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Comment by spupe | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this statement. Cutting people off from the internet in today's world is akin to cutting them off electricity.

I also worry that while the West seems to be in complete agreement that harsh punishment on Russia is fair, it may or may not be the case in the future that such punishment is reserved to those who "deserve" it.

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It's almost as if there currently there is a imperialist war going on in Europe that includes the systematic destruction of civil infrastructure such as hospitals, power plants and residential areas.

Cutting the aggressor of from electricity and internet is of course the least thing you should do. Arms supply is ofc better, but hey, doing this will not hurt.

And hey, if a little bit of economic inconvenience is not "deserved" for a fucking invasion, how high would you like to have this bar? This is as high as it can be.

And imagine the country being supplied with electricity was constantly using it to disrupt the electrical supplies of its neighbors for political and economic benefit.

Decades of Russia shitting all over the internet, both as a state and egging its citizens and organized crime to do so privately, has finally come home to roost.

Both of you can be right.

Cutting a country off from the Internet can be an extremely serious step and subject to great risk of being abused... while also being a reasonable response in the case of an unprovoked military invasion of a democracy and targeting of its civilian population.

Russian Government itself is working hard to isolate their segment of internet so they can control it and firewall it Chinese style to push their propaganda unrestricted. So willfully cutting it off for them is essentially helping the enemy.

There used to be Radio Svoboda to counter Soviet propaganda. Nowadays West need to be working hard to ensure there is internet in Russia and news and communications are available, so regular people cans see non-government news sources and dissidents can securely coordinate. I don't understand why it's so hard to comprehend.

They've had open access to the internet until now and look where we've gotten. Having open access to the internet was not convincing enough Russians to condemn their government. So maybe getting people inconvenienced enough to show them the world condemns their actions is a better shot.

>Having open access to the internet was not convincing enough Russians to condemn their government.

But they have been - there has been an unprecedented amount of protests in Russian cities..

>I also worry that while the West seems to be in complete agreement that harsh punishment on Russia is fair, it may or may not be the case in the future that such punishment is reserved to those who "deserve" it.

Nor is it immediately clear that this strategy is actually a wise one when you consider all other geopolitical variables in play. Setting the conditions for a Russo-Sino alliance in the Pacific Theater is something that should give everyone pause given CCP's increasing bellicosity regarding the Taiwan question. "They deserve it" is not really a guiding principle for policy grounded in anything other than whatever peculiar moral constraints elites set for themselves.

> Cutting people off from the internet in today's world is akin to cutting them off electricity.

Russians have no reason to complain when they're cutting of Mariupol's water and food supply. There's already a case of a child dying from dehydration.

Is it Russians, or their government? This distinction matters, most of us who live in the US or Europe would also personal responsibility for war crimes by this standard.

Putin is not on the frontlines. His citizens are.

Not all his citizens are. And his soldiers are following orders. Are you in favor of giving US citizens punishment for the crimes of some of its citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq?

As a thought experiment:

Let’s say that you had a magic button you could press that would mirror every act of violence done in Ukraine with one in Russia going forward. So the next time a Hospital blows up in Ukraine, a Hospital blows up somewhere in Russia. Perfect symmetry.

Would you press the button? Because if you would then sanctions of any kind are dramatically less drastic than that.

Are you saying 1.) Russia doesn’t deserve punishment or

2.) although Russia does deserve punishment they shouldn’t be punished because sometime later someone who doesn’t deserve punished will be punished

By that logic how could any action have a penalty or punishment?

If we could cut off Russia's electricity like we could the Internet, without that being likely to escalate to a hot war with them, we'd do that too. We'd be crazy not to.

Cutting off the electricity is less damaging. Because if they have no sources of information, then all they have is propaganda.

If they have no access to free chat apps - they have no safe way to communicate.

It just can not help them to overthrow Putin.

I see the point in economic sanctions - people should be forced to go to the streets. Brutally forced, if needed. I agree that it's necessary.

But they still should have access to information (not only propaganda) and secure communication.

In almost all cases, cutting off the electricity over any significant amount of time will also make it impossible to access the internet. It is therefore impossible for only the second thing to be worse than the first & second thing.

Without electricity, you have solar chargers and wifi/4g.

OP's point is that "cutting off the internet" means cutting off access to the Western internet, and not "all internet".

There are ways to deliver propaganda without the internet (television, lessons in schools - it is being heavily used right now), but there are no ways to spread the real information without Internet access.

Short-wave radio is an option

Or printing pamphlets on the hectograph.

Cutting off the electricity is less damaging.

Without electricity, no internet, to a first approximation. So I tend to disagree because one mostly entails the other.

And no propaganda, so it's still less damaging.

Propaganda was delivered via air drops back in the day. Perhaps Ukraine could deploy leaflets via helium balloons or similarly primitive mechanism.

The people in Mariupol have been cut off electricity, water, and are starving. Without electricity, even mobile goes down. No electricity, no Star Link. No electric cars. No photos from your smartphone (it dies eventually, like all batteries). Zero communication. Its objectively worse than no internet. Besides, the Russians were centralized on their own walled garden anyway. They still have their RUnet, and Putin was alreafy censoring the internet heavily as far as he could (including by centralizing in Russia).

The last line is not quite correct. Twitter is blocked, Tor bridges are being blocked regularly. Other than that, there are no significant bans. Nobody removes messages from Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, Matrix.

Censorship right now only works against the .ru websites and newspapers - they can't post anything and can’t even call it war. One of them is still calling it a war, though - Meduza.

Also, independent radio stations were closed.

This document is only about access to western newspapers, websites, and chats like Matrix, Viber, Signal.

The logical conclusion of this argument is that no negative action can be taken against a state, as said negative action might later be taken wrongly in the future. Thus we have to just let Russia invade Ukraine and kill everyone there.

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