World War with Putin. On three fronts

The Kremlin continues to fight not only against Ukraine, but also against its citizens. With the help of information.

There is an old anecdote about how Rabinovic was sent to a partisan detachment to distribute anti-Hitler leaflets in the villages. He returned two weeks later, when everyone in the squad considered him dead.

"The peasants have nothing to eat, and you sent me with these leaves. It was very difficult to sell them all," Rabinovic told them.

Well, we live in this anecdote.

The world war with Russian President Vladimir Putin is being waged on three fronts. On one - the main one - the Armed Forces of Ukraine repel the occupying forces by force of arms.

On the other hand, the entire civilized world is waging a war of sanctions to divide the unity of Putin's elite and undermine Putin's support among those around him.

In the third, informative, we are fighting against the propaganda and lies of the Kremlin, which are holding some Russians hostage and forming a base of support for Putin's criminal war.

The demand for independent, uncensored information from Russian citizens is huge, as evidenced by the statistics of political content reviews, the growth of subscribers on social networks of independent media.

This can be seen in the actions of the Kremlin, which fights against independent information, sparing nothing: destroying not only the most principled information channel Rain, but also always ready to compromise the Echo of Moscow, blocking not only "hostile" Twitter and Facebook, but also cutting almost apolitical Instagram, risking the indignation of tens of millions of its "ordinary" users. All this in order to stop the spread of content that Putin does not like.

And what is the situation on the information front?

Well, as in the anecdote: in order to access uncensored information, a user from Russia must somehow pay for (!) a VPN service, which will not accept payment from a Russian card. Well, what are we waiting for.

Last summer (at a time of waves of denouncing independent media as “foreign agents” and out-of-court blocking of websites), I talked a lot about this in Washington with many important people. They asked, "How can we help?" I answered: we don't need help at all, we manage, we work. But the upcoming censorship must be fought, and that is quite simple.

For example, when a commercial VPN service collects five dollars a month from a subscriber, it spends 90 percent on marketing, procurement, and all sorts of other costs. The cost is low there - in terms of server capacity, you don't have to pay much more to add more users.

Well, dear comrades, if you want to spend money, just reimburse the VPN service for the costs in exchange for making all the information available to the user from Russia for free. Wholesale is cheaper! It will cost very little, and access to uncensored information will be much easier.

This is just a conditional example with VPN service - there are many different good tools for bypassing blockages. Invest in their development, promotion, resilience and willingness to serve more subscribers and, finally, free access for users from Russia.

Spend only a few million dollars - and you will cancel 10 years of effort and tens of billions of rubles that Roskomnadzor spent on building the Russian Internet censorship system.

But so far this obvious step has not been taken.