VLADIMIR PUTIN, Russia’s president, has portrayed his aggression on the Ukrainian border as pushing back against Western advances. For some time he has been doing much the same online. He has long referred to the internet as a “CIA project”, and his deep belief that the enemy within and the enemy without are in effect one and the same means that if Alexei Navalny, Mr Putin’s foremost internal foe, uses YouTube—his video of the president’s seaside palace was viewed more than 120m times—then YouTube and its parent, Alphabet, are enemies, too.
Faced with such “aggression” he wants a Russian internet that is secure against external threat and internal opposition. He
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