Ben Rhodes

inflicting damage on just the way people go about their daily lives, right?

Like Russia is a plugged-in society.

If you want to order food, you want to order a taxi, you want to pay for something with your phone, you need the internet to do all that.

And according to Komirsan, which is a newspaper, each day of no service costs Russian businesses as much as 1 billion rubles, which is $12 million.

I also just want to point out, you know, personally, I've been impacted by this because it's just getting harder and harder to communicate with my family.

We, I don't want to give all my secrets.

It's not max, but you know, like we, you know, we communicate, we use video, we use the internet.

And increasingly there's just like really bad service.

Sometimes like, you know, we can't really see each other or hear each other.

It's just a horrible connection or the calls just don't go through at all.

And, you know, all of that obviously is upsetting and terrifying, not just for me, but I think for anybody who has, you know, family and loved ones and people that they need to communicate with in the country.

But the thing that they're doing is, you know, the Russian government is claiming this is all done under the guise of security measures.

They tell people it's to protect against Ukrainian drones.

I also think, though, it's interesting because there's a lot of speculation that it's really just Putin becoming completely paranoid after reports saying that, you know, the Israelis and the Americans like hacked into the street cameras.

Yeah.

And that's how traffic cameras and that's how they monitor the Iranian leadership's moves there.

So first, before I go a little further, what do you think of the paranoia angle?

Yes, that's a very important point that I didn't mention.

They've been dealing with this for a long time.

They've been firsthand feeling the impacts of the war a lot more because it's their men that are going to the front.