2024-07-31 11:46:43
The law makes possession of devices that allow soldiers to store or send video, photos or geolocation data over the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 15 days in jail.
It also prohibits the transfer of any information that could be used to identify Russian soldiers and their whereabouts.
“The draft law aims to ensure the safety of soldiers and military units,” Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, told the Russian news agency Interfax.
The situation has changed
The new law comes after reports that Russia’s military is suffering record losses at the front, and the UK Ministry of Defense estimates that the number of soldiers killed in July and August will exceed 1,000 a day. soldiers
As the losses mount, so does the pressure on the soldiers’ wives and mothers to return the soldiers home. May. after rare protests in central Moscow, the Kremlin declared the leader of the movement a “foreign agent”.
Open-source researchers worry that the new rules could make it harder to identify and document Russia’s frontline activities.
Molfar, the Ukrainian OSINT agency that analyzes Russia’s activities on the battlefield on a daily basis, told Politico that it has been noticing a decline in social media posts by the Russian military for some time.
“At the beginning of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the situation was drastically different, with social media postings of Russian military personnel announcing their locations and other classified information,” Molfar’s head of research Maksim Zrazhevsky told Politico.
“The law is likely to further reduce the amount of this kind of data, but the military is not the only source of information from the battlefield.” Valuable data can often be found in civilian social media profiles or even in official sources such as the Russian Ministry of Defense,” he added.
The wrath of the Z-bloggers
The move was also criticized by pro-military bloggers, the so-called “Z-bloggers”. Russian blogger Yegor Guzenko said in a Telegram message that the entire military depends on Internet devices.
“But how can office rats understand and know this?” Let’s let these Duma dogs fight on their own,” he wrote.
Another pro-war blogger, Dva Mayora, slammed the move as showing an outdated understanding of modern mobilization.
“They decided that a soldier should go to war without thinking about his family, and the family of a mobilized person, like the family of a World War II soldier or Cossack, should be proud that a person was mobilized,” wrote a blogger with more than 700,000 followers on Telegram. followers.
The new law also prohibits the transfer of information about citizens called up for military training, as well as persons dismissed from the army.
2024-07-31 11:46:43