On March 9, 2022, Marianna Vyshemirskaya was standing in front of the bombed maternity ward in Mariupol when the AP photographers Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov caught her on camera. Later that day, they managed to send the footage to their editor, and the photos became viral. Immediately, the Russian propaganda machine reacted with its usual firehose of falsehood, accusing Ukraine of staging the photo shoot. It marked the beginning of a massive and global disinformation campaign to cover up Russia's atrocities in Ukraine. One of the scepticisms planted by the propagandists was that there was only one photographer and only one pregnant woman pictured. Even though the evidence came from several sources and featured more people, the footage was still scarce. No wonder people, used to being flooded by livestreams, felt suspicious and echoed a genuine question: why are there no more witness testimonials? Content — “fake news” — is only the tip of the iceberg that is disinformation, and at the base of it lies connectivity infrastructure. There are plenty of examples of governments and corporations using it to spread or fight disinformation, with greater effect than traditional content moderation in social media. Why argue on Twitter when you can shut down Twitter or the internet altogether? In the occupied territories — from Crimea to Luhansk — the digital space is also occupied. The first thing the Russian soldiers do when they take a territory is destroy or hijack cell and TV towers. NetBlock clearly shows that internet connectivity drops wherever Russia goes. Many infrastructure control tactics were tried and tested in 2014 during the annexation of Crimea. The vital infrastructure conquered and built there is being used now to redirect internet traffic (by physically switching the cables) from the newly occupied territories through Crimea to Russia. Russia blocks access to all the radio and TV channels and, most recently, to Google and social media. Instead, Ukrainians get a transmission from Crimea and the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The residents of multiple newly occupied areas reported seeing special cars with giant TV screens parked in the populated places, blaring Russian propaganda. Another tactic is media grabbing. The Russian military either forces famous journalists to work for them or uses trusted Ukrainian media brands to publish pro-Kremlin coverage. There is also room for the tried and tested cyberattacks, of course. All this creates a perfect environment for disinformation to flourish. Those who managed to escape Mariupol say that, during the siege, there was only one media available — a radio station, which posed as news. It announced that the Russian troops had taken over Kyiv, and Zelenskyy had left the country and disowned the residents of Mariupol. The radio station said that it was the Ukrainian army that held the city hostage — in lockdown, disconnected, and bombarded. In all fairness, it’s not only Russia that controls the digital infrastructure in the contested territories. Seeing how the once-Ukrainian infrastructure in Crimea is repurposed to facilitate the invasion, Ukrainian providers and the special and intelligence services frequently sabotage their networks. Even private actors can seriously interfere with communications in this war. SpaceX and the USA government donated thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to Ukraine, which are said to be extremely useful for military operations. But, reportedly, there were outages when Ukrainian troops broke through the frontline into territory controlled by Russia. While no official explanation came from SpaceX, some experts hypothesise that the company could deliberately switch off the terminals to stop the Russian soldiers from using them. The city of Mariupol was under siege for 80 days. Connectivity dropped significantly on February 24 and went completely down on March 3. On March 2, Mariupol also lost power and running water. In such extreme conditions, everything comes a step down the Maslow's pyramid, and so does the concept of essential connectivity infrastructure. Not only can one not livestream events, one can't even record them for later use because one's phone is out of juice. Another step down the pyramid: in the town where tens of thousands of people have vanished, people become the elements of the infrastructure themselves. It is they who record and share the evidence and drive out of town with phones and flash drives. It's they, after all, who decide whether to release the information. As a continuation of Russian military efforts to shut down the communication infrastructure, the soldiers targeted its most basic link, the people.