There is, however, a detail that gives pause – both in scale and in symbolism. This tragedy, by the calendar, preceded the beginning of the American Revolution by a single day. Yes, it was on April 19, 1775 – exactly 251 years ago – that the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. Armed citizens who refused to surrender their weapons to British soldiers opened a new chapter in the world history of democracy.

Between the two dates – April 18 and April 19 – lies a chasm of two and a half centuries and an abyss of meaning. But there is also a common thread: the question of who controls weapons in a society, and what price ordinary citizens pay for that. This thread is just as relevant today as it was 251 years ago.

THE STATISTICS IT IS CONVENIENT TO IGNORE

The debate over opening the firearms market during a full-scale war is, to put it mildly, absurd — not because it is the ‘wrong’ topic, but because the answer has already been written by reality, encoded in official police statistics that people prefer not to read. Let us look at the numbers.

The data reveal two distinct cycles of violence separated by a pre-war low. The first peak falls in 2014 (2,523 proceedings) – the year of Crimea’s annexation and the start of the armed conflict in the East: a sharp saturation of weapons, disorganization of law enforcement, and collapse of unified command. The following years show a gradual normalization – through to the 2021 minimum (300 proceedings). These figures should be treated as the baseline for comparison.

The full-scale invasion of 2022 produced a new spike: +543% relative to 2021 in the very first year (1,929 proceedings). A critical detail: the proportion of suspicion notices to total proceedings in 2022–2023 collapsed to 25–27% (compared to 77–86% in peacetime). This means the majority of cases were opened without identified suspects – a direct consequence of uncontrolled weapons proliferation and overburdened investigators. The positive trend of 2024–2025 (declining to 821–832 proceedings) reflects system adaptation, but the level remains twice the pre-war baseline.

This table records an even more alarming dynamic.

While the overall number of firearm-related crimes in 2022–2023 primarily reflected the chaos of the first months of the invasion, the homicide statistics point to a qualitatively different process. The year 2023 is the absolute peak across all 13 years of observation: 909 intentional firearm homicides – 25 times the 2021 minimum (36).

The most telling indicator is clearance. In 2023, it fell to 19%: only 173 of 909 cases had an identified suspect. In practical terms, 736 intentional homicides went unsolved within a single calendar year. For comparison: in 2018–2021, clearance rates stood at 90–98%. The recovery seen in 2024–2025 (52–64%) is a positive trend, yet it remains at least twice below peacetime levels. This means a significant share of those who committed firearm homicides during the active phase of the conflict remains unpunished – and continues to live in society.

AND THEN THE VIDEO APPEARS

And then a video appears that cannot be ignored.

During the terrorist attack in Kyiv, individuals in patrol police uniforms, upon hearing gunshots, simply fled – leaving civilians without protection. The recording shows a child forced to save herself on her own. The footage was published by TSN and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. The officers have been suspended from duty. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko has ordered a disciplinary investigation.

Declarations are good. But the question is not what the minister said this morning. The question is what happens after the investigation concludes – assuming guilt is established and the authenticity of the recordings is confirmed. If police leadership fails to demonstrate a genuine response – not a declarative one, but one with concrete disciplinary consequences – the problem will intensify. Not because ‘the police are bad,’ but because institutional silence following such a video legitimizes conduct incompatible with the status of a law enforcement officer.

Among a segment of Ukrainian police officers, a dangerous attitude has taken hold during the full-scale war. Wartime, where violence is normalized, only reinforces the self-preservation reflex – at the expense of the protection reflex. Fleeing a shooter is not the cowardice of individuals. It is a symptom of systemic institutional degradation that cannot be fixed by a single disciplinary inquiry.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: WHAT THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS ACTUALLY GAVE

Let us return to the symbolism of the date.

April 19, 1775 – the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The first shots of the American Revolution. The shot heard round the world. And a few years later, the first modern constitutional democracy was born.

The right to bear arms did not merely allow Americans to win the War of Independence. It structured American democracy for two and a half centuries and embedded at its core the principle that an armed citizen is a subject, not an object, of power. This principle was enshrined in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791): “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

American statistics demonstrate the obvious: high firearms saturation correlates with higher rates of firearm-related crime. 79% of intentional homicides in the United States involve a firearm. In EU countries, that figure ranges from 20% to 40%. The American model is not a template to emulate in a criminological sense. But it is a template in a constitutional-democratic sense: the right to self-defense as the foundation of the relationship between citizen and state.

It is important to distinguish two levels of debate. The first is criminological: more guns = more of certain categories of crime. The statistics confirm this, and to deny it is to ignore reality. The second is constitutional-democratic: the right of an armed citizen as a deterrent against state arbitrariness and as the basis of popular sovereignty. These two levels do not contradict each other – they describe different dimensions of the same reality.

