Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar: “Putin wants to cut off internet access and create his own internet, like China has”

Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, director of the Digital Society Institute at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, former ambassador-at-large in cyber-diplomacy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia and speaker at the 20th edition of CIDOB’s annual conference ‘War and Peace in the 21st Century’, reflects on disinformation in Putin’s Russia: “The picture that the Russian media has been painting for 20 years now, since Putin got to power, goes far beyond what is imaginable. Russian talk shows are full of stories that never happened. I grew up in the USSR and it was not so bad then; it was bad, but not as bad as it is now, the way they treat their people: they are no longer lies, they are outright fantasies. But the West has paid no attention; it has taken a war for Russia Today to stop being translated, it only happened when the EU imposed sanctions. And now all the Western media has left Russia, so Western versions of events will no longer be known. And Putin is even considering cutting off internet access and creating an internet of his own like China has. This is basically taking Russia back to 1952, to the Stalin era.”