If violence is granular enough, it becomes manageable, measurable, and repeatable. Russia rolled out its digital occupation in Ukraine almost simultaneously with kinetic operations, aiming to extend its networked authoritarianism into newly seized territories. Responsibility for this digital expansion is shared with private startups in exchange for profit, establishing a hybrid regime of governance.

Human resources in these occupation-building processes are a valuable asset, but the architecture of their organization is even more essential. At the intersection of corporate incentives, administrative power, and agile workflows, the moral vacuum crucial for such participation emerged – seeming less like a side effect than a feature of the architecture itself. Therefore, violence developers labor not over the justification of occupation, but over the scalability of the project.

Chief Executive

Pavel Kuznetsov is a Russian government official and general of the Russian Federation’s digital occupation processes. His military genius developed from his background in the oil business in Penza and his Russian education in law and public administration. Kuznetsov himself best described his soft skills in an interview¹ with a regional Russian publication in 2011: “I am a good start-up entrepreneur and adventurer by nature. Large companies often took advantage of this trait of mine. I am attracted to everything new, and I am driven by interest.” That year, he headed the business development department of the Penza regional administration, and already in 2012, he became deputy minister of economy of the Penza region.

From 2014 to 2018, Kuznetsov held several positions in Russian telecommunications companies, where he led the digitization of public services – all of the companies belonged to the private Russian investment group AFK Sistemaю². In 2018, Kuznetsov was appointed CEO of AFK’s subsidiary Moscow City Telephone Network³, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest telecommunications group МТС, which he also headed a year later.

In 2021, Kuznetsov officially left MTС to fully realize his “entrepreneurial spirit” in the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian Federation – he became the founder of the investment fund IC Invest,⁴ registered in occupied Crimea. From the outset, the fund had a rather diverse portfolio of assets – real estate, telecommunications, tourism – everything essential for the establishment of the occupation. As of 2025, the company has 18 of its own trademarks.⁵ The same type of investment is demonstrated by AFK Sistema, which previously “discovered” Kuznetsov. It is not unlikely that the two companies remain affiliated, with IC Invest serving as a separate legal entity for operations in legally unstable territories under Russian occupation.

In 2022, the IC Invest portfolio was expanded⁶ with two telecommunications operators in Russian-occupied Crimea: K-Telecom and KTK-Telecom. Both were built on infrastructure previously owned by MTС, a subsidiary of AFK. “Market participants have long suspected a connection between these operators and MTС,” wrote a Russian business publication about the merger.⁷

It was Kuznetsov’s new mobile operator brand that received the exclusive right to deploy its infrastructure in the newly occupied territories of Ukraine – parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Thus, in occupied Kherson, starting in May 2022, SIM cards from the operator +7Telecom began to be sold. This was the only opportunity for the local population to gain access to communications, since Ukrainian traffic had already been cut off and residents were left in an information vacuum.

“This uncertainty affected us because we did not know where to look for the truth. This informational vacuum was frightening, and in a way, was probably the worst part of the occupation. Despair and fear,” shared⁸ a resident of occupied Tavriisk, recalling what had happened. To stay in touch with loved ones outside the occupied territories, get news about the course of hostilities, and receive pension and social assistance payments, residents were forced to buy new SIM cards, leaving their passport details in exchange. Thus, through military means, the Russian Federation created forced demand in the occupied Ukrainian territories, in fact granting Kuznetsov’s structures a quasi-monopoly.

In May 2022, these SIM cards did not have any markings. At the same time, it is known that the 7telecom[.]ru domain was registered⁹ in June 2022 in the name of a Russian entity, IC8 (АО “Айси Эйт”),¹⁰ which IC Invest owns.¹¹ In other words, the “investors” deployed their infrastructure before registering the corresponding legal entity in the occupied territories.

At the time of publication,¹² +7Telecom is officially named¹³ as a K-Telecom brand, controlled by IC Invest. Over the past three years of occupation, K-Telecom has managed to launch a home Internet service,¹⁴ become the first supplier of e-SIM cards in all occupied territories of Ukraine,¹⁵ including the so-called “LNR” and “DNR”, and receive a preferential loan of 3 billion rubles from a Russian state bank for the development of the operator’s infrastructure in so-called “DNR”.¹⁶

Russia has long been actively developing network authoritarianism within its own territory¹⁷ and aggressively using it to organize its occupation processes.¹⁸ While at the beginning of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, one of its main actors was the state-owned telecommunications company Miranda Media,¹⁹ now in Russia, we are increasingly seeing distributed responsibility for digital occupation, with private entities such as IC Invest.