UKRAINE TODAY: A SOCIETY WITH WEAPONS IN HAND

Ukraine today is a society in which millions of citizens, weapons in hand, are defending the state from destruction. By estimates, as of 2025, between 6 and 10 million units of various types of weapons are in civilian circulation – including among demobilized soldiers and veterans. Some are legally registered. Some are not. This is a fact that must be lived with.

The gravest threat lies ahead. Hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers are returning from the front. Some with untreated PTSD. Some with weapons, legally or not. The experience of other conflicts – Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Balkans – shows that crime rates among veterans do not rise immediately, but rather 2–3 years after demobilization. That wave has not yet arrived. And if the state does not prepare, the police statistics of 2027–2028 will become the subject of parliamentary inquiries, not academic articles.

The question is not whether to ‘legalize or not.’ The question is what institutional culture we are building around this reality – and whether the state is capable of the accountability that follows from it.

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION: THE STATE THAT DOES NOT PROTECT — AND THE CITIZEN WHO PROTECTS HIMSELF

The American Revolution began because the state failed to protect its citizens – and so they took up arms themselves. The Kyiv tragedy of April 18, 2026 – and especially the video of officers fleeing a shooter while leaving a child at the center of the gunfire – is a painful reminder that this question remains very much alive today.

A police officer who flees a shooter and abandons a child to their fate is not merely a disciplinary matter. It is a symptom. A state that wishes to grant its citizens the right to bear arms – or that has already done so de facto, having distributed millions of weapons in the first days of the invasion – must first demonstrate that it itself knows how to handle weapons responsibly and protect those who protect it.

The statistics are incontrovertible: the full-scale war produced a sharp spike in firearm-related crime – +543% in the first year alone. But those same statistics show that in 2024–2025, the numbers began to fall. This means that society and the state are adapting. The question is: in which direction. Toward the rule of law and institutional accountability – or toward the normalization of impunity, in which police officers flee and killers remain unidentified.

The weapon used by the gunman was officially registered, and he himself held the relevant permits. According to journalists’ reports, the man turned out to be a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian Armed Forces – a native of Moscow with Ukrainian citizenship – who, according to some sources, had made donations in support of the so-called ‘special military operation’. According to preliminary information, he had already attacked people in the same shop three years earlier. Neighbours say he moved into the building at the start of the full-scale invasion.

These facts form a chilling picture, but our task is not to inflame emotions – it is to try to answer, calmly and honestly, the questions that this tragedy inevitably poses to society, the law enforcement system and the rule of law.

WEAPONS, LICENCES AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY

The first and most obvious conclusion that springs to mind is that this crime was committed using a legally registered weapon. This is not a mere detail but a fundamentally important circumstance that undermines one of the central arguments of those lobbying for the free circulation of firearms: ‘Legal Weapons = Safety’.

The debate over the liberalisation of the firearms market in Ukraine has raged for years, but it intensified particularly in the context of the full-scale war, when a section of society and a number of lawmakers began insisting on enshrining the right to bear arms in the constitution, citing the need for self-defence and patriotic duty. The tragedy in Korsun polarised society at the time: many people sympathised with the man who had used a weapon against law enforcement officers – which in itself is symptomatic and alarming.

The current case is fundamentally different. Here there is no ‘people’s avenger’ or ‘Korsun Robin Hood’, nor is there any hint of social conflict with the system. There is a retired lieutenant-colonel who shoots peaceful supermarket shoppers with a legally registered pistol. It is precisely this circumstance that should settle the debate: not ‘who’ commits the crime or what their ideology is, but the fact that Ukraine’s system for issuing firearms licences is structurally incapable of filtering out those who harbour hidden destructive intentions. Screening during the registration of firearms has proved futile. Previous attacks on people in the same shop did not lead to the licence being revoked. The system failed.

Here, however, we must refrain from oversimplification. The people’s right to resist tyranny remains a fundamental principle of constitutional theory and international legal tradition. The question is not whether a citizen has the right to defend themselves, but whether the state is capable of responsibly managing the circulation of weapons in conditions of hybrid warfare, social trauma and the psychological instability of the population. The answer provided by this tragedy is – not yet.

NEGOTIATIONS, DE-ESCALATION AND COMMUNICATION FAILURE

For around 40 minutes, negotiators attempted to establish contact with the attacker, but he did not respond. “He did not make contact. I did not hear him,” noted the head of the negotiation unit at the Kyiv National Police.

This is a key detail that requires separate analysis. Forty minutes is both a long time and a short time. For negotiators, this is a relatively brief period in tactical terms. But the very fact of a complete lack of any response from the attacker indicates not only his pathological determination, but also a fundamental problem: were these forty minutes used with genuinely professional techniques for engaging a person in crisis? Does our police force even have the necessary level of training for negotiators capable of working with people who have crossed a psychological threshold?

