Putin’s regime is throttling the internet in Russia

Russia’s campaign to tighten its grip on the internet took a sharper turn last month, as the Kremlin moved closer to a long-standing objective: cutting off access to online information beyond the state’s control.

Authorities gradually blocked the country’s most widely used messenger app, Telegram, which had previously been used by more than 100 million Russians, after banning WhatsApp in February.

Russia had already outlawed many Western websites and news services after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, part of a sweeping effort to stop Western agencies from reporting on the war, including coverage of Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian cities and heavy losses among Russian forces on the front line.

Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, were banned by Russian authorities within weeks of the full-scale invasion.

Today, only websites included on the Russian government’s so-called ‘white list’ remain fully accessible to users inside the country.

But the latest internet shutdowns and messaging-app restrictions have also hit residents of Moscow and St Petersburg, where many younger Russians have used still-unrestricted domestic social media platforms to voice anger at the measures.

Two women take selfie photos in central Moscow on 5 May during an internetshutdown that lasted several hours that day in the Russian capital.

The online clampdown has triggered rare flashes of public discontent in President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russia.

Criticism has not come only from ordinary users. Prominent pro-war Russian bloggers, along with Sergey Mironov, the leader of a small Kremlin-aligned party in the Russian parliament, have also spoken out against the block on Telegram.

Even so, opponents of the restrictions stop short of blaming Mr Putin directly or mentioning Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Instead, their complaints tend to target unnamed officials and “the authorities” in general terms.

Kremlin officials insist the internet restrictions are temporary and necessary to prevent drone attacks on the country — an argument repeatedly advanced in the run-up to today’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, which marks the 81st anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.

Mr Putin said in late April that the restrictions were required to protect the country from terrorist attacks.

A Moscow-based film professional in his 40s told RTÉ News that the disruptions are now a constant topic of conversation.

“Most are frustrated because this kind of communication has become essential to modern life,” said the film worker, who asked not to be named, though he said his request for anonymity was not driven by fear of the authorities’ reaction.

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“Mobile internet has become unpredictable,” he said.

“Sometimes everything works normally, and sometimes entire services become unstable for no obvious reason”.

The film worker sent his responses through Gmail because WhatsApp and Telegram were unavailable. Signal, another messaging service, was also banned in 2024 by Russia’s mass media regulator, Roskomnadzor.

All three apps use end-to-end encryption and in recent years became the preferred tools for journalists trying to communicate with interviewees inside Russia.

Subway passengers in Moscow look at their smartphones on 4 April

“The Kremlin has always wanted to create a sovereign information space modelled on the Chinese example,” Igor Gretskiy, an expert on Russian foreign policy based in Estonia, told RTÉ News.

“People in the Kremlin still believe that the West can influence Russians through the internet,” he said.

In China, communist authorities block foreign search engines and websites, allowing the state to build an isolated online ecosystem in which political terms and references to protests or historical events — including the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 — are fully blocked or heavily filtered.

That is the model the Kremlin would like to reproduce, though it has so far stopped short of shutting down all Western platforms and websites completely.

For decades, Russians living under autocratic rule were still able to access most of the global internet. Since the late 1990s, they have, like users in democracies, watched videos on YouTube and relied on Google for the past 20 years.

Over the last decade, however, those freedoms have steadily been pared back by Roskomnadzor.

The regulator introduced a national blacklist system in 2012, requiring internet providers to block selected sites — an early sign of a far broader crackdown to come.

In 2019, Russia’s parliament passed the country’s Sovereign Internet law, giving Roskomnadzor the power to sever international connectivity or cut access to services such as cloud providers.

In 2024, authorities ordered internet providers to slow YouTube video download speeds. The so-called ‘throttling’ proved effective, pushing many users toward Russian platforms such as VK and Rutube.

Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly avoids using the internet

The Kremlin’s broader strategy is to wall off the Russian-language internet — known as ‘RuNet’ — from the rest of the world and curb the use of messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp that the state cannot fully control.

Mr Gretskiy, a research fellow at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security, believes the success of the campaign against YouTube may have “inspired security services” to move against Telegram and WhatsApp as well.

Last August, Roskomnadzor restricted video and audio functions on both Telegram and WhatsApp, saying the step was needed for security reasons and to guard against terrorist threats.

But those curbs affected fewer than 20% of users and failed to drive people away from the apps.

Since then, the Kremlin has moved to impose full restrictions on access to Telegram and WhatsApp inside the country.

In their place, Russian authorities want citizens to adopt Max, a new government-backed app launched last year by Russian tech firm VK.

The app comes pre-installed on all newly purchased mobile phoned in Russia. Pro-Kremlin outlets such as Izvestia say more than 85 million Russians are now using Max.

Like WeChat in China, Max is designed as a super-app, allowing users not only to message and call friends, but also to pay bills, verify identity and submit government paperwork through the platform.

WeChat is known for strictly following China’s censorship rules and, according to many tech experts, offering users limited privacy.

Tests carried out by security experts last August and commissioned by Forbes found that Max tracked user activity with “excessive tracking”, while The Moscow Times, an English-language news outlet, reported last year that local housing and education authorities in Russia were encouraging the public to use Max in dealings with their departments.

Kremlin officials have said that the internet restrictions are temporary

The comparison suggests a system similar to the one Chinese authorities have built, where using WeChat has effectively become unavoidable.

The film worker interviewed by RTÉ News said he was “still holding out” against downloading Max.

Despite the unusually open criticism of the current restrictions, there is little evidence so far that the issue could develop into a broader movement against the regime.

Russian society, Mr Gretskiy said, is highly fragmented and more likely to “adapt to the restrictions”.

As for Mr Putin, he reportedly avoids using the internet altogether.

In a pre-recorded video message last week, the Russian leader read from pages of hand-written notes — an unusual image for a 21st century head of state, and one that reinforced the view that Mr Putin is deeply sceptical of, or even paranoid about, technology.

A leaked document from a European intelligence agency, details of which were published this week by CNN, points to rising paranoia inside the Kremlin after a number of assassinations of senior Russian military personnel last year.

According to the intelligence report, surveillance systems have been installed in the homes of Kremlin staff. They are also barred from travelling on public transport.

The report says officials who work closely with Mr Putin may do so only with phones that have no internet access, and that the Russian leader is spending increasing amounts of time in underground bunkers.

It also says fears of a coup are circulating inside the Kremlin.

For now, Mr Putin remains firmly in control, but the latest wave of internet restrictions points to a regime increasingly intent on constructing a Russian-only online sphere for its citizens — one in which criticism of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine is fully suppressed.

Kremlin officials say the measures are temporary. But as long as the war in Ukraine continues, internet shutdowns imposed by Russian authorities are also likely to continue.