Russia cracks down on personal phones on the frontlineUkrainian...

Russia cracks down on personal phones on the frontline

Ukrainian open-source investigators said the new restrictions will make it harder to analyze Russian movements.

July 24, 2024 8:34 pm CET

By Veronika Melkozerova

The Russian parliament adopted a law Wednesday hiking the penalty for personal use of internet devices by frontline soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

The law classifies possession of devices that allow military personnel to store or send video, photos or geolocation data on the internet as a grave offense, punishable by up to 15 days detention.

It also forbids the transmission of any information that could be used to identify any Russian troops and their whereabouts.

“The bill is aimed at ensuring the safety of military personnel and units,” Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrei Kartapolov told Russian news agency Interfax.

The new law follows reports that the Russian army is experiencing record losses on the frontline, with the United Kingdom's defense ministry estimating that the casualty rate will exceed 1,000 soldiers each day over July and August.

As losses have mounted, so has domestic pressure from wives and mothers of military personnel for troops to return home. In May, the Kremlin declared the leader of the movement a "foreign agent" following rare protests in central Moscow.

Open-source investigators are concerned that the new rules could make it harder to identify and document Russian activities on the frontline.

Ukrainian OSINT agency Molfar, which analyzes Russian activities on the battlefield daily, told POLITICO they have observed a decrease in the data published by the Russian military on social media for some time.

“At the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the situation was radically different, with many posts on social media from the Russian military, who published their locations and other sensitive information,” Maksym Zrazhevskyi, head of research at Molfar said.

“The law is likely further to reduce the amount of this type of data, but the military is not the sole source of information from the battlefield. Valuable data can often be found in civilian social network profiles or even official sources like the Russian Defense Ministry,” he added.

Pro-war bloggers, known as Z-bloggers, were also critical of the move. Russian blogger Yegor Guzenko, also known as the Thirteenth, said in a Telegram post that the entire army relies on internet devices. "But how can office rats understand and know this? Let's let these scumbags of the Duma go to war themselves," he wrote.

Dva Mayora, another pro-war blogger, slammed the move as an showing an outdated understanding of modern mobilization.

"They decided that a soldier should fight without thinking about his family, and the family of a mobilized person should, like the family of a soldier in WWII or the family of a Cossack, be proud that a man was mobilized," the blogger, who has over 700,000 followers, wrote on Telegram.

The new law also prohibits transferring information about citizens called up for military training, as well as those discharged from the army, and members of their families.