Today, a dangerous mindset prevails among some Ukrainian police officers: ‘Shoot First – Sort It Out Later’. This mindset has gained further momentum in a wartime environment, where violence is normalised and the right to use force is interpreted far more broadly than provided for by law and human rights standards. The Kyiv tragedy, like many before it, risks becoming not a catalyst for reform but a confirmation of this flawed logic. Meanwhile, the ECtHR consistently emphasises that when assessing the lawfulness of the use of lethal force, account must be taken not only of the actions of the perpetrators but also of all the surrounding circumstances – in particular, planning and control (Mikhalkova and Others v. Ukraine, para. 36; McCann and Others v. the UK [GC], para. 150). The legislative and administrative framework must clearly define the limited circumstances in which law enforcement officers may use firearms, and police officers must not be left in a state of uncertainty regarding these limits (Soare and Others v. Romania, para. 129).

The true measure of police effectiveness is the ability to resolve critical situations without resorting to lethal force. It is in this direction that modern policing is developing in democratic countries, where officers acquire skills honed over years in de-escalation, psychological influence and – only in extreme cases – the use of weapons. The ECtHR in Soare and Others v. Romania explicitly stated that the absence of clear rules and proper training explains the inadequate and autonomous actions of police officers in critical situations (para. 135). And in Celniku v. Greece, the Court held that Article 2 of the ECHR covers not only the direct actions of police officers but also staff training: if the level of training does not correspond to the complexity of the tasks at hand, the state bears responsibility.

NEUTRALISATION OF THE ATTACKER: ARTICLE 2 OF THE ECHR AND THE RIGHT TO LIFE

Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko stated that KORD special forces carried out a raid and neutralised the attacker. During the assault, the perpetrator resisted law enforcement officers and opened fire on them.

In the acute phase of a crisis, when a person is actively shooting at police officers, the use of lethal force is formally justified even under the strict standards of Article 2 of the Convention.

The ECtHR, in cases such as McCann and Others v. United Kingdom, Nachova v. Bulgaria and Finogenov v. Russia, has consistently developed the criterion of ‘absolute necessity’: the state is obliged to prove that the person’s death was the result of force that did not exceed what was absolutely necessary in the specific circumstances. At the same time, as explained in McCann and Others v. the UK [GC] (para. 200), the use of force is justified only where the agents genuinely believed that opening fire was necessary and had subjectively sufficient grounds for doing so — rather than merely following orders.

The standard of ‘absolute necessity’ is stricter than the criterion of ‘necessary in a democratic society’ under Articles 8 and 11 of the ECHR: force must be strictly proportionate (Jaloud v. the Netherlands [GC], para. 199; Kelly and Others v. the UK, para. 93). In a situation involving the rescue of a hostage from an armed criminal offering active resistance, these conditions may be met — but this still requires verification.

But this is precisely where the issue begins that most commentators prefer to sidestep. The state is obliged to conduct an effective independent investigation into whether there really was no other tactical option. Were all possibilities for a non-violent resolution of the situation exhausted? Was the timing of the assault correctly chosen? Is every shot fired by KORD officers documented and justified? The ECtHR in Al-Skeini and Others v. the UK [GC] (para. 163) and Armani Da Silva v. the UK [GC] (para. 233) clearly stated: the investigation must cover not only the immediate actions of those carrying out the operation but also the planning and control of the operation as a whole; it must be capable of establishing whether the use of force was justified. Any shortcoming that undermines this capability constitutes a violation of the procedural aspect of Article 2 of the ECHR. A telling example is the case of Finogenov and Others v. Russia (Operation ‘Nord-Ost’), where the Court found a violation precisely because of the incompleteness and bias of the investigation.

In the context of Ukraine during a full-scale invasion, a public demand for an investigation into the circumstances of the death of a man who had just killed six civilians sounds critically unpopular. But this is precisely the essence of the rule of law: Article 2 of the ECHR protects the right to life not only of the criminal’s victims, but also of the criminal himself. Without this principle, the entire human rights framework becomes a situational compromise of the majority, rather than a system of universal guarantees. Article 2 of the ECHR imposes a positive obligation on the state not only to refrain from the intentional deprivation of life, but also to take preventive measures to protect persons within its jurisdiction (Yuriy Illarionovich Shchokin v. Ukraine, para. 35). A general legal prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life becomes ineffective without an effective review procedure: this is precisely how the Court formulated it in Giuliani and Gaggio v. Italy [GC] (para. 249) and Al-Skeini and Others v. the UK [GC] (para. 163). Andronicou and Constantinou v. Cyprus demonstrates that even a hostage rescue operation resulting in the death of a perpetrator may be deemed lawful – but only provided that planning was carried out with a view to minimising risk, negotiations were conducted rationally, and the operatives had clear instructions to use only proportionate force (para. 194).

Furthermore, there is a purely practical argument: a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian Armed Forces who had lived in Ukraine, made donations to the ‘SVO’ and ultimately carried out a mass shooting – this was a source of information of exceptional value to counter-intelligence. His motives, connections, possible handlers and funding channels could all have been established during interrogations. His elimination has permanently shut down that channel.

