Russia and other nations are working on “sovereign Internet” systems that threaten digital rights—and the stability of the global Internet
Russian here. This is a super old claim from our government and is a common source of jokes, it's even called "Cheburnet" (from Cheburashka) colloquially, nobody really treats such claims seriously. Last time Russian government tried to influence internet was when they struggled to ban telegram for several years, and ended up giving up, endorsing it, and moving their official resources to it.
Okay, while I'm not a fan of a fragmented internet, I am a fan of losing all the russian trolls that plague many parts of the internet and online gaming. Counterstrike and similar games will lose their saltiest players too!
Terrible situation, even if you're in the "well it's Russia so stuff them" camp. Countries moving to their own Internet is a terrible situation, one we've seen before with China and their deep censorship of online media.
NSA and CIA are absolutely salivating at the idea of the Russians trying to roll their own TCP/IP stack. However good some of the Russian intel groups might be at offense, they are hot garbage at defense.
This will be obviously all in the name of authoritarianism. Will the Russian Federation people benefit or will this be a means to control information? Note that my criticisms leveled against Russia could apply to Amurica as well. We Amuricans seem to have wet dreams of Christo-Fascism.
We must somehow patch a connection in, to ensure they have a sufficient quantity of international memes, cats and porn. Access to the internet is a basic human right these days, we surely cannot abandon them.
I do have mixed feelings about this. Let's say pool it off and Russia net is now thing. That makes it harder for Russian conmen to rum various scams and hacks, ex ransomware, but it makes it a lot harder for the people there to break out of the state own propaganda.