One morning, you turn on your computer at home and can’t access your work platform. The last WhatsApp message is from the night before. The government’s online portal isn’t working either. It’s clear: your internet is blocked by the authorities. In theory, you only need to restart your VPN — a virtual private network, a program that acts as a tunnel to bypass censorship and can encrypt communications — but your usual VPN suddenly isn’t working: it’s been disabled. You try another one. No luck. The panic sets in as you try one VPN after another. You waste an hour — on other days it’s been longer — but eventually it connects. Among the dozens of WhatsApp messages that download all at once, there’s one with an important message from your family.
This is daily life for most people in Russia: a constant struggle against the Kremlin’s strategy, which for months has been testing ways to restrict internet access and allow only a handful of government‑controlled websites. Some days, cellphones simply don’t work outdoors. And it’s become routine for everyone to ask which new VPNs work because the old ones have stopped working.
In fact, since last year, it has been a crime to publicly recommend VPNs that are not government-approved — and therefore subject to spyware —, although these tools are not prohibited per se.
Authorities began testing internet blackouts in some regions in the second half of last year. Now, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major Russian cities are starting to experience what the future holds. Some regions, however, have already been living with this new reality for months.
“Don’t worry, the internet doesn’t work on cellphones,” replies the landlady of an apartment in Vladimir province, two hours east of Moscow by train, without indignation or surprise, after being unable to make contact or receive the security‑deposit transfer. Later, upon crossing the invisible border back into the capital, a text message pops up on the phone: “Welcome home.” Suddenly, dozens of WhatsApp messages flood the screen.
Russia’s telecommunications regulator, the state agency Roskomnadzor, has spent recent years building a blacklist of 4.7 million websites blocked to the public: WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube, Instagram, Roblox, Twitter, all independent media and part of the foreign press, among others. If you are in Russia, you should not be able to read this. The list is so extensive that even children and older adults have learned to use VPNs with ease to get around the internet blackout.
“People will adapt, no doubt, but bitterness will linger,” reflects journalist and Russia expert Andrei Kolesnikov. “The buildup of discontent is constant, especially in the current context of economic stagnation and on the war front. And it could have repercussions in the future.”
Vladimir Putin’s system, Kolesnikov continues, “knows no turning back: it can only advance along the path of prohibitions.” But blocking the internet is “an unequivocal miscalculation, a serious violation of the social contract” that existed between the state and its citizens — essentially: leave everything in the Kremlin’s hands, and it will leave you alone. “They have abolished all rights and freedoms, but the internet remains the last freedom left. Not fully enjoyed, but still attainable. Taking away this last freedom breeds discontent and distrust.”
Russian state propaganda sings songs on television about how wonderful life is without the internet, even though 21st‑century life is built on it. “Net interneta, spasayet gazeta” (“No internet, the newspaper comes to the rescue”), reads an ad encouraging subscriptions to the daily Kommersant. In the image, a balaclava‑clad soldier holds up a print edition of the Kommersant — one of the few newspapers authorized by the Kremlin.
The issue is that Telegram is far more than a messaging app: it is one of Russians’ main sources of information. One in four people relies primarily on its channels for news, amid the Kremlin¡s censorship of information, according to a survey by the independent Levada Center. The Russian government’s attempt to block it in mid‑March had little effect. Another Levada poll shows that 49% of the population used Telegram, compared with 53% a year earlier.
No court decision
In some cases, the situation borders on the absurd: Telegram has been blocked without any court ruling against it, while at the same time being used extensively by the authorities themselves. The Central Election Commission has confirmed that the political parties permitted under Putin’s system will be allowed to campaign on the platform ahead of the autumn legislative elections, while state agencies have already issued at least 13 public tenders this month to acquire VPNs, according to a study by the channel Agentsvo.
The authorities’ internet blackouts have caused collateral damage, such as the collapse of payment services on April 3. Afterwards, the agency ordered media outlets that reported on the incident to delete their stories.
“In their eagerness to fight circumvention of the blackout, they’ve taken down half of Runet [the Russian segment of the internet],” complained Kaspersky Lab co‑founder Natalia Kasperski on her Telegram channel. Hours later, she published another column retracting the statement after speaking with Roskomnadzor director Andrei Lipov. According to the revised version, the outage was caused by a failure at Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank.
In any case, the expert had organized a debate with other technology specialists the day before, and their conclusion was unanimous: “There is no technical way to block a VPN without disrupting the entire internet connection.”
National resignation
The final decision on internet policy lies with Putin, who acknowledged in 2024 that he has a “very primitive” relationship with the web. “Sometimes I just press a few buttons to look something up,” he said at a forum where he simultaneously argued for controlling the internet through “sovereign algorithms.”
“The Americans are orbiting the moon while we watch drones flying and the internet crashes,” says Kolesnikov. “Political demodernization always leads to technological and economic demodernization.”
The internet blackout has sparked some isolated protests in the streets. Several supporters of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party were arrested for demonstrating, and Ilya Remeslo, a propagandist who until recently had been loyal to the Kremlin, was committed to a psychiatric hospital after insulting Putin over his handling of the war and internet censorship.
“Get used to it? Definitely not. We see millions of Russians looking for ways to circumvent the blackout, but we can’t ignore the Russian context of war and repression, so we shouldn’t expect protests,” says Anton Barbashin, director of the Russian think tank Riddle.
The expert argues that there is a clear split within the Russian elite over the internet blackouts and that the internal struggle over whether to tighten or ease restrictions continues. “There is no sign that the Federal Security Service [FSB] and those who push for repressive policies are concerned about the harm to citizens. The war is a clear example […] But the political faction — the Presidential Administration’s Domestic Policy Department — is clearly opposed,” Barbashin notes.
The Kremlin’s intrusion into citizens’ personal lives is reaching new heights every day. The Ministry of Digital Development has demanded that major companies in the country, such as banks (Sberbank), social networks (VK), search engines (Yandex), and online commerce platforms (Wildberries, Ozon, and Avito), add software to their cellphone applications that allows them to spy on the VPNs used by their users. It is not known whether the companies have agreed to install this module, which can reveal a user’s IP address and phone content.
Interestingly, in neighboring Belarus, under the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, cell phone internet works without a VPN. The reason is simple: unlike in Russia, the network in Belarus was built entirely centralized around a few traffic nodes, controlled by the state through the company Beltelecom. And, in the worst-case scenario, the police can always demand a phone for an on-site inspection. In Russia, for now, security forces deny accusations that they have asked passersby to hand over their phones.
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