An ordinary morning in 2026, somewhere in Rostov, Kazan or, these days, Moscow. You step out of the house and open the taxi app — the wheel spins. You try to pay by phone at the shop — the payment fails. Your messenger is silent; the sat-nav places you in an empty field. No, your phone isn't broken. Your region is simply under another round of "mobile internet restrictions": the only things that work are those on a special list — the state services portal, the banks, the marketplaces, and MAX, the messenger the state very much wants you to love.
How the country got here is a story a quarter of a century long. It involves black boxes in providers' server rooms. It involves the state losing a war against a single messaging app — spectacularly, publicly — taking offence, learning its lessons and rebuilding from scratch. And it ends with the inversion of the very principle the Russian internet was built on: it used to be that whatever was on the list was banned. Now, whatever is on the list is allowed. Here is how it happened, in order.
Updated: 23 July 2026. This is a live topic: the lists of restrictions, and the way they are enforced, change weekly.
First, they just listened
The story of control over the Russian internet begins not with blocking but with wiretapping. As far back as 1995, Russia introduced a system with the unremarkable name of SORM — the "system of operational-investigative measures". The scheme is brilliant in its simplicity: every telecoms operator is obliged to buy, install and maintain, at its own expense, equipment to which the security services have remote access. The state does not plant the bug — you buy the bug yourself, you pay its electricity bill, and without it you simply won't get a licence to operate.
The system then grew with the technology. SORM-1 listened to phone calls. SORM-2, which arrived in the late nineties, learnt to intercept internet traffic — email, websites, messengers. SORM-3, the 2014 edition, hoovers up everything at once: calls, correspondence, geolocation, connection logs. And in 2016 the "Yarovaya law" took the design to its logical conclusion: from July 2018, operators have been required to store not just metadata but content itself — calls and messages for six months, internet traffic for 30 days — expanding their storage capacity by 15% a year. MegaFon alone put its costs at 35–40 billion roubles. Guessing who ultimately paid is not difficult: operators' costs have a way of dissolving into subscribers' bills.
Note something important here: all of this is surveillance, not yet a kill switch. The state learnt to read long ago. Switching things off was a different matter. The switch came later — and it was built, in essence, out of wounded pride.
How the state lost to Durov
In the spring of 2018, Roskomnadzor, the communications regulator, set out to block Telegram after the messenger refused to hand its encryption keys to the FSB. On 13 April a Moscow court issued the ruling; on 16 April the operators began blocking. What followed was the best reality show of the year.
Telegram rotated its IP addresses faster than the regulator could blacklist them. Roskomnadzor, warming to the chase, blocked more than four million addresses — and took down a mass of bystanders in the process: banks, online payment systems, other people's websites. Telegram itself, meanwhile, kept working for most users without so much as a VPN. People launched paper aeroplanes into the sky in support of the app, and its Russian audience did not shrink during the "ban" — it grew.
Two years later, on 18 June 2020, Roskomnadzor announced it was lifting the blocking order "in agreement with the Prosecutor General's Office". Translated from officialese, this means "saving face". One piquant detail, which trade publications have pointed out ever since: the 2018 court ruling was never overturned. The keys were never handed to the FSB, and legally Telegram is blocked to this day. That piece of paper would go off later — more on which below.
The lesson the state drew from the episode was not "leave the internet alone". The lesson was different: targeted bans do not work on an open network. So the network itself would have to be rebuilt.
Homework: box number two
Barely a year into the Telegram saga, on 1 May 2019, the law on the "sovereign internet" was signed. The name is dull; the substance is simple. Next to the SORM box, every operator acquired a second box — the TSPU, or "technical means for countering threats". This is deep packet inspection (DPI) equipment, and it is controlled not by the provider but by Roskomnadzor directly, remotely, from a single centre.
The difference from the old registry of banned sites is fundamental. The registry banned addresses; the TSPU sees the traffic itself — the protocol, the signature, where a connection is headed. Above all, it can not only block but throttle. Quietly, selectively, without a court ruling — without even an official admission that anything is happening at all.
The first tryout was the throttling of Twitter in March 2021. The dress rehearsal was YouTube. From the summer of 2024, video began loading ever more poorly for Russians; the official explanation spoke of the "degradation" of Google's caching servers, while independent experts quoted in the trade press pointed politely at the TSPU. The argument over causes can run and run, but the result is measurable: according to Mediascope figures cited by Forbes, YouTube's daily audience in Russia shrank from 55.7 million people in July 2024 to 46.2 million by November. By 2026 the TSPU was, in the assessment of technical analysts, strangling the main VPN protocols too, and Roskomnadzor was openly advising Russian websites to drop Cloudflare's encryption — it interferes, you see, with the filtering.
A separate question — one we have examined before in our analysis of whether Russia has the technological muscle for the AI race — is whether the state can sustain projects on this scale. The answer is uncomfortable: this particular one, yes. Filtering traffic, unlike competing in AI, requires no cutting-edge chips. It requires only power over the operators, and of that there is plenty.
The war writes everything off
Until 2022, the machine was still restrained by a residue of decorum. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine dispensed with it. In March 2022 Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked, and on 21 March a Moscow court declared Meta an extremist organisation — the entire company, as one might a terrorist network. This was a new legal genre: the extremist label was applied not to a post or a group but to a global platform with billions of users. With one caveat: the judge excluded WhatsApp from the ruling — a messenger, she reasoned, not a social network. Remember that caveat. It would last three years.
The next step was to shift liability from platforms to people. Since 1 September 2025, Russia has fined citizens 3,000–5,000 roubles for the "deliberate searching of knowingly extremist materials" — including via VPN. Advertising a VPN service can cost a company up to half a million. The digital ministry offered reassurance: using a VPN is not itself an offence, and search engines will not inform on users. Perhaps. But the construction — a narrow pretext attached to an infinitely stretchable wording — works the same way every time in Russian law, as we have documented in detail in our review of how Russia's human rights legislation was tightened by exactly this method. First the norm targets "terrorists"; then it targets everyone else.
Everybody into MAX
In the summer of 2025 the state tried, for the first time, not merely to ban something but to herd people somewhere. The destination was MAX — a messenger built by VK's corporate structures, Russia's answer to China's WeChat.
The campaign ran on two tracks at once, and the synchronisation says more than any official statement. On 13 August 2025 Roskomnadzor cut off voice calls in Telegram and WhatsApp — officially, to fight phone scammers. From 1 September, MAX became mandatory pre-installed software on every smartphone sold in Russia. From late November, according to operators and press reports, WhatsApp itself began to be squeezed in stages — Judge Solopova's caveat was living out its final months. In December the State Duma made MAX legally compulsory for the first time: residential management companies must now communicate with residents through it. And in February 2026, after Vladimir Putin's public remarks about the inadmissibility of communