How Russia's invasion threatens to subvert the internet as we know it

Russian author and journalist Andrei Soldatov used to regard his country as the most digitally connected in Europe. These days, he can barely recognize the Russian internet.

Websites with the .ru domain have been online only intermittently since the invasion of Ukraine. U.S. tech companies such as Microsoft and Oracle have stopped selling software there. Many Russians can’t pay for the private networking apps they use to get around government censorship of sites such as Facebook, after Visa and Mastercard halted operations there.

“Russia is so dependent on online services. Now, these things are falling apart,” said Soldatov, author of the book “The Red Web,” about the Kremlin’s battles over online surveillance.

Russia is three weeks into a test that the internet has never seen before: A major economic and global power is nearly isolated online after international sanctions cut off many services from abroad and the Russian government clamped down harder on online speech and access inside its borders.