As Vladimir Putin comes under growing pressure, with the war in Ukraine spiralling out of control and increasingly taking place on Russian soil, the regime is escalating its war on the internet.
The Kremlin has ramped up restrictions on usage of the web since the invasion of February 2022, quashing spaces that could be used to spread dissent, such as Western apps and websites, alongside a crackdown on protests offline that can now carry years-long jail sentences.
Russian web users describe a baffling and frustrating experience as websites suddenly disappear, messaging apps freeze, and virtual private networks (VPNs) that offered an escape from censorship fail.
Experts warn that the next phase could mean the introduction of a North Korea-style system that offers users minimal access to information under sweeping state control.
Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, said earlier this month that the Russian internet increasingly resembles the Hermit Kingdom’s “Kwangmyong” model that is isolated from the World Wide Web. A leak in 2016 showed the country had only 28 websites.
A researcher specialising in internet censorship in Russia at Human Rights Watch (HRW), speaking anonymously due to safety concerns, told The i Paper that the Russian regime has “been consistently trying to build a system where they can control what information is spread online, and who spreads it”.
North Korea’s national airline, Air Koryo, has one of the country’s few known websitesSince 2019, Russia has been developing what is officially known as its Sovereign Internet – a system intended to give regime authorities significantly greater control over the country’s digital infrastructure.
The law led to the installation of state-controlled inspection equipment across internet providers, which can analyse and filter web traffic, allowing the regime to block services without relying on the providers’ co-operation.
The HRW researcher described the equipment as “black boxes installed in the networks of all the internet service providers”.
The researcher further noted the growing use of shutdowns and “whitelists” – services that remain accessible when other internet traffic is restricted.
Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram have all faced restrictions in Russia, while the Kremlin has promoted domestic alternatives, such as Max, a Russian “National Messenger” which is whitelisted.
Since the invasion of Ukraine and escalation of censorship, Russian internet users have flocked to VPNs in record numbers.
But the services have been targeted this year in a large-scale crackdown, with dozens of services targeted.
Amnezia, a VPN service used by Russians seeking to circumvent censorship, said it faced a “large-scale attack” from the Russian authorities at the beginning of the summer, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that are intended to crash a site by flooding it with fake traffic.
Amnezia’s founder, Mazay Banzaev, said the episode revealed “several new trends in state censorship: a long period of preparation, a combined approach that even included real hacking techniques.”
The company is fighting back. Amnezia has developed new technology designed to disguise the characteristics of VPN traffic and make it harder for Russian censorship equipment to identify.
But Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet regulator, is taking on a more proactive role, backed by an expanded budget of more than 70bn roubles (£614m) between 2026 and 2028, according to The Moscow Times.
Vladimir Putin is imposing sweeping controls on the Russian internet (Photo: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/AFP/Getty)“What concerns us most is that, technologically, Roskomnadzor is becoming very sophisticated and powerful,” Banzaev said.
“And given the practically unlimited budget being allocated to it, they can build a very serious system for combating traffic that is outside the government’s control.”
Demand for VPNs has not disappeared. Users downloaded 9.2 million apps for proxy networks in March, a 1,400 per cent increase year on year, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.
But the HRW researcher expressed concern that the effort required for users to reach foreign websites would eventually lead to them giving up.
“I think one of the most dangerous consequences is just people giving up trying,” they said, describing an exhausting cycle in which a user attempts to access an independent news site, downloads a VPN when it is blocked, only to find the VPN no longer works, and then the mobile internet is shut down.
Russian internet operators have reported a series of rolling service blackouts since last year, as Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian cities have escalated, with authorities said to be seeking to scramble signals for enemy attacks.
A sign in Moscow showing a ban on drones. Mobile internet shutdowns have become more frequent as Ukrainian attacks on Russian cities have escalated (Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty)“Bit by bit, it’s getting more and more difficult, and nuanced, when it comes to accessing their blocked information,” the researcher said. “I think the highest risk that I see here is for an ordinary user to just give up trying and just switch to that Max platform because you’re tired”.
A “sovereign internet” that fully blocked out foreign pages would be difficult for the Kremlin to implement. Russia’s internet grew through a vast and decentralised network of providers during the 1990s, unlike North Korea’s highly centralised digital environment.
Banzaev said that completely eliminating access to the global internet has only really been achieved in North Korea and during certain internet shutdowns in Iran and Myanmar.
“It’s very, very hard to have a system that controls the whole country and doesn’t get overloaded”, he said.
But the desire to expand censorship is clear and the regime’s capabilities are developing, he added, predicting that censors would soon have more tools at their disposal, and a broader remit to target more internet services.
“Right now, Roskomnadzor simply does not have the technical capacity to filter all traffic because of limited resources. But if those capabilities continue to expand, at some point it will become possible,” said Banzaev.
The HRW researcher also played down any hopes that restrictions could be a temporary wartime measure that are lifted in peacetime.
“Unless there is some sort of a major, major regime change or like an absolutely 180-degree shift towards something else entirely, the system will keep trying to gain more control over the internet and over the information online,” they said.
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