THE DANGER OF ‘SECURITY’ DISCOURSE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This tragedy will inevitably give rise to legislative initiatives. Some will be aimed at tightening controls on the circulation of weapons — and this is justified and necessary. But others — and this is where alarm bells should ring — will use this incident to justify expanding the police apparatus, intensifying preventive surveillance and legalising ‘proactive’ operational measures.

This mechanism is well known in human rights practice: a terrorist attack or large-scale crime becomes a ‘window of opportunity’ for the state to expand its powers in areas where citizens would not normally permit such intrusion. Laws passed ‘in the heat of the moment’ are, as a rule, not repealed even after the shock has passed.

The right to private and family life, guaranteed by Article 8 of the ECHR, the right to the protection of personal data, the right not to be subject to preventive police surveillance without sufficient grounds – all these guarantees are under threat whenever society experiences a sudden surge of fear. The standard of ‘necessary in a democratic society’ under Article 8 of the ECHR is less stringent than the criterion of ‘absolutely necessary’ under Article 2, but even this does not permit the state to introduce widespread preventive surveillance without individual grounds and judicial oversight. The task of the human rights community, the legal profession and the academic community is to ensure that a single tragedy does not become a justification for systemic restrictions on rights that will affect millions of people who have no connection whatsoever to the crime.

POLICE TRAINING

A dangerous trend that has long been brewing within the Ukrainian police has now gained new momentum: a readiness to use weapons before establishing the facts. The tragedy of 18 April risks becoming not a warning but a justification for this logic – and it is currently extremely difficult to assess the true scale of such a shift.

That is precisely why this case must serve as a compelling argument in favour of a systematic review of police training – but not in the direction of improving marksmanship or physical skills. We are talking about something fundamentally different: training officers in the art of communication, the ability to defuse tension in real time and the professional application of de-escalation techniques.

The true measure of the effectiveness of a modern police force is the ability to resolve critical situations without violence. The shift from a punitive model to one of dialogue and professional restraint is not romanticism but a practical necessity. This is where the future of Ukraine’s law enforcement system lies.

CONCLUSIONS

This tragedy presents a multi-layered challenge. For society, it is a call for restraint amidst emotional pressure and the temptation of simplistic answers. For legislators, it is a challenge to draft regulations that genuinely enhance safety without becoming instruments of punitive bureaucracy. For the police, it is a mirror in which they must see not their own heroism but their systemic shortcomings in training, de-escalation and tactical flexibility. For human rights defenders, it is a reminder that the protection of human rights cannot be conditional: either it applies to everyone, or it does not exist as a principle.

Six families are mourning their loved ones. This is an undeniable reality, and it takes precedence. But the appropriate response to these deaths is not a new wave of police aggression or a flurry of emotional legislation – it is a systematic, dispassionate and honest analysis of where the system failed, and how to fix it without losing our humanity.

Angela Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother and mother of three, spent over five months behind bars after Fargo (North Dakota) police linked her to bank frauds committed in a state where, by her own account, she had never been. It was only after her extradition to North Dakota that her lawyer discovered bank records confirming that Lipps had been in Tennessee at the time the crimes were committed. The charges were dropped on 23 December, and she was released on Christmas Eve.

This case calls for a much deeper analysis than simply noting yet another algorithmic failure. It demonstrates a structural pattern inherent in every era of technological transformation in criminal justice: a new identification tool is introduced with enthusiasm and uncritical trust, supplanting tried-and-tested methods of establishing facts, whilst specific individuals become the victims of systemic errors. To see this pattern for oneself, one need only look at a case that took place over 120 years ago in London.

THE CASE OF ADOLF BECK: ANATOMY OF AN IDENTIFICATION ERROR AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In 1896, the Norwegian national Adolf Beck was convicted by the Central Criminal Court of London (the Old Bailey) for a series of frauds against women — allegedly, posing as a lord, he would approach them on the street, promise expensive gifts, and steal their jewellery. The verdict was based almost exclusively on witness testimony: the victims identified Beck unanimously. Moreover, the police established that similar crimes had been committed in 1877 by a person using the same modus operandi — and this old case was attributed to Beck without sufficient grounds.

After serving five years of his sentence, Beck was released in 1901 — only to find himself back in custody in 1904 on identical charges. And once again: confident, unanimous eyewitness testimony. And once again: an innocent man. The real offender — William Thomas, operating under the alias John Smith — was apprehended only by chance: he committed yet another fraud after Beck’s second arrest and was caught in the act. Beck was released and pardoned. The total duration of his wrongful imprisonment amounted to approximately seven years.