Keller Easterling calls these hybrid forms of governance “extrastatecraft.”²⁰ Manifesting themselves through infrastructure systems – like telecoms, data centers, highways, fiber-optic cables, and special economic zones – they are managed not only by states, but also by private corporations. Extrastatecraft often works through repeatable spatial formulas, such as special economic zones or suburban developments, or telecom grids, that can be copied across multiple territories – including occupied ones.

By shifting the burden of organizing its occupation to private companies in exchange for a share of the market and profits, the state achieves a more efficient organization of its occupation processes. Packaged into tasks and sprints, digital occupation becomes a manageable routine and raises significantly fewer moral doubts among its executors.

Developers of the violence

“A digital product development company operating in Crimea and creating products for businesses and users” – this is how IC8 (ООО “Айси Эйт”)²¹ describes its specialization. The company is a subsidiary of IC Invest, and since spring 2022, it has been developing²² supporting software to establish mobile communications in the occupied territories of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

The company does not have a LinkedIn profile, but it does have a profile on the Russian career service for IT specialists, Habr. The CVs of its employees are also posted there. According to their profiles, all of them are citizens of the Russian Federation or Belarus and are located in the Russian Federation, Belarus, or the occupied territories. “Played a key role in the selection of technologies and the design of the architecture” – this is how one of the company’s developers described his work experience at IC8 in 2022 in his CV. “I implemented the registration of SIM cards and cable internet contracts based on customer passport data,” highlighted another developer. HR, who worked at IC8 from April 2022 to March 2023, mentioned that in 11 months, she managed to increase the team from 27 to 141 employees, reducing the time to fill vacancies from 6 months to 12 days.

Many employees note “interesting and ambitious projects” among the company’s advantages. Others complain that “rapid growth” does not contribute to the establishment of organizational processes.²³

The company’s financial situation improved significantly with the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to official data from Russian aggregators²⁴ for 2022, the company earned 99 million rubles in revenue at the end of 2022, which is 10 times more than in 2021.

On August 1, 2023, the legal entity AO “Айси Эйт” was liquidated, with OOO “Айси Эйт” established as its successor. Unlike the previous entity, Pavel Kuznetsov is no longer listed as the founder, but remains the founder of an entire group – this is a common tactic of self-camouflage of expanding structures. The company continued to improve its financial performance: in 2024, IC8 received revenue of 635 million rubles, which is 64.3% more than a year earlier.²⁵

In October 2022, employees of three subsidiaries of IC Invest (IC8, K-Telecom, and KTK-Telecom) attended a New Year’s corporate party in occupied Yalta. The company’s press release was accompanied by a motivational quote from the IC8 director: “Now is the time to work quickly, precisely, and consistently.”²⁶

According to publicly available CVs, the developers seem to treat the tools of digital occupation as just another client product – at most, an “interesting project.”

Hannah Arendt, describing the problem of the perpetrators of the “final solution to the Jewish question,” pointed to distance from suffering as the main condition for organizing genocide. Distance, in her view, freed the organizers of concentration camps from “the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.”²⁷

Although the developers of IC8 these days are not directly involved in the development of killing machines such as gas chambers or ballistic missiles, they make a decisive contribution to strengthening the Russian occupation and its algorithmic legitimization.

Zygmunt Bauman,²⁸ continuing Arendt’s thought, paid particular attention to the routine of “bureaucrats of violence.” “[…] Most of the participants did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers… Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk,“ Bauman quotes Raul Hilberg in his book, adding, ”Whether they knew about the ultimate consequences of their actions – that knowledge remained, at best, in the distant corners of their minds.”

Bauman sought to prove that the Holocaust of the Jews was not exclusively a tragedy of the Jewish people and cannot be explained by some special German character – it is possible again and again anywhere under certain circumstances. He considered modernity itself, the contemporary and sometimes excessive human tendency toward organization, to be the main condition for the emergence of the Holocaust. He was met with criticism.

Bobb Cannon²⁹ pointed out that Bauman underestimated the ideological component of the genocide of the Jews, and the anti-Semitism cultivated by the Reich. Also, he criticized Bauman’s excessive fixation on organizational processes. One can agree with such comments on Bauman’s work: genocides occurred even before modernity, they were not always bureaucratically refined, and included horrific examples of human cruelty that were carried out by hand, without any organizational distance.

But revisiting Bauman’s concept of the “bureaucrats of violence” in the context of modern digital occupation raises a new question: Is hatred, in principle, necessary for the accomplices of organized, remote mass violence? Perhaps it is precisely the absence of an ideological component that becomes the crucial factor here.

