6 2GM Tuesday March 15 2022 | the times
News
Russia has banned Instagram in the
latest crackdown on online freedoms to
accompany the war in Ukraine.
The ban, which comes after a crack-
down by social media platforms on
Russian propaganda, came into effect
on Sunday night, prompting emotional
goodbyes from users to a photo-sharing
app that had assumed outsized import-
ance in Russia over the past decade.
The ban was announced on Friday,
providing a two-day grace period for
users to sign off from their accounts.
Russia’s state censorship agency
Roskomnadzor cited the decision by
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, to
allow posts calling for violence against
Russians on its platforms, provided
they were those involved in the inva-
sion, such as soldiers.
The company, which also runs Face-
book, has said that calls for violence
against Russian citizens as a whole re-
mained prohibited.
On Sunday Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s
public affairs chief, said the company
was disallowing posts calling for the
death of heads of state, in response to
reports that posts urging the death of
President Putin or his ally, President
Lukashenko of Belarus, had appeared.
“In order to remove any ambiguity
about our stance, we are further
narrowing our guidance to make
explicit that we are not allowing calls
for the death of a head of state on our
platforms,” Clegg wrote in a memo.
The Kremlin had already blocked
Facebook, which is popular among
urban, opposition-minded Russians, on
March 4 citing “discrimination” against
Russian state media on the platform.
But Instagram, which the market data
company Statista reported in Novem-
ber as having 62.9 million users in
Russia, or 40 per cent of the country’s
population, is another matter entirely.
The app is deeply integrated into the
fabric of Russian life, with celebrities
amassing vast followings.Some, includ-
ing Ivan Urgant, a popular late night TV
host, had used the platform to state
their opposition to the war.
Over the weekend, as news of the ban
broke, both ordinary Russians and
Moscow has reoccupied Cold War mili-
tary bases in the Arctic, prompting
fears it is trying to dominate the region
which is rich in natural resources.
Russia has long viewed the Arctic’s
melting sea ice as an opportunity to de-
velop energy sources and find shortcuts
in international shipping routes.
For more than a decade it has in-
creased its military presence in the area
and stepped up submarine and bomber
patrols. Now the US and Canada fear
that President Putin will use the inva-
sion of Ukraine as an excuse to extend
territorial claims.
Speaking at a conference in Ottawa,
General Wayne Eyre, the chief of Cana-
da’s defence staff, said it was “not incon-
ceivable that our sovereignty [in the
Arctic] may be challenged”. Some Ca-
nadians consider that its territory is
vulnerable because of its sparse popula-
tion and lack of infrastructure.
“The far north is a key area of con-
cern,” Eyre said. Justin Trudeau, the
prime minister, and President Biden
have discussed “enhancing co-opera-
tion in the Arctic”, with a view to
thwarting Russian advances.
Russia accounts for half the Arctic
land mass. The region contains 13 per
cent of the world’s oil reserves and 30per cent of its natural gas. Eyre said that
Russia had reoccupied a handful of its
bases that were abandoned after the
Cold War, in addition to others it has
maintained in the region.
Robert Huebert, an Arctic expert at
the University of Calgary, said that
Moscow had reopened, modernised
and extended airfields at 18 bases in theMoscow makes a move on Arctic
Kola Peninsula, in northwest Russia.
The claims came on the eve of military
exercises by Norad, the US-Canada
aerial alliance. Experts said that the
drills offered a useful opportunity to
demonstrate the two countries’ mili-
tary preparedness to the Kremlin.
“We have to be on our A game,” Hue-
bert said. Deterrence was based on “our
ability to convince the Russians that we
are going to know of any attack on
North American airspace”, he said.
In 2013 China became an observer
state on the Arctic Council — a loose
association of countries in the region —
and is eyeing greater access to the
Northern Sea Route. Beijing has also
conducted military drills with Russia in
the Arctic.
Devised by Mikhail Gorbachev to
make the Arctic a “pole of peace”, the
council was one of the only forums
where collaboration with Russia con-
tinued after the invasion of Crimea in- Huebert said the group might
now shift from eight members to seven.
The body comprising Canada, Den-
mark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Swe-
den, the US and Russia, which oversees
national standards, laws and treaties,
disbanded this month in protest.
Even Britain has sent troops to the
Arctic in recent months for cold wea-
ther training.
Charlie Mitchell OttawaRUSSIAGREENLANDArctic
OceanArctic
CircleCANADAALASKA
(US)MoscowAirfield
Military
CoastguardAirfield and military
Coastguard and military
Airfield and coastguard
Northern fleetNato RussiaArctic bases
Site of reopened
basesMosMosoooooossccocowcowcooRussia threatens to hit US
by crashing space station
Jacqui Goddard Miami
The head of Russia’s space agency has
threatened to crash the International
Space Station (ISS) into the US in
response to American criticism of
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the war Dmitry
Rogozin, director-general of Roscosmos,
has said that Nasa could “soar into space
on their broomsticks” and branded an
American astronaut a “moron”.
Nasa has attempted to calm unease
after a Russian state news agency
published a video it claims was made by
Roscosmos, depicting cosmonauts
undocking their segment of the ISS and
waving goodbye to an American
colleague whom they are due to
transport home this month.
“On March 30 a Soyuz spacecraft will
return as scheduled, carrying Nasa
astronaut Mark Vande Hei and
cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton
Shkaplerov back to Earth,” the US
space agency said.
Russia and the US are the primary
partners in the 15-nation alliance that
runs the ISS, a laboratory that orbits at
a 250-mile altitude. They have kept a
continuous human presence there for
21 years, rising above geopolitical
chaos and diplomatic tensions. Nasa
controllers at the Johnson Space Centre
in Houston, Texas, report a continuation
of good relations with Moscow, but
Rogozin has ranted in public.
He suggested on social media that
sanctions could end Russia’s ability to
provide propulsion control systems for
the ISS, causing it to “fall down into the
sea or on to land”. He appeared with a
map purporting to show areas he alleges
would be at risk of being hit by the ISS.
Rogozin has also feuded with the US
astronaut Captain Mark Kelly, a former
ISS commander. “Get off, you moron,”
he tweeted at Kelly, who has spoken out
against the Ukraine invasion.
Nasa, once solely reliant on Russia,
now has SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to
shuttle astronauts back and forth.
When SpaceX launched a batch of Star-
link satellites to orbit on Friday, the
company taunted Rogozin, who said
last week that with no Russian rocket
engines, the US space programme
would be in trouble. “Let them fly on
something else — their broomsticks,”
he said. SpaceX responded: “Time to let
the American broomstick fly and hear
the sounds of freedom.”this fratricidal war. We Russians
are thinking and intelligent people.
It’s in our power alone to stop all
this madness. Go protest. Don’t be
afraid of anything. They cannot jail
all of us.”
Ovsyannikova added that it was aNews War in Ukraine
Kremlin bans Instagram in bid
Felix Light wealthy Instagram influencers posted
farewell messages on the platform.
“Right now, I’m writing this post and
crying,” wrote Olga Buzova, a reality
TV personality and pop star who has
more than 23 million followers.“I hope
this isn’t true,” she added, annotating
her post with crying emojis.
Many Instagram users posted links
to newly created channels on the mes-
senger service Telegram, which the
Russian authorities have previously
tried and failed to block.
Some of those worst affected by the
ban are Russia’s small businesses, many
of which rely on Instagram for advertis-
ing, even allowing customers to book
services through the app. “It’s very sad,
I don’t know how we will continue,” said
Artyom Nalbandiants, a tour guide in
North Ossetia-Alania, in the Caucasus,
who used Instagram to attract tourists
to the mountainous region.
Though individual users will still be
able to access Instagram via block-cir-
cumventing virtual private network
(VPN) technology, few Russians are
expected to resort to paid-for VPNs. In-
stead, many are likely to migrate to
Russian-made social networks such as
VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, which
lost users after the rise of Instagram.
In an email to its millions of users
GosUslugi, a state-run public services
portal, announced that Instagram was
being blocked out of concern for
“Russians’ psychological health”, and
encouraged users to return to Russian
social networks, which have been criti-
cised for links to the Kremlin.
“We’ll be able to get clients on
Telegram and VKontakte,” said Nal-
bandiants. “At least, we’ll have to.”
The crackdown on Meta comes after
years of escalating tensions between
the Kremlin and social media giants.
LinkedIn, the professional networking
site, was blocked in Russia in 2016,
while Twitter was deliberately slowed
down in March last year amid large-
scale protests against the jailing of the
opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Russia has previously threatened to
prosecute local employees of foreign IT
companies it accuses of law breaking.
Ukraine’s war is a generational
struggle too, Hugo Rifkind, page 31
A
Russian journalist
hijacked a state-
controlled television
news broadcast last
night and waved a
placard denouncing the war and
accusing her own channel of
broadcasting propaganda and lies
(Felix Light writes).
Marina Ovsyannikova’s placard in
a mix of English and Russian said:
“No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe
the propaganda. They lie to you
here. Russians against war.”
She was removed from the studio
moments after her protest during
the broadcast of Vremya, a news
round-up show.
Ovsyannikova is said to work as
an editor on Channel One, which
broadcasts from Moscow’s
Ostankino TV Tower. In a recorded
video posted on the messaging site
Telegram, she explained her action
and criticised the war in Ukraine,
Vladimir Putin’s presidency and
her own employer.
“What is happening in Ukraine is
a crime, Russia is an aggressor
country and the responsibility for
that aggression rests on the
conscience of only one person. This
person is Vladimir Putin,” she said.
“Unfortunately, in the past few
years I have been working on
Channel One, producing Kremlin
propaganda. I am now very
ashamed of this. Ashamed to have
allowed lies from the TV screen,
ashamed to have allowed others to
zombify Russian people.”
Wearing a necklace in the coloursTV editor
denounces
state lies
live on air
of the Russian and Ukrainian flags,
Ovsyannikova said her father was
Ukrainian and her mother Russian
and that “they were never enemies”.
She added: “Ten generations of
our descendants will not be able to
cleanse themselves of the shame ofoftheRussianandUkrainianflags t