A regional Russian internet provider named Nodex was almost completely destroyed by an attack by a Ukranian hacking group. Nodex confirmed the attack in a statement on Russian social network VK, saying its network was “broken” and that it was working to restore infrastructure from backups.

The hacking group, called the Ukrainian Cyber ​​Alliance, took credit for the attack, saying that St. Petersburg “completely looted and wiped out … Cyberattacks have long been the domain of countries such as Russia and North Korea, which have used them to penetrate domestic infrastructure such as utility grids and, in the case of North Korea, even the theft of cryptocurrency to finance the development of nuclear weapons.

TechCrunch earlier reported on the Ukranian attack and wrote that Nodex remained offline on Wednesday night.

The attack comes as Russia continues to test the possibility of cutting its citizens off from the global web in favor of its own restricted, sovereign network. Last year, Russia’s federal internet regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, restricts global access to the internet a day in many regions of the country, especially the Muslim majority, even preventing VPNs from reaching servers abroad.

The Kremlin understandably wants to control the flow of information available to citizens during its ongoing war in Ukraine. Information about the war was heavily censored, with heavy penalties for discussing it as anything other than a “special operation.”

YouTube remains accessible in Russia but there are frequent significant outages and slowdowns that critics say are the result of intentional shutdown government to block the viewing of certain content. Russia certainly hopes that by cutting off websites outside of its control, citizens won’t stumble upon content that contradicts the Kremlin’s narrative and will only consider views it deems acceptable. News operations that spread Western ideas like Radio Free Europe, and online influence campaigns through social media could be neutralized if the Russians were simply cut off from their reach.

Which is all to say, attacks on internet networks by Ukranian groups will be ineffective for a long time if Russia continues to unplug its ISPs from the rest of the world, which is that separate the world into broken silos.