MOSCOW, March 9. /TASS/. It is impossible to cut Russia off from the world wide web, and even if such a decision is made, Russia will have access through other states, says Vladimir Zykov, director of the Professional Social Media and Messengers’ Users Association.

"I will remind you that Russia held exercises before and we examined whether the rest of the world can cut us off of the Internet. Certain actions were taken so that at least the Russian segment would continue working. In general, it is impossible to cut Russia off of the Internet, because the Internet is not only Europe and the West. There are many countries in the world, and the Internet will flow through them in any case, because there are very many input and output points. Even if some sanctions are imposed against the Internet, we will pull through," Zykov told the "Informational attack: how to counter fake news and hacking?" round table Wednesday.

Meanwhile, he noted that Russia has almost no import replacement for hardware, which foreign companies can theoretically shut down, including in critically important areas of infrastructure.

"Most likely we are either unprotected or poorly protected here. There are still options for the West to deprive us of the Internet temporarily," Zykov concluded.

However, Urvan Parfentyev, coordinator of the Safe Internet Center stated that critically important hardware-software objects that support the functioning of such crucially essential areas as the energy and oil industry are not connected to the world wide web.

"It is necessary to understand that the Internet is a distributed system, it does not have any sort of an on-off switch. And all cases when the Internet was shut down in some state or another - in all these cases, the Internet was shut down from the inside, by the local authorities. Carrying out such a scenario is extremely complicated, not from an organizational standpoint, but rather from a technical one," he noted.