Putin’s Post-Iran Paranoia

Julia Ioffe: “Vladimir Putin is, according to the chatter, completely spooked by the U.S.-Israeli war against Russia’s old ally, particularly the reports that Israel targeted the ayatollah by hacking traffic cameras in Tehran.”

“Earlier this month, the Russian president stopped going to the Kremlin and all his public events vanished from the calendar. Now, Moscow has virtually no cell service and it’s become impossible to message, call, or surf the web in large parts of the city. Even VPNs have been affected: One friend told me he needed to try three different services to see the videos I was sending him.”

“The Kremlin has experimented with shutting off cell service in other, smaller cities, but to do this in the nation’s capital—a city of 13 million people, where so many of the country’s businesses are headquartered—is shocking. The official explanation is that Moscow is protecting itself from Ukrainian drones, but even pro-Kremlin propagandists are speculating that this has more to do with the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine.”