In Moscow, a city where 180,000 cameras identify passers‑by using artificial intelligence, phones been cut off from the internet for a week, on the orders of Russian security services. “If you ask us how long these measures will last, they will last as long as new measures are necessary to ensure the safety of our citizens. Citizens can have no doubt that the most important thing is to guarantee security,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a twist of logic worthy of a dystopian novel. No contacting family members, no reading the news, no ordering a taxi, no accessing banking apps, no completing administrative procedures. In a world reshaped by the internet, the Kremlin is rehearsing a total blackout for whenever circumstances turn against it.
Peskov, in his George Orwell-esque statement, did not specify whether the “security” his forces must protect referred to the safety of citizens or that of the government itself.
“Is YouTube working for you?” or “Sorry, I was out and about and didn’t get any messages” have been two of the most repeated phrases this week in the Russian capital. In some parts of Moscow, only a few websites are working. In other areas, like the city center and inside the Metro, there’s no mobile internet at all. A person who had arrived at a restaurant around 8 p.m. left a simple instruction: “Turn right when you come in.” The message didn’t reach anyone until midnight, when his phone finally connected to his home Wi‑Fi.
Russian security forces began testing the system a few months ago in other, less populated regions. Some inconveniences can be resolved the old-fashioned way, with an SMS message or by finding a Wi-Fi hotspot for urgent matters. Others, such as ordering a taxi far from the city center in a sprawling metro station when the subway closes, or paying a bill where payment terminals operate on a mobile network, pose a greater challenge.
The online sales platforms Wildberries and Russ say that sales of road maps have skyrocketed in the Russian capital by 170%, as have orders for pagers (73%) and walkie-talkies (27%).
The question now hanging over Russians is how far this digital wall will go. After blocking mobile internet, the next step could be cutting off home connections. And Google — fined repeatedly for refusing to comply with Kremlin orders — is already in the authorities’ crosshairs and has just moved much of its server infrastructure out of Russia. If foreign platforms are banned, finding tools to bypass censorship will become increasingly difficult.
Andrei Svintsov, vice-chairman of the information policy committee in the State Duma (Russia’s lower house of parliament), confirmed this week that the Kremlin will create a “white list” of websites and applications that will work when security forces shut down the internet.
These new restrictions represent a new chapter in the escalating censorship of recent months. Among other measures, WhatsApp was completely banned and Telegram will suffer the same fate starting in April, while roaming and SMS messages to and from abroad have also been blocked.
Thousands of websites, including those from “unfriendly” countries like Spain, have also been directly inaccessible in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine began. Apps like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter have also been blocked, and some have been labeled extremist.
These restrictions have been circumvented, with varying degrees of success, thanks to the use of VPNs, applications that encrypt user traffic and route it through servers in third countries. Until now, the Russian government largely looked the other way, while security forces and citizens played a cat‑and‑mouse game: people downloaded new VPNs, and authorities blocked them as they became popular.
The Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor has the technical capacity to monitor VPN traffic, and will begin restricting it gradually. And Telegram will also become slower to respond when used through a VPN. “If anyone thinks people will download a VPN and continue using the app, I have bad news for them,” said Svintsov on Thursday.
According to the senior official, the Kremlin will be able to block all VPNs “within three to six months.” Last year, yhe Kremlin issued an order called Resolution 1667, stipulating that all traffic from Russian operators must pass through Roskomnadzor, where agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), not a judge, would decide which content is illegal.
Svintsov’s threat raises concerns. Despite Roskomnadzor’s monitoring, VPNs reroute users’ connections through other countries where the apps remain legal, and they can mask encrypted traffic. One VPN can be shut down, but new ones appear. In China — a pioneer in building a digital wall around the internet since the 1990s — some VPNs still work, even if downloading them inside the country is difficult and authorities scrutinize every new app.
The Kremlin may not achieve total censorship, but it may still reach its ultimate goal. Promoting VPNs not approved by the government has been a crime since last year, and a large share of the Russian population — especially older people — either does not use these tools or does not know how to set them up. “It’s difficult for my mother,” says Nadia, explaining that she wants to install a VPN for her so they can speak from abroad. According to a survey by the Levada Center, only 40% of Russians use these applications to get around censorship.
The government is not hiding its censorial intentions in a year when the Kremlin will hold parliamentary elections. The result is predictable; the real question will be voter turnout. For Russian political scientists and opposition figures such as Ekaterina Shulman, these elections will be presented by the government as a reaffirmation of its war against Ukraine. Once the elections are over, the Kremlin will have to make decisions in the face of a struggling crisis and an army mired in its fifth year of war.
And Putin is losing his aura. According to the latest survey by the Kremlin’s Center for Sociological Research (VTsIOM), only 32.1% of Russians thought of their current president when asked, without being given any names, to whom they would entrust important government affairs — the lowest percentage since he began his offensive against Ukraine in 2022. However, when Putin was mentioned, 77% said they trusted him.
Humor is a safety valve in times of repression. A cartoon in the independent newspaper The Insider shows a poster with the slogan “Putin took us out of the 1990s.” Next to it, one person asks another where he bought the pager, and the other shows him a printed map.
The trauma of the hardships of the 1990s — during the crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union — still lingers in Russia’s collective memory. Economic problems, power struggles within the elite, and the rise in crime triggered by the war in Ukraine have revived some of those memories. Symbolically, the State Duma has even proposed bringing back phone booths on the streets in response to the internet shutdowns.
The platform Na Sviazi (Connected, in Russian) has reported internet blackouts in at least 68 regions of the country in recent months. Meanwhile, sources in the telecommunications sector, cited by Kommersant, one of Russia’s leading newspapers, estimate that the Moscow economy alone has lost between 3 and 5 billion rubles ($37 million to $62 million) since the outages began on March 6.
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