mr Koval said."When a close neighbour tried to climb a tree, they shot him in the leg."

More than 12,000 Internet Starlink terminals made by SpaceX, the rocket company controlled by Elon Musk, have supplemented coverage, said Mr Andrii Nabok, an official in the Ministry of Digital Transformation, which is trying to restore Internet access in Ukraine. A government loan program is being drafted to hasten repairs.

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