After knocking out the internet in Kherson, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian city, Russian forces reinstated service but rerouted it through Russia's Rostelecom
Jonathan Greig / The Record :
Context & Ripple Effects
Kherson is the first named test case in a pattern the related coverage traces across occupied Ukraine: Ukrainian officials reported Russian takeover of internet infrastructure in Donbas days later, and Wired documented Russia forcing multiple ISPs to reroute connections through Russian-controlled infrastructure. The Kherson move — cut the service, then restore it through Rostelecom — shows the playbook at city scale.
The reroute matters because it converts connectivity from a utility into an occupation instrument: traffic transiting Russian networks is exposed to the censorship and surveillance the later coverage describes, and it contrasts with Ukraine's defensive fight to keep its own backbone up, including the neutralized attack on Ukrtelecom and Kyivstar's struggle to stay operational under killed staff, seized infrastructure, and cyberattacks.
First-order effects
- Kherson residents regain internet access only through Rostelecom, placing their traffic on Russian infrastructure subject to Russian censorship and surveillance instead of Ukrainian carriers.
- Rostelecom becomes the operating ISP in an occupied Ukrainian city, a role no coverage shows it holding before the invasion.
Second-order effects
- Ukrainian operators like Ukrtelecom and Kyivstar face a two-front problem — defending their networks against attack while losing subscriber territory to a Russian state carrier that reinstates service under its own control.
- Other occupied cities become candidates for the same knock-out-then-reroute sequence, which the Donbas takeover and the forced ISP reroutes reported by Wired suggest was already underway.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across occupied territories, Ukraine's national internet fragments into a Russian-routed zone and a Ukrainian-held zone, with connectivity boundaries tracking the front line and information access becoming a function of territorial control.
- The reroute gives Ukraine and its partners a concrete case for treating telecom infrastructure as occupation evidence, since a named Russian carrier operating seized networks is attributable in a way diffuse cyberattacks often are not.
The trend: Russia is consolidating occupied Ukrainian territory onto its own telecom infrastructure, turning internet access from a service into an instrument of territorial control.