What allowed this miscarriage of justice to occur not once but twice? The answer lies in the institutional attitude towards the new identification paradigm. The late nineteenth century was the era of what was then called ‘scientific policing’: Bertillon’s anthropometry, later fingerprinting, and systematised procedures for questioning witnesses. Eyewitnesses no longer simply ‘recognised’ a suspect — they participated in a procedure that carried the trappings of scientific rigour. The procedural authority of identification became self-sufficient evidence requiring no verification. Beck’s alibis were not seriously investigated precisely because ‘scientific’ identification appeared more reliable than any exculpatory counter-evidence.

The Beck case had significant legal consequences: in 1907, the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in England — directly as an institutional response to the demonstrated inability of the system to self-correct in cases involving identification errors.

STRUCTURAL PARALLELS: TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND FAILURES OF PROOF

A comparison of the Beck and Lipps cases reveals a striking structural isomorphism, suggesting a consistent pattern rather than mere coincidence.

First, in both cases the identification technology was introduced into law enforcement practice without proper validation and without established standards for its admissibility. The Fargo police chief admitted at a press conference that the department had acquired its own facial recognition system ‘without the knowledge of senior management’ and without agreed protocols for its use. ‘We would not have allowed this to be used,’ he stated, noting that the system has since been prohibited. In the Beck case, systematic in-person identification was similarly introduced as a tool of ‘progress’ without adequate consideration of its inherent limitations.

Second, in both cases alibis or counter-evidence were available from the outset but were not properly investigated, due to excessive reliance on the identification outcome. Lipps’s lawyers emphasised that ‘the police officer used facial recognition as a substitute for basic investigation’ and that ‘no investigation was carried out to establish whether she was even in North Dakota at the relevant time’. The word ‘substitute’ is key: the technology did not supplement traditional investigative methods — it replaced them.

Third, in both cases the institutional machinery continued to move by inertia even after the first signs of error appeared. The police received information about potentially exculpatory evidence as early as 12 December, yet a substantive response — involving the investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge — did not follow until 23 December, more than five months after the arrest.

Fourth, the legal consequences for the victims proved catastrophic beyond the scope of the criminal proceedings themselves. For Beck, prolonged detention destroyed his reputation and social standing. For Lipps, ‘the trauma, loss of liberty and reputational damage cannot be easily remedied’, her lawyers state, noting that they are considering bringing civil rights claims.

This parallel points to a central theoretical problem: why do such errors recur with each technological shift in the identification paradigm? The answer lies in what might be called technological determinism in evidence law — the tendency, once a new tool acquires ‘scientific’ status, to treat it as a priori superior to traditional forms of evidence. This cognitive bias is reinforced by a structural asymmetry: the flaws of traditional methods (eyewitness testimony, documentary records) are well known and openly discussed, whereas the flaws of the new tool remain systematically invisible until the first high-profile scandal.

PROCEDURAL AND NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS

The Lipps case highlights several normative questions long debated in the doctrine of criminal procedure, which have taken on new urgency with the widespread introduction of AI into law enforcement.

The first is the admissibility standard for algorithmic evidence. The result of Clearview AI’s facial recognition served as the basis for issuing an arrest warrant with inter-state extradition — without any verification by an independent competent authority.

The second concerns procedural safeguards when using automated systems. The ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle has gained widespread formal recognition, yet the Lipps case demonstrates its practical erosion: a human is technically present, but their role is reduced to relaying the algorithmic output without critical scrutiny. ‘The detectives mistakenly assumed that they had also been sent photographs from the scene along with the identification conclusion,’ the police chief admitted — describing a process in which even the minimal verification step nominally built into the procedure was bypassed by those captivated by the authority of the algorithm.

The third concerns remedial justice. The police chief declined to apologise, citing an ongoing investigation into a ‘wide network of individuals’. This stance is symptomatic: institutional denial of responsibility is as much a structural component of the pattern as the original error.

CONCLUSIONS: THE PERPETUAL RACE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW OF EVIDENCE

The Lipps case is neither an anomaly nor the product of purely individual negligence. It is the predictable outcome of an incomplete institutional understanding of a new identification paradigm. One hundred and thirty years separate the Adolf Beck case from the Angela Lipps case, yet the nature of the error is unchanged. Technological innovation alters only the instrument; the first victims are always those whose alibi proves ‘less convincing’ than the authority of an identification system that has not yet stood the test of time.

For the doctrine of evidence law, the Lipps case reaffirms that proven reliability, reproducibility of results, and independent verification must remain the constant criteria for the admissibility of evidence, regardless of the technological nature of the tool. The foundational principle — that no evidence is self-sufficient and that all evidence must be tested in adversarial proceedings — is not superseded by the advent of artificial intelligence. On the contrary: the more powerful the tool, the stricter the procedural framework governing its use must be.

The genuine novelty of our era lies not in the fact that algorithms make mistakes — all identification systems do — but in the fact that the pace and scale of their deployment are outrunning the development of legal safeguards against their errors.

