General Speakers List Good morning everyone the delegate of Russia will be here to give a formal speech on behalf of the country’s general stance on the agenda. Russia has been trying to develop and enhance its national security and control over digital communications through many methods. The Sovereign Internet Law is a set of 2019 amendments to existing Russian legislation that mandate Internet surveillance and grants the Russian government powers to partition Russia from the rest of the Internet, including creating a national fork of the Domain Name System. The federal law was aimed at suppressing the dissemination of unreliable socially significant information under the guise of reliable messages that create a threat of harm to the life and health of citizens, or property, a danger of massive disruption of public order and public safety, or a threat of interfering with the functioning or termination of the functioning of facilities life support, transport or social infrastructure, credit institutions, energy facilities, industry and communications. An essential component of digital sovereignty is the Russian Internet – a Russian language-based, relatively closed segment of the Internet consisting of popular research engines and social media sites. Russian defence and security elites acknowledged the significance of the Internet as a security threat after 2012 when political opposition used it extensively to mobilise, first against the fraudulent Duma election and then against Putin’s re-election.47 Several steps were taken to implement the concept of ‘digital sovereignty,’ namely to create Russia’s national Internet segment that would make it selfsufficient and independent from developments outside its borders, thus ensuring protection from both internal and external threats. The system for the centralized management of the public telecommunications network is currently under development and will be controlled by the Centre of Monitoring and Managing of the Public Communication Networks by the Radio Frequency Service. It foresees that Internet Service Providers are required to install certain equipment into their networks which can monitor and filter traffic, and if needed completely block it. This would, in theory, disconnect the Russian segment of the Internet from the global network. Russia has also been accused of being involved in multiple cyber attacks where security services organised several including denial of service attacks, hacker attacks, dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, participation of state-sponsored teams in political blogs, persecution of cyber-dissidents and other active measures against other countries while trying to aim for a multilateral approach towards internet governance. This specifies the need for international cooperation towards combating cyber-related warfare and cyber-related terrorism with all countries and promoting all cybersecurity norms.