Huge swathes of Putin’s empire is cut off from the internet amid suspicions of links to Ukraine war

Large parts of Vladimir Putin’s empire have been cut off from the internet today in a mysterious outage amid suspicions of sabotage linked to Ukraine.

Major regions in Siberia, the Russian Far East and 11 of Putin’s zones were hit by unprecedented internet problems during the crash.

Regions affected by problems were more than 36 times the size of the United Kingdom and nearly the size of the United States.

The closure follows Russian complaints that Ukraine and the West had both attacked its satellites.

There were also suspicions that numerous fires, explosions and accidents at key strategic facilities could be caused by sabotage related to enemies of Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Earlier, internet provider TransTeleCom (TTK) informed its subscribers in Yakutia, Russia’s largest region, that it had “an outage on a backbone fiber optic connection”.

A report said: ‘There is a global outage at TTK.

‘There is no internet in half of the Federal District of the Far East.

“Communications were cut off about two hours ago.”

Affected regions included Perm, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Primorsky, Krasnoyarsk, TransBaikal, Buryatia, Yakutia, Amur, Primorsky Jewish Autonomous Region, and Sakhalin.

The large city of Saint Petersburg would also have had problems with the internet.

Many of the areas affected today were connected to routes operated by Russian Railways, TTK’s major shareholder.

The internet provider distributes its web services through the Trans-Siberian Railway and branch lines.

The crash comes amid suspicions of sabotage linked to the war in Ukraine

TransTeleCom (TTK) told its subscribers in Yakutia – Russia’s largest region – it had experienced a “backbone fiber optic outage”

After the outage, customers took to social media to express outrage at a lack of information on the internet.

One said, “Nothing works,” while another added, “I’m switching to another user.”

The outage also comes as Moscow this week threatened to disrupt the West’s civilian space satellites in a dramatic escalation of the war in Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign Ministry accused unnamed countries of helping Kiev target Russian satellites.

“This is an outrageous violation of international law,” the ministry said. “The Russian side has the right to respond appropriately.”

It then warned: ‘All the necessary possibilities for this are present.’

Ukraine was accused of hacking or disrupting Russian civilian communications satellites using “specialists from a number of foreign states.”

The ministry did not give specific examples.

The crash comes amid complaints from Russia that Ukraine and the West had attacked its satellites

Russia has already accused the West of using its civilian space infrastructure to support Ukrainian forces’ operations, including for combat strikes, and to track the locations of Vladimir Putin’s army and movements.

In recent weeks, Russian radio and TV broadcasts have also been interrupted with warnings of apparent nuclear alerts.

At the time, people were being urged to rush to the nearest bomb shelters amid the blaring of sirens on radio and TV broadcasts.

Two weeks ago, residents of annexed Crimea were warned of imminent emergency evacuation ferries to the Russian mainland after an intense drone attack by Ukraine on naval port Sevastopol.

The impact is seen as causing psychological trauma among the population and leading to questioning Putin’s war against Ukraine.

In such cases, Russian officials have blamed hacking by unknown groups on satellite signals.

Russia is trying to speed up its military satellite launches during the war in Ukraine.