That said, the bill’s authors proved flexible: if a citizen genuinely wants to hear a foreign voice on the line, they can personally notify their operator of this unorthodox wish. In other words, silence from the outside world becomes the default, and the desire to hear it becomes an administrative act of personal courage. What was perfectly ordinary just yesterday—receiving a call from relatives abroad — will tomorrow become a privilege reserved for those who took the trouble to submit a request.

It should also be noted that the rule will not apply to numbers from the Union State — meaning Belarus remains accessible. The rest of the world does not. The geography of trust, as we can see, is clearly defined.

Now for the most interesting part.

The official justification for the law is the fight against telephone scammers who call from abroad and swindle money from the elderly. The problem is certainly real and acute. But this raises a delicate question: what will happen to the domestic fraud sector, which, according to Russian law enforcement officials themselves, is thriving just as vigorously and, unlike its foreign competitors, calls exclusively from numbers with the +7 code?

The logic of the law, if you think about it, runs something like this: we cannot allow a grandmother from Ryazan to fall victim to some scoundrel from Kyiv or Warsaw — that would be an affront to national dignity. But if that same pensioner hands over her savings to a “bank security officer” from Nizhny Novgorod — that is purely an internal matter, a private arrangement between citizens of the same state.

The state, in this way, carefully protects domestic producers from unfair foreign competition. Protectionism in its purest form — only instead of tariffs, a legislative blockade against outside challengers.

It is also worth considering the aesthetics of this decision.

The Iron Curtain of the Soviet era closed the borders to people — it prevented them from leaving. The new, digital and telephonic curtain operates more subtly: it simply prevents anyone from calling in. Bodies may remain wherever they are, but the information space is neatly contracted to the confines of the Union State, plus whatever one declares to one’s operator.

It is telling that the measures specifically target landline phones and people over 60—that is, those most dependent on their home telephone as their primary window to the world. Young people have long communicated via messaging apps — those have not been shut down yet (though, judging by the pace, their turn will come). But the grandmother with a rotary-dial phone in the kitchen — she is now “protected.” In the sense of “protection” that is difficult to distinguish from isolation.

All that remains is to wish the bill’s authors consistency.

If foreign scammers are dangerous — shut down the internet too. If foreign news distorts reality — it has largely been shut down already. If foreign words pollute the language — there are lawmakers with precisely such bills in hand. If foreign air carries unwanted ideas…

We will stop there. The State Duma has no shortage of inspiration as it is.

There is a particular kind of academic ‘stagnation’: when a phenomenon is so vast and so obvious that the scientific apparatus grinds to a halt, not knowing where to begin. The self-isolation of modern Russia is precisely such a case. It has long since gone beyond the concept of a ‘carceral state’ — and even this concept, which until recently seemed a sufficiently broad analytical category, increasingly resembles a pair of clothes that are too tight, worn over something much larger and clumsier.

However, before resorting to mid-level theories, it is worth turning to the classics. Yevgeny Schwartz, in his play ‘To Kill the Dragon’ (1944), depicted a mechanism that is instantly recognisable in modern Russia: The Dragon does not merely set the rules—it sets reality. Windows that look outward are dangerous not because an enemy might enter through them, but because through them the inhabitants might see something the Dragon did not foresee. Therefore — close them. Methodically, systematically, citing regulations.

The digital dimension of this narrative demands separate attention. Over the two decades of the Putin regime, Russia has cultivated the illusion of openness in the digital space — as a kind of safety valve that relieves social pressure. This is the essence of what might be called ‘anesthesia of consumption’: citizens are allowed to read whatever they want — and so they take to the streets less often. When the real pressure became too great, the safety valve was shut off.

On February 20, 2026, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring telecommunications operators to suspend services at the request of the FSB — without any judicial oversight. Ten days later, the law took effect. Starting March 6, 2026, Moscow residents reported widespread mobile network outages. On March 14, the ‘whitelist’ system was activated — a set of resources accessible during the blackout. The list included: government portals, state-controlled platforms (VK, Yandex), food delivery services, and banking apps. The following were deliberately excluded from the list: independent media, foreign news resources, and any tools for verifying reality.

To paraphrase Schwartz: how many open windows do we have? All of them are open. We don’t know any limits. Well then, we’ll close the open windows. The technical implementation of the dragon’s monologue turned out to be simple and elegant: a person can order a pizza, pay a bill, call a taxi — but cannot find out why the connection is down, what’s happening in the city, or consult with anyone outside official channels. The state does not deprive a person of pizza delivery. It deprives a person of the ability to know that pizza delivery and the FSB are now part of the same infrastructure.

The phenomenology of voluntary isolation is not without its cultural artifacts. In this context, an event that a strict researcher would not even notice takes on particular analytical significance — but one that strikingly and accurately illustrates the mechanism of normalization. On the show “Field of Miracles” (“Channel One”), the children’s vocal ensemble “Komilfo” (Volgograd) performed a song about the benefits of disconnecting from the internet. The young performers — with all the immediacy of a child’s voice — conveyed to the audience that in the absence of blogs and channels, they are forced to play badminton, that this is a “terrible dream,” and at the same time: “We don’t want to, we don’t want to, you won’t catch us in the net, we won’t sit, we won’t sit on your internet”.

