Russia has found a security measure with a remarkable property: there is no evidence it stops the drones, and plenty of evidence it stops the warnings. As Ukrainian drones and missiles keep coming, Russian authorities increasingly shut down mobile internet and, in some areas, cellular service altogether. The official rationale is that drones could use cellular networks for navigation or targeting. The practical outcome is that the population loses almost every channel that could tell them to take cover.
By mid-September, 59 Russian regions had reported mobile internet restrictions. During these shutdowns, nearly every alert channel becomes unreliable: SMS, push notifications, Telegram channels, government websites, and in some cases even sirens, radio and television. The state is essentially asking its citizens to be warned through infrastructure it has just turned off.
The human cost is not hypothetical. An independent investigation counted at least 36 civilians killed across Russia and occupied Crimea this summer in strikes during which air raid sirens were never activated, and that figure is a minimum, because silent sirens are not always reported. In the Moscow region, strikes without sirens accounted for 68 percent of attack fatalities. Users in seven regions said they almost never received SMS alerts; in another 32 regions, messages arrived late or not at all, sometimes only after the strike.
The individual episodes read like a manual of how not to run civil protection. In Izhevsk, during the drone attack on the Kupol plant, no siren sounded and mobile internet disruptions blocked access to Telegram warnings: three people died and 35 were injured. Digital rights activists noted the obvious: the communications restrictions did not knock the drones off course, but timely warnings could have saved the dead and spared the injured. In Cheboksary, residents lost both mobile internet and regular cellular service; some received dozens of duplicate alerts while others received none. And in the Moscow region, during the recent parliamentary elections, authorities reportedly activated neither sirens nor SMS warnings during a major Ukrainian attack. The suspected reason is as cynical as it sounds: a high voter turnout was worth more than public safety.
Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian lawyer specializing in digital rights, puts the core problem plainly: during strikes, people lose access to information and cannot make the decisions that could save their lives. He also dismantles the official justification. Blocking cellular networks is not a panacea, because drones also rely on satellite navigation and radio communications. Mobile internet has been throttled for two years now, and the number of drone attacks has increased, not decreased. The digital rights project Na Svyazi summarizes the paradox in one sentence: security means alerts that work and people who can communicate.
There is a lesson here that goes well beyond Russia, and it should make anyone working on resilience and business continuity in Europe slightly uncomfortable. Telecommunication networks are three things at once: a tool of defense, a target, and critical infrastructure for civil protection. A security measure designed against one risk can quietly destroy your capacity to manage another. If your crisis plan assumes that the mobile network will be available precisely when things go wrong, you do not have a crisis plan; you have a hope. Redundant alert channels, independent of mobile data and ideally independent of any single infrastructure, are not a luxury for paranoid planners. They are the minimum requirement for calling an alert system an alert system.
Russia is running this experiment on its own population, in wartime, at scale. The results are in: when the state switches off communications to feel safer, the drones still fly, and the people on the ground are the ones who pay. This summer, at least 36 civilians died in strikes where no siren ever sounded.
Raffaele Di Marzio
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