The degrading treatment of Ukraine’s internet

DEGRADING AND ideally destroying your opponents’ ability to communicate are elementary military tactics. And, in its war on Ukraine, Russia has certainly attempted to do this. These days, closing down communications focuses on the enemy’s internet capabilities. So it is not surprising that analyses by NetBlocks, a firm in London that monitors internet activity, suggest that the number of devices connected to Ukraine’s internet has fallen by nearly a quarter since Russia’s onslaught began. Alp Toker, NetBlocks’ founder, describes that loss as striking. But it could be a lot worse, for it means that most Ukrainians are still online. What is going on?

For one thing, Ukraine boasts an unusually large number of internet-service providers—by one reckoning the country has the world’s fourth-least-concentrated internet market. This means the network has few choke points, so is hard to disable. In this, indeed, it fulfils one objective of the internet’s ancestor from the 1970s, ARPANET, which was intended to be similarly resilient to attack. Repair crews, for their part, are toiling heroically, including, when possible and more efficient, by fixing equipment owned by competitors.