This song is, perhaps, the most accurate cultural document of the era. It fully reproduces the Dragon’s logic: truth reformatted as desire. The children aren’t forced — they want the windows closed. They aren’t deprived of the internet — they themselves refuse the network. Normalization is complete when the victim internalizes the restrictions to such an extent that they begin to consider them their own choice. This is the true surgery of control—when the stitched wound leaves no scars.

At the same time, the propaganda pedagogy revealed a characteristic ambivalence: the “terrible dream” in the song’s lyrics is a metaphor specifically for disconnecting from the internet, not for its presence. That is, the children sing about how bad it is without the internet — and at the same time assert that they don’t want to be on it. This contradiction, of course, is not acknowledged by the authors themselves. But it is symptomatic: second-generation propaganda is no longer capable of sustaining even its own internal logic.

The self-isolation of Russian society, thus, is not merely a political fact — it is a performance. The regime enacts the closing of windows, society enacts the enjoyment of darkness, and children sing songs about how the sun was superfluous anyway. If Shvartsovsky’s Dragon were to read contemporary analytical reports, he could only shake his head: why intimidate when you can teach people to love the cage? Why ban windows if you can convince people that they were never open to begin with?

The answer to this question leaves us with a bleak but analytically honest conclusion: the prison state as a concept is already too anthropocentric. It presupposes a prisoner who knows he is a prisoner. Contemporary Russia has gone further — toward a society that perceives bars as an architectural feature and sings children’s songs in their defense. To call this a “prison state” is to underestimate the scale of the phenomenon. To call it a “dystopia” is still to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Perhaps the most accurate name is simply: The Dragon Lives. And the windows are closing.

This article develops the conceptual model of “two-phase authoritarianism,” in which coercion gives way to temptation in the first phase, so that by the second — once society has already been stripped of its means of resistance — the transition to totalitarianism becomes technically and politically feasible. The events of March 2026 in Moscow — the activation of “whitelists” of permitted internet resources during a deliberate shutdown of mobile communications — serve as a marker of that transition.

An important theoretical instrument actively deployed by authoritarian governments to legitimize control over the internet is the concept of “digital sovereignty.” Originally developed in democratic contexts as a safeguard against the monopolistic practices of transnational platforms, it has been repurposed by Russia, China, and kindred regimes to justify the state’s right to shut down, filter, and reshape the information environment. “Sovereign internet,” in this reading, is not a right of citizens to secure communications — it is the state’s right to determine which communications are possible at all.

PHASE ONE: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OF MANAGED CONSUMPTION

The first stage of the two-phase model spans roughly the first two decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. It is defined by a specific social contract that can be stated simply: the state does not interfere with consumption — society does not interfere with governance.

The mechanism of this contract is well documented. Oil revenues in the 2000s and early 2010s allowed Russia’s middle class to access Western standards of consumption: shopping malls, foreign travel, smartphones, and streaming services. Simultaneously, independent media, judicial independence, and electoral competition were systematically dismantled — but in a manner calibrated so that the majority of the population did not feel the direct material consequences.

Scholars have termed this phenomenon “welfare authoritarianism” or “pleasure authoritarianism“: a regime that sustains its legitimacy not through ideological mobilization but by ensuring a rising level of consumption. Citizens trade participation in public life for a guarantee of private comfort, and consider the exchange acceptable so long as that comfort persists.

The digital dimension of this contract was fundamental. Russia in the first decade of the century had a comparatively open internet. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — all were freely accessible. Blocked sites were marginal in number and in public consciousness. This “internet freedom” functioned as a partial substitute for the real-world freedom that had been quietly removed: people could read what they wished and, therefore, took to the streets less often.

The regime deliberately cultivated the illusion of openness in the digital space — as a pressure valve for social discontent. When real-world pressure grew too acute, the valve was closed. This observation recurs across numerous analyses of the evolution of the Russian internet, and it is accurate.

THE BREAK: FEBRUARY 2022 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shattered this contract on several fronts simultaneously. First, international sanctions and the voluntary withdrawal of Western corporations made consumerist comforts materially unattainable: IKEA, McDonald’s, Apple Pay, Netflix, and Instagram disappeared. Second, mass anti-war protests — the largest in more than a decade — demonstrated that a segment of society was prepared to break the contract even under direct police pressure. Third, and most consequential for our model, the state concluded that as long as a person retains access to uncontrolled information, they remain potentially disloyal.

The initial response was surgical: blocking Instagram and Facebook, throttling Twitter/X, tightening regulations on VPN services. But these measures remained half-hearted — they left people with the practical sense that censorship could technically be circumvented. The systemic shift came later.

