The Real Russia. Today.

Russia's costly Internet crackdown, saving e-souls, and a teenage biathlete says, ‘Me too’

Thursday, April 26, 2018

• Russia's economy could lose $1 billion by the end of the year, because of the Telegram ban
• A scientific council says the Telegram ban is causing “serious damage” to Russia's scientific research capacity
• The Moscow City Court finally registers Telegram's appeal
• Meduza examines dueling statistical studies of Telegram traffic since Russia started blocking the messenger
• A St. Petersburg local lawmaker wants to save Russians' souls by rewriting how they use online social media
• 17-year-old Russian biathlete Anna Moiseyeva says a coach sexually harassed her
• Two senior Armenian officials come to Moscow for diplomatic talks
• Russia sends additional Pantsir-S1s to Syria

Russia's damned Internet 🌏

💸 A billion dollars lost?

The “software solutions” company Flexbby estimates that the collateral damage to the Russian economy caused by Roskomnadzor’s efforts to block Telegram will reach $1 billion within a few months. Flexbby says the blocking of millions of IP addresses has disrupted the work of roughly 400 Russian companies that use various cloud services offered by Google and Amazon.

Since the federal censor started blocking access to servers used by Telegram, Russian businesses have experienced outages in online storage, geolocation, e-payments, bank services, AI systems, mobile apps, customer service, and more. Additionally, Google and Amazon are apparently on track to lose as much as $940 million by the end of the year.

Ordinary Russian Internet users have also experienced widespread outages of Google’s popular online services, reporting disruptions to products like Gmail, YouTube, and more. The Russian Association of Motor Insurers and Russian Postal Service have complained that reCAPTCHA, which detects bots accessing their websites, has been failing and interrupting their own customer services.

🔬 Hurting scientific research

The Russian Education Ministry’s Science Council published a statement on Wednesday demanding that Roskomnadzor restore access to various online scientific resources that have been blocked in the agency’s efforts to cut off access to servers used by the instant messenger Telegram. According to the council, Russian scholars have been disconnected from more than a dozen websites and services that are “extremely important for scientific work.”

The Science Council says Roskomnadzor’s damage to Russia’s scientific community has been “serious,” and highlighted the blocking of the Digital Object Identifier system, which is used to identify journal articles, research reports, and data sets.

Hasn’t Russia’s censor blamed this collateral damage on Internet Service Providers? The Science Council isn’t buying that. Its statement says, “The council believes that Roskomnadzor, and not particular Internet providers, is fully responsible for the current situation. [...] The disruption of scientific work throughout the country is too high a price to pay for a clumsy attempt to enforce a court ruling against a single company.”

⚖️ Back to court?

On Wednesday, April 25, the Moscow City Court finally acknowledged receiving Telegram’s challenge to the April 13 district court ruling that sanctioned Roskomnadzor’s decision to block the app in Russia. Telegram’s lawyers say they submitted the appeals paperwork on April 17. The city court has yet to set a date for the examination of Telegram’s appeal.

📉 Has Roskomnadzor actually been pretty successful against Telegram?

A new report by the monitoring website Medialogia claims that traffic to Telegram’s channels fell by 76.5 percent in the week after Russia started blocking the instant messenger. Medialogia says it counted the number of views on posts by the network’s 158,000 most active channels between April 16 (when Roskomnadzor started blocking Telegram) and April 23, finding that the total fell from almost 47 million to just more than 11 million.

Another monitoring website called Telegram Analytics has objected to Medialogia’s methodology. On April 23, Telegram Analytics published research showing that subscriptions to Russian Telegram channels grew 23 percent between April 8 and 22, and the cumulative reach of this content grew by 15 percent. Telegram Analytics tracks 40,000 Russian-language Telegram channels that draw 140-200 million daily views.

So which measure is better? Both approaches count what they say they do, but Medialogia's system is more vulnerable to random fluctuations in traffic and the timing and quantity of posts on a particular day. As Telegram Analytics has pointed out, there are also problems with Medialogia's decision to start its comparison with data from April 16, when Telegram traffic skyrocketed because of the start of Roskomnadzor's crackdown. What might seem like the devastating blow of Russian censorship could be the social network's audience and user activity returning to normal.

🐄 Herding all the Web's social media

Andrey Anokhin, a city councilman in St. Petersburg, has drafted legislation that would force Internet users to access all social media through a state-operated portal and limit the amount of time they’re permitted to be online to three hours a day. The law would also ban underage Internet users from accessing social media at all from schools, orphanages, and other public spaces.

Anokhin says any social network that refuses to submit to this system would be blocked in Russia, though his legislation doesn’t account whatsoever for the potentially astronomical costs of building this new Internet infrastructure or blocking billion-dollar websites. Anokhin says these restrictions are necessary to protect Russians from moral corruption and nervous breakdowns, arguing that social media degrades users’ perception of reality.

Her too 🤸‍♀️

The 17-year-old Russian biathlete Anna Moiseyeva says she was sexually harassed by a senior coach at the Moscow Sports Training Center. In September 2017, coach Sergey Tutmin allegedly made repeated advances at the teenager, promising to help her career in exchange for sexual favors. Moiseyeva managed to record one of these solicitations on her mobile phone (listen to it here, and read a transcript here). Afterwards, she told her mother and personal coach about Tutmin.

With her mother, Moiseyeva filed an administrative note and called a special hotline for “children in danger,” which put them in touch with the Federal Investigative Committee. Moiseyeva was then summoned to meet with the president of Moscow’s Biathlon Federation and the Moscow regional sports minister, who promised to fix the problem and “tear off” Tutmin’s head.

In the end, Sergey Tutmin resigned from the Moscow Sports Training Center, but the website Sovetsky Sport points out that he’ll still be welcome to meet with athletes at training camps. The news outlet also reports that the coaches who supported Moiseyeva are now being pressured to resign. “Apparently, failing to act as a team is a far more terrible crime than propositioning an underage athlete,” writes Sovetsky Sport.

Nalbandyan and Gevorgyan come to Moscow 🇦🇲🇷🇺

Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandyan arrived in Moscow on Wednesday evening, according to Interfax, though it’s unknown whom he intends to meet for talks about Armenia's current political unrest. On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Armen Gevorgyan also flew to Moscow for “talks” with Russian officials.

The Kremlin has said that the current political unrest in Armenia is a domestic matter for the Armenian state and people.

On April 23, Prime Minister and former long-time President Serzh Sargsyan stepped down amid street protests. Demonstrators are now rallying against the country's acting prime minister, Karen Karapetyan, a member of the country’s ruling Republican Party. The Armenian Parliament is expected to discuss the election of a new prime minister on May 1, and lawmakers could hold a vote as soon as the next day.

Pantsir-S1s, not S-300s? 🇸🇾🇷🇺

A “military-diplomatic source” told the newspaper Kommersant that Russia has stationed additional Pantsir-S1 weapon systems at its naval base in Tartus, Syria. The source says the short- to medium-range surface-to-air missile systems were added roughly a week ago, and it’s possible that Syria’s ambassador to Russia had these weapons in mind when he claimed earlier this week that Russia has supplied Damascus with the more powerful S-300 weapon system.

Following the allied airstrikes on Syria on April 14, Moscow said it would consider sending S-300s to Damascus, but Russian officials refuted the Syrian ambassador’s claims that this transfer has already happened.

Yours, Meduza