Russia cracks down on personal phones on the frontline
politico.eu
Ukrainian open-source investigators said the new restrictions will make it harder to analyze Russian movements.
The Russian parliament adopted a law Wednesday hiking the penalty for personal use of internet devices by frontline soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
The law classifies possession of devices that allow military personnel to store or send video, photos or geolocation data on the internet as a grave offense, punishable by up to 15 days detention.
It also forbids the transmission of any information that could be used to identify any Russian troops and their whereabouts.
...Wait, that wasn't a basic standard lesson? Isn't an unsecured phone transmission basically a death sentence if if gets picked up since it tells people exactly where to fire artillery at?
it is also a death sentence to be on the frontlines with no way to learn where you need to go. unsecure comms are better than no comms and russia isn't competent enough to provide secure comms.
*any random ass company: you're forbidden from checking the work email in your phone, it's too risky
*Russian intelligence: here's our discord server, join to get updates on our tactics and the chance to win ZZ themed water bottles!
"You will not let anyone know how fucked you are."
There's a bunch of cases of soldiers getting hit because they posted identifiable information. The redditors who actually joined the Ukrainian army got got in this attack basically as soon as they made it into the country.
Russia couldn't give less of a shit whether or not their front line troops die. That's why they're using prisoners. This is about not letting information out.
OK, even if Russia's army was run by mustache-twirling villains who want every russian soldier dead, they also want to win the war, and it's really hard to win the war if the enemy knows where your soldiers are.
Not every Russian soldier, just the prisoners and foreigners tricked into being in the Russian military who actually might have something the world wants to hear about this war.
Also, Putin doesn't have a mustache.
Somehow "they could give away their positions" has never been a problem until now, almost two and a half years later.
I'm sure this isn't the first they they've increased restrictions on phones.
Same thing we've seen on the Ukraine side, same thing we saw during the Iraq war, same thing we're seeing in Israel. These things don't go into place instantly.
Instantly? The war began in February 2022 and it took this long for them to have a 'no cell phones on the front lines' policy because these things take time?
No wonder Russia's army is so ineffective if they can't even pass along that simple message in two years.
It took the US until like 2006 to get soldiers to stop filming themselves throwing puppies off cliffs (actual event), and even since there's been a number of incidents, and they're significantly more centralized than Russia's military. This isn't "pass along a message", militaries are a huge organizations, with disparate practices and politics. Just because there wasn't a high-level order increasing the penalty for having a phone on the front line doesn't mean that it wasn't restricted before, just because there is now doesn't mean it's going to be followed 100% of the time.
Ah 2006, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
So now you're saying that it took them two and a half years to figure out how to say "if you use a cell phone on the front lines, you'll face punishment?"
Bingo!
Oh no, 15 days of not getting shot at?
Yes, but the package also includes 15 days of starving, while getting beaten and raped by your fellow countrymen
True, but so does not being locked up, so its kinda moot
Due to how this war machine works it was usually solved on a case to case basis by local military authorities, just like many other things you could've read about with basement imprisonment, taping to a tree, beatings, without taking it to the court. Like in recruitment centers there's no law I can recall about having your phone there, but in many videos people recall only dummy button phones were allowed by guards and recently mobilized collectively used them to reach out to their relatives. It's more of a signal to their families that they'd not be in touch, and it doesn't carry a big sentence not to angry them too much, while I can bet it'd never be persecuted due to this article.