On February 20, 2026, Putin signed a law requiring telecommunications operators to suspend services upon instruction from the Federal Security Service. The stated purpose was counterterrorism. The practical function was to give the FSB direct administrative authority to shut down communications in any region of the country, without judicial oversight of any kind. The law took effect ten days after signature.

Beginning March 6, 2026, Moscow residents reported pervasive mobile network outages. According to Forbes, operators received orders to restrict network operations in specific areas of the city. On March 14, 2026, a “whitelist” system was activated — a defined list of resources accessible during the shutdown.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE WHITELIST

The composition of the list is analytically revealing. It includes: government services (Gosuslugi, official agency portals); state-controlled information platforms (VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Yandex); e-commerce services (Ozon, Wildberries, Samokat, Burger King, SDEK, car-sharing); banking applications (Alfa-Bank, VTB, the Mir payment system); and state media (RIA Novosti, Zvezda, Match TV, VGTRK).

Conspicuously absent from the list: any independent or foreign news source; social networks not under state control; messaging applications; and any tool capable of allowing users to verify the actual state of affairs outside official channels.

The architecture of the list follows a coherent and unambiguous logic. This is not a list of resources essential for survival — it is notably lacking, for instance, in medical services or emergency infrastructure. It is a list of controlled existence: a person may order food, pay a bill, call a taxi — but cannot learn why communications are down, what is occurring in the city, or consult with anyone outside official channels.

What we observe, therefore, is not the destruction of comfort but its restructuring: comfort is preserved precisely and only to the degree that it does not threaten control. The state does not deprive a person of pizza delivery — it deprives a person of the ability to know that pizza delivery and the FSB now share the same infrastructure.

PHASE TWO: COMFORT AS INSTRUMENT, NOT COMPENSATION

This is what qualitatively distinguishes the second phase from the first. In the first phase, comfort functioned as compensation — a substitute for freedom. In the second, it becomes an instrument of control: a permitted set of actions within an enclosed space. The difference between a gilded cage and a bare one ceases to matter; what matters is that neither can be exited.

The law of February 20, 2026, is precisely such an act of normalization: it converts ad hoc disconnections — practiced before, but extrajudicially — into a legal procedure. From this point forward, any shutdown of communications is not an act of arbitrary power but the enforcement of law. Legal form does not constrain; it legitimizes.

CONCLUSIONS

The situation described above permits the following theoretical and practical conclusions.

First, twenty-first-century authoritarianism does not merely suppress freedom — it replaces freedom with a simulacrum of well-being. This substitution is not a temporary tactic but a structural element that allows the regime to minimize the costs of overt repression during the first phase.

Second, the transition from the first phase to the second is not an abrupt rupture — it is prepared by the gradual technical, legal, and institutional construction of a control infrastructure. Those who failed to register the first phase find themselves unprepared for the second.

Third, the whitelist of internet resources is not merely a technical solution — it is the concentrated expression of a new social ontology: only what is permitted is real. This represents “information sovereignty” in its most radical and unmediated form.

Fourth, the legal normalization of communications shutdowns is the key step that transforms the extraordinary into the routine. Further comparative analysis of legislative trajectories in states exhibiting similar dynamics is necessary if adequate mechanisms of protection and resistance are to be developed in time.

Pre-war (2013-2021), Ukraine demonstrated consistent crime reduction, reaching a historic low of 321443 registered crimes in 2021, with approximately 50-54% suspect identification rates. The full-scale invasion immediately disrupted this trajectory. By 2025, registered crimes surged to 608191 – an 89% increase from 2021 – while suspect identification plummeted to 27,3%, creating an unprecedented justice gap with over 442000 criminal proceedings lacking identified suspects.

The war fundamentally transformed crime patterns. Criminality became significantly more rural, with rural crime increasing from 20% (2013-2021) to 32,3% (2025) of total crimes. The urban-to-rural crime ratio declined from 4:1 to barely 2:1, reflecting occupation-related crimes, abandoned property theft, and frontline zone criminality.

Crime categories showed varied impacts: property crimes initially decreased but fraud increased dramatically (from 23847 in 2021 to 82609 in 2023). Domestic violence crimes surged (from 4800 in 2021 to 8900 in 2024). War crimes exploded from 253 in 2021 to 62128 in 2022. Intentional homicides with firearms peaked at 909 in 2023 – 25 times the 2021 baseline. Paradoxically, despite weapon proliferation, some firearms crimes showed complex patterns rather than simple increases.

Human trafficking statistics revealed troubling gaps: despite 6,5 million refugees creating unprecedented vulnerability, registered cases remained low (105 in 2024), suggesting severe underreporting and possible law enforcement complicity.

The study demonstrates that while Ukraine maintained statistical transparency during existential crisis, institutional effectiveness collapsed under wartime pressures, creating dangerous impunity that threatens post-war reconstruction and rule of law.