For years, Russian authorities have planted the seeds for a “sovereign Internet” -- a walled-off garden where Russians can browse restricted or censored information under watchful government surveillance.
The seeds include tighter regulations on companies like Google and Facebook; new government surveillance tools; control of dominant web portals; throttling popular sites, such as YouTube; and creating a state-controlled super app.
This week, officials took a major step toward finishing that wall when they blocked or throttled the country’s two most popular messaging apps.
On February 11, Roskomnadzor, the agency charged with regulating -- and censoring -- the Internet, deleted WhatsApp, from Russia’s National Domain Name System, essentially the homegrown Russian directory or library for all websites.
The agency made no announcement, but WhatsApp, which is owned by the parent company of Facebook, confirmed the move: “Trying to isolate over 100 million people from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia.”
Two days earlier, Russian users of Telegram reported a major slowdown of that app, which is second in popularity to WhatsApp. Officials later said they were fining the company for allegedly not complying with Russian law.
But there’s something else more significant in this week’s moves, said Alena Epifanova, a cyber researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin: It’s the first time regulators have moved to effectively delete websites en masse from the Russian domain system.
“It’s unfortunately not surprising. It was just a matter of time,” she said. Regulators “move to block everything that they can’t control and take another step toward a sovereign Internet.”
Max-imum Control
In the wake of the Telegram slowdown, Pavel Durov, the Russian-born tech entrepreneur who created it, issued a statement criticizing authorities.
“Russia is restricting access to Telegram in an attempt to force its citizens to switch to a state-controlled app built for surveillance and political censorship,” he said.
The state-controlled app he referred to is called Messenger Max, which authorities eventually hope will be the basis for a super-app -- an all-in-one tool that will simplify Russians’ lives, while also controlling them.
Over the past year, officials and media personalities inside Russia have heavily marketed Max, which is built by VK, the country’s dominant social-media platform. The chief executive of VK, which was created by Durov originally, is the son of a senior Kremlin aide.
VK is also moving rapidly to create an alternative to YouTube, the Google-owned video platform that is also hugely popular in Russia.
By slowing or blocking WhatsApp and Telegram, officials hope frustrated Russians will give up and switch to Max. Same for YouTube.
“Max is part of the puzzle. They introduced it, but no one was going to use it,” Epifanova said. “And as long as you have alternatives that work, as long as you have alternatives that your friends and family use, people won’t move to another platform.
“Therefore, they have to block Telegram, they have to block WhatsApp to get people to use Max,” she said. “Doesn’t matter if they’re liberals or independent media crying that ‘this is unfair.’ Now it will also be ordinary Russians who have nothing to do with politics.”
In comments to reporters on February 12, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the decision to block WhatsApp was due to a failure to comply with Russian law. Max, he said, was "a convenient alternative to foreign messaging apps."
Behind The Kremlin (Fire)Walls
The mass removal of the websites from the National Domain System is a bigger deal, Epifanova said.
In total, 13 domain names were removed from the Roskomnadzor directory this week, according to On The Line, an Internet freedom organization. Aside from WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube, several major news organizations were removed from the directory including RFE/RL’s Russian Service, Current Time, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle.
"Regulators have begun actively implementing a new restrictive measure: deleting DNS records, or DNS tampering,” the organization said in a post on Telegram. “This has happened before, but only in isolated instances, such as when Discord and Signal were blocked in 2024. We only recorded a mass deletion today.”
The move stems from 2019 when lawmakers made important amendments to a years-old law regulating the Internet. Among other things, it authorized regulators to require internet service providers to install specialized intrusive hardware that would allow both surveilling Internet traffic, as well as throttling it.
In 2021, regulators throttled Twitter, the social-media platform now known as X -- the first apparent use of the new hardware, Epifanova said.
The updated law also allowed for the creation of a Russian National Domain System -- a homegrown online directory that works in parallel with the Global Domain System that makes Internet function around the world.
That parallel directory is what Roskomnadzor used this week to block the 13 website domains.
It is “a copy which...contains only the websites and online services that have been approved by the Russian state,” she said.
As of now, Russians can still access the blocked websites using Virtual Private Networks. Known as VPN, these are popular tools that shield the physical location of a phone or computer and thus circumvent national restrictions.
But authorities are trying to stamp out the use of VPNs.
Setting up a parallel directory also poses the danger that Russia’s “sovereign Internet” will become unstable, or even unusable, in part or in whole, Epifanova said. That risks either isolating Russians further from unfettered information -- or damaging the broader economy.
“It really is a major step to decouple from the global Internet,” she said.
