Every morning, millions of Russians now begin their day with the same ritual: testing VPNs one by one until something works. The Kremlin's systematic effort to wall off the open internet has moved from experiment to policy, shifting from sporadic regional blackouts to sustained disruptions in Moscow and St. Petersburg. What was once a distant concern for urban professionals has become a daily friction that cuts across age, class, and geography.
A Blacklist Built Over Years, Enforced With Growing Aggression
Russia's telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has spent years assembling a blocklist of 4.7 million websites, a catalogue that spans WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube, Instagram, Roblox, Twitter, all independent media, and portions of the foreign press. The scale is so sweeping that even children and pensioners have learned to use circumvention tools as a matter of routine. The list does not reflect legal judgments: Telegram, for instance, has been blocked without any court ruling, while simultaneously serving as an official communications channel for state agencies and political parties approved by the Kremlin.
Since last year, publicly recommending a VPN that is not government-approved - and therefore subject to potential spyware - has been designated a criminal offense. The tools themselves are not banned outright, but the infrastructure to discuss them freely is being quietly dismantled. The Ministry of Digital Development has reportedly demanded that major Russian corporations, including the bank Sberbank, the search engine Yandex, and the social platform VK, embed modules in their mobile applications capable of detecting which VPN a user is running and exposing their IP address and phone content. Whether those companies have complied remains unclear.
The Technical Contradictions at the Heart of the Crackdown
The authorities' ambition collides with a hard technical reality. A roundtable of technology specialists, organized by Kaspersky Lab co-founder Natalia Kasperski, reached a unanimous conclusion: there is no technical method to block VPN traffic without disrupting the broader internet connection. That assessment was borne out on April 3, when Roskomnadzor's blocking operations caused payment services to collapse across the country. The regulator subsequently ordered news outlets to delete their coverage of the incident - a detail that illustrates the extent to which information control, not accountability, drives institutional reflex.
The contrast with neighboring Belarus is instructive. Under Alexander Lukashenko's regime, mobile internet functions without a VPN, not because the state is more permissive, but because its network architecture is more tractable: built around centralized traffic nodes controlled by a single state entity, Beltelecom, it can be switched or monitored at will. Russia's infrastructure is far more distributed, which means that blunt censorship tools tend to produce collateral damage rather than clean suppression. Putin himself acknowledged in 2024 that his engagement with the internet is "very primitive" - a candid admission that the policy apparatus making these decisions operates at considerable remove from the technology it seeks to control.
The Social Contract Under Strain
Journalist and Russia expert Andrei Kolesnikov describes what is unfolding as "an unequivocal miscalculation, a serious violation of the social contract." The implicit agreement between the Russian state and its population for much of the Putin era rested on a basic arrangement: political passivity in exchange for relative personal freedom. The internet was the last domain where that freedom felt tangible. "Taking away this last freedom breeds discontent and distrust," Kolesnikov warns, adding that the accumulation of frustration - layered on top of economic stagnation and the grinding costs of the war - carries long-term political consequences that the Kremlin appears to be discounting.
Telegram sits at the center of this tension. According to a survey by the independent Levada Center, one in four Russians relies on Telegram channels as a primary news source - a direct consequence of the Kremlin's systematic suppression of independent journalism. A follow-up Levada poll found that 49% of the population used the platform, down only slightly from 53% the previous year, suggesting that the mid-March attempt to suppress it had limited practical effect. People adapt, but they do not disappear.
Anton Barbashin, director of the Russian think tank Riddle, identifies a visible fracture within the Russian elite over digital censorship. The Federal Security Service and the advocates of hard repression appear indifferent to the harm inflicted on ordinary citizens. The Presidential Administration's Domestic Policy Department, however, is reportedly opposed - a recognition that political management requires some residual public goodwill. That internal tension has not yet produced a policy reversal, but it suggests the current trajectory is contested rather than settled.
Life Inside the Blockade
The lived experience of the blackout has an uneven geography. In Vladimir province, two hours from Moscow by rail, a landlady answers a missed call without alarm: "Don't worry, the internet doesn't work on cellphones." There is no indignation, no surprise. Crossing back into the capital, a phone floods with dozens of delayed WhatsApp messages. The invisible line between connected and disconnected life runs between regions, between urban and rural, between the well-resourced and those who cannot spend an hour chasing a working VPN each morning.
State propaganda offers a different framing. One advertisement promoting subscriptions to the Kremlin-approved newspaper Kommersant features a soldier in a balaclava holding a print edition beneath the slogan: Net interneta, spasayet gazeta - "No internet, the newspaper comes to the rescue." The image captures, perhaps more honestly than intended, where the logic of digital repression leads: backward toward a media landscape that can be fully curated, fully controlled, and fully severed from the outside world.