Russia goes offline, and Muscovites are not ‘loving it.’ Cheburnet arrives, and Russians discover consequences. On Friday morning, April 3rd, at around ten o’clock Moscow time, Russia stopped working. The money stopped dispensing and flowing. Sberbank — Russia’s largest lender — went down. Then VTB. Then T-Bank. Then Alfa-Bank. Then Gazprombank. Then the Central Bank’s own Faster Payments System, the interbank rail that processes QR code transfers and phone-number payments. All of it, simultaneously, across Moscow, St Petersburg, Samara, Novosibirsk, the Sverdlovsk region, Chelyabinsk.
Card terminals in shops threw errors. ATMs refused to dispense cash. Mobile banking apps wouldn’t open. In the Moscow metro, turnstiles stopped accepting bank cards — staff had to wave passengers through for free just to stop crowds forming. Petrol stations demanded cash. A regional zoo in Belgorod put up a sign asking visitors to pay in physical roubles. Traffic jams stretched for kilometres on toll roads because the payment gates wouldn’t read cards. Sberbank alone logged more than four thousand complaints in a single hour. This is the sound of a country sliding towards a digital cage. The Kremlin is the one building it, and Russians are only just waking up to the realisation they have no rights, and soon will have no privileges.
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Of course, I can only hope for a total collapse of the mafia shithole.
“Russians are only just waking up to the realisation they have no rights, and soon will have no privileges.”
They are slow learners in mafia land. It took them over 100 years to realise they have been brainwashed by the state.
They have a lot in common with the maga crowd.