The russians Will Burn Through Millions of Rubles Just to Launch Their Own Tax Agency’s Website

The kremlin’s adventure – a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – continues to steadily reduce the rf’s economy to zero, and now it’s also crippling its digital sector. Due to the mass revocation of GlobalSign’s international security certificates, russian websites are being cut off from the civilized internet. Currently, the websites of government agencies (the federal tax service) and major banks simply refuse to load in standard global browsers, forcing users to either risk their data or voluntarily enter the “digital Gulag swamp”.

To resolve the problem that the russians have created for themselves, the ministry of digital development of the rf is promoting “import-substituted” certificates. The code snippets themselves are technically free, but businesses will, as usual, have to pay to retrofit their infrastructure to support them. For large corporations, reconfiguring their systems will cost 10 to 50 million rubles and take up to half a year. This will require a massive replacement of software and updates to operating systems, dealing yet another painful blow to the war-stricken budget and IT sector.

Unable to integrate their certificates into global browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari predictably ignore software developed by the sanctioned aggressor), kremlin officials are strongly recommending that everyone switch to “yandex browser”. However, even experts in russia itself acknowledge that using this “crutch browser” causes crashes and cache issues, while data security is out of the question altogether.

It has come to the point where more than 20,000 russian domains remain without international security certification, including “gazprombank”, “alrosa”, and other pillars of putin’s regime. Although 90% of the russian market still relies on foreign certificates, foreign companies continue to revoke them. This automatically makes russian domestic systems, messaging apps, email, and banking APIs ideal targets for hacker attacks.

Thus, in the end, it will be russian businesses alone that will have to pay for this entire “grand geopolitical maneuver” and technical overhaul. While kremlin officials report on “successful import substitution”, entrepreneurs are forced to scrape together millions of rubles from budgets already drained by war and sanctions simply to ensure their domestic services don’t literally fall apart at the click of a button.