In occupied Ukraine, Russia is forcing multiple ISPs to reroute connections through Russian infrastructure, subjecting traffic to censorship and surveillance
In occupied Ukraine, people's internet is being routed to Russia—and subjected to its powerful censorship and surveillance machine.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story caps a months-long sequence: after Russia blocked Twitter and other platforms at home in late February, it began seizing the pipes themselves in occupied Ukraine — first in the Donbas, where officials said infrastructure was handed to Russia-controlled operators (internet infrastructure taken over in the Donbas), then in Kherson, where service knocked out by Russian forces came back routed through Rostelecom (Kherson's internet rerouted through Rostelecom).
What changed with this report is scale and mechanism: rather than isolated city takeovers, Russia is compelling multiple ISPs across occupied territory to hand their transit to Russian networks, plugging those regions directly into the censorship and surveillance stack already built for domestic users.
First-order effects
- Residents of occupied Ukrainian cities lose access to uncensored information and services the moment their traffic transits Russian networks, since the same filtering that hit Twitter inside Russia now applies to them.
- Local ISPs in occupied territory are forced to cede control of their routing to Russian operators, converting independent providers into extensions of Russia's surveillance apparatus.
Second-order effects
- The playbook proven in Kherson and the Donbas becomes a template Russia can replicate city by city as it occupies more territory, making connectivity itself an instrument of territorial control.
- Occupied-region users are pushed toward the same evasion tools Russians adopted under domestic tightening — multi-phone setups and VPNs — which Russia has been cracking down on as its controls ratchet up.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, occupation increasingly means network annexation: borders drawn on maps get mirrored in BGP routes, splitting once-unified networks into sovereign substrates where access depends on which side of a front line your router sits.
- Ukraine and its partners face a structural question of whether reconnected territory can ever be seamlessly rejoined to the global internet, or whether years of Russian-routed infrastructure leave a lasting split that outlasts the occupation itself.
The trend: Territorial conflict is increasingly fought at the network layer, with occupying powers rerouting conquered populations' internet into their own censorship-and-surveillance infrastructure.