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.