Pedestrians pause to look at their phones in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Monday. (AP photo)

TALLINN, Estonia — A snappy tune by a blogger that mockingly laments his poor internet connection in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has gotten over a half-million views on Instagram in two weeks.

“How to say you’re from Rostov without saying a word? Show one bar of cellphone service,” Pavel Osipyan raps while walking around the city, smartphone in hand. “We have internet until 12 o’clock, and recently there’s been no connection at all. No need to be angry, just get used to it already.”

The complaints by Osipyan — unable to pay electronically for groceries, or having to use paper maps while driving — aren’t isolated to Rostov-on-Don, which borders Ukraine and, as home to Russia’s Southern Military District, is targeted frequently by drones.

In the last two months, cellphone internet shutdowns, which officials say are needed to foil Ukrainian drones, have hit dozens of Russian regions — from those near the fighting to parts of Siberia and even the Far East. Some Wi-Fi outages also have been reported.

Russians contacted by The Associated Press talked about card payments not going through, taxi and ride-sharing apps not working properly, ATMs that sometimes fail.

Experts point to the unprecedented nature of the measures and warn of far-reaching consequences in a country where the Kremlin already has significantly curtailed online freedom.

Such shutdowns in the name of security legitimize them to the public and open the door for authorities abusing the restrictions, said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, policy manager for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the Access Now digital rights group.

A signal to regional authorities

Experts say the trend began in May, when Russia celebrated the 80th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi Germany in World War II and foreign dignitaries flocked to Moscow for a big military parade.

The capital suffered severe disruptions of cellphone connectivity to the internet for days, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed those were deliberate restrictions due to regular Ukrainian drone attacks. Asked how long they’d last, he replied, “This will be done as needed.”

Russia has restricted smartphone connectivity before, with isolated instances during protests, as well as in regions bordering Ukraine.

Shutdowns in the capital, however, sent a signal to authorities across the vast country that it’s a useful tool, said lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of Russian internet freedom group Roskomsvoboda.

Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” in early June, in which drones launched from containers on trucks attacked airfields deep inside Russia, made officials all the more eager to take action, Darbinyan said.

Unpredictable disruptions

Russians from affected regions say the outages can last for hours or days; patterns also are hard to discern, with service working in one part of a city but vanishing elsewhere.

In Voronezh, near Ukraine and frequently targeted by drones, one resident said she felt like she was in “a cave” in early July with no cellphone internet or Wi-Fi in her home. The woman, who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said she was only able to get online at work the next day.

Cellphone internet in the southwestern city of Samara “goes out at the most unpredictable moments,” said Natalia, who also spoke on condition that her last name be withheld for safety reasons. Her home Wi-Fi recently also has slowed to a near halt around 11 p.m., staying that way for a few hours, she said.

Connectivity has improved recently in the Siberian city of Omsk, said Viktor Shkurenko, who owns retail stores and other businesses there. But cellphone internet service was out in his office for an entire week. A few of his smaller stores that rely on cellphone networks suffered disruptions, but nothing critical, he said.

“I don’t feel any super strong discomfort,” said Grigori Khromov of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city where regular and widespread shutdowns were reported. “I have an office job and I work either at home or in the office and have either wire internet or Wi-Fi.”

Russia’s efforts at internet control

Russian and Ukrainian drones use cellphone internet networks to operate, so shutdowns are one way authorities try to counter the attacks, said Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

But it’s also part of the Kremlin’s long-term effort to rein in the internet. Authorities have actively censored online content in the last decade, blocking thousands of websites of independent media, opposition groups and human rights organizations.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the government blocked major social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as encrypted messenger platform Signal and a few other messaging apps.

Access to YouTube — wildly popular in Russia — was disrupted last year in what experts called deliberate throttling by the authorities. The Kremlin blamed YouTube owner Google for not properly maintaining its hardware in Russia.