Long before waging war on Ukraine, President
Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s
internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social
control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall.
So when Western tech companies began cutting
ties with Russia following its invasion, Russian
investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was
alarmed. He’d spent years exposing Russian
censorship and feared that well-intentioned
efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin
isolate Russians from the free flow of information,
aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.