Russia is in the midst of a vast, slow-moving effort to splinter its internet from the rest of the world, say activists and experts, with steep consequences for millions of people who are gradually being cut off.
Unlike Iran’s internet shutdowns earlier this year, Russia’s shutdown is a piecemeal and opaque effort. It is defined by escalating mobile internet blackouts across cities and provinces, growing restrictions on certain kinds of traffic, and new blocks on Telegram, a messaging app essential to communication and daily life for most Russians.
“This is a step backward – a step 100 years back. They might as well switch to paper mail, telegraphs and horses soon,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on X about the blocks.
Arturo Filastò, a researcher at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an internet censorship watchdog, said Russia’s shutdown was “quite a bit more opaque and less visible” than Iran’s. This is because, compared with Iran, Russia’s internet infrastructure is more decentralised, making widespread censorship harder to implement. “They have many more internet service providers that operate and manage their network a bit more independently,” Filasto said.
The shutdown relies on government-mandated equipment deployed across different networks, with varying levels of effectiveness. Since 20 March, data from OONI shows that Telegram is increasingly blocked, with probes run on more than 500 different networks indicating widespread interference with the service.
“I’m switching to pigeon post,” said a Russian internet user in a video broadcast by a Belarusian TV station. “I pay for the internet and I feel I am being robbed every month. They just take my fucking money and I don’t use the benefits of civilisation!”
Analysts at Amnezia VPN, which makes censorship circumvention tools, say the Telegram blocks are more sweeping and indicate greater technical capability than previous Russian efforts to censor the platform. They described access problems across more than a dozen regions including Moscow and St Petersburg.
They said censors were “blocking more crudely and on a much larger scale, no longer worried that something might break or spiral out of control”.
This is likely to grow more pronounced. Russian authorities have elsewhere suggested they will completely block Telegram from early April, with the head of Russia’s Rostelecom saying in March that WhatsApp was “dead” and Telegram would soon follow. Both are seemingly set to be replaced by a new, government-controlled domestic messaging service, Max.
Russia has also been shutting down mobile networks across large swathes of the country for at least a year, allowing access to only a “whitelist” of pre-approved sites.
Earlier this month, mobile internet in Moscow’s city centre was entirely shut down, causing widespread disruption as users were unable to access banking services or make phone calls.
Russian retailers have reported increased sales of pagers, paper maps and mobile phones as people attempt to cope with the blockages.
For most of the past year, shutdowns and other forms of internet censorship have been disguised by official excuses and plausible deniability, said Amnezia and Filastò. Initially, authorities justified mobile internet outages – which often were confined to outlying regions – by saying these were to protect against Ukrainian drones.
Amnezia analysts say earlier mobile internet blackouts were a test and that censors implemented them cautiously, trying to minimise harm to businesses.
Now, they said, “updates appear to be rolled out as soon as they are ready”, and Roskomnazdor, the Russian telecommunications authority, was “testing how the economy will function under strict restrictions at any time of the year”.
“According to our forecasts, shutdowns in Moscow will become more or less routine,” they said.
While authorities have not yet shut down home networks, they have the technology to do this and may soon. “We have observed similar shutdowns in Iran and can draw conclusions about how this might be implemented in Russia,” the analysts said.