Additionally, we have a common issue here: how do technological artifacts “complicate the ascription of moral responsibility”?³⁰ In the late 1990s, Helen Nissenbaum³¹ put forward the idea that the very practice of programming – with its modularity, abstractions, and division of tasks into small fragments – creates moral distance. Developers solve technical problems at the local level and are therefore cut off from the social consequences of their code. Two decades later, now co-authoring with Cooper and Lauf,³² she returns to this topic and emphasizes: the abstraction of algorithms does indeed increase moral distance, but at the same time, the loss of responsibility is not inevitable.

Their emphasis shifts to the idea that responsibility should be understood as relational – arising from the network of interactions between people, organizations, and technologies. Researchers show that the risk of moral distance is real but can be mitigated through conscious work on social and technical accountability mechanisms. Thus, the opposite can also be true here – such a risk can be preserved and even exacerbated if the mechanisms of such accountability are not worked on.

The intersection of aggressive business strategies, software development frameworks, the state’s occupation objectives, and its unlimited administrative resources creates fertile ground for organizing mass remote violence. A moral vacuum emerges at such intersections as a critical element of the entire architecture, solidifying it. As a result, one of the key forms of military knowledge acquired by the Russian Federation in this process – alongside technological solutions and trained specialists – is the development of flexible, fluid structures that organize occupation as an ordinary labor process.

(Un)expected tasks

The components of such violence camouflage themselves with each new level of organization. The traditional procedure for involving new human resources in software development has also been weaponized in the interests of Russia’s digital occupation, now through hackathons for students of technical specialties.

In December 2022, the Crimean University of Physics and Technology held its first hackathon for engineering students with the support of IC8. The company provided a prize fund of 1 million Russian rubles and gave the students a specific technical task to complete in three days.³³

“For many students, this is the start of their future profession. I have examples of my students getting very well-paid jobs, especially after information security competitions. In other words, this can be a very significant moment for them: representatives of various special services start ‘hunting’ for them and offering them jobs,” Viktor Milyukov, head of the Department of Computer Engineering at the KFU, commented on this hackathon to a local newspaper.³⁴

The practice of involving young specialists in the development of digital infrastructure for the occupation or in the production of weapons in Russia is becoming commonplace. Probably the most famous case, which was actively covered in Russian and foreign media, is the drone production plant in Alabuga,³⁵ where local students were practically forced into labor slavery with no possibility of refusal – if they refuse to work on assembling drones on production lines, they are expelled, and if they were expelled, their parents would be threatened with demands to pay the cost of this free education, which the authorities had already spent on the student.

KFU students were luckier; they participated and competed for a cash prize of their own free will. One of the hackathon winners described his motivation quite predictably: “Participating in a hackathon is very interesting. It shows your level and results in your professional activities. Because such competitions allow you to assess how good you are at what you do and how quickly you can solve unexpected tasks.”

“Unexpected tasks” is an apt description of the potential career trajectory for such specialists. After creating new markets with high demand, digital occupation – camouflaging itself behind a scattering of organizational processes – seeks to ensure its scalability. At times, new professional and economic opportunities for young perpetrators of mass violence emerge within the same financial groups’ sphere of interest.

In April 2024, Pavel Kuznetsov headed³⁶ AO “Kronstadt,” a Russian manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles and cruise missiles. In 2025, he changed positions but remained with the company.³⁷ Six months before his appointment, Russian media reported that Kronstadt JSC had signed a contract with a Russian manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to develop software for swarm drone applications.³⁸ “The software should ensure effective control of a group of products from a ground station by a single operator through the use of augmented reality and artificial intelligence technologies.”³⁹ Development is planned to be completed by 2026. As of November 2025, the company has 66 job openings in Moscow, Dubna, Rybinsk, Saransk, St. Petersburg, and occupied Ukrainian Crimea.⁴⁰

9 years ago, Vladimir Putin stated: “Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere”.⁴¹ He said it was a joke, but it turned out to be a slogan of a Russian occupation, which, in line with market logic, tends towards endless improvement and expansion. Continued Russia’s occupation of Ukraine reveals a model of extended networked authoritarianism in which state power fuses with private corporate structures, turning violence into a routinized, scalable workflow. Figures like Pavel Kuznetsov and companies such as IC Invest exemplify how digital infrastructure, software development, and agile corporate practices become instruments of control, normalizing participation in the occupation through career incentives and organizational distance. Thus, extrastatecraft optimizes military occupation: it becomes sustained not by overt ideology or visible brutality, but by distributed labor, bureaucratic routines, and the seamless integration of technological, economic, and administrative mechanisms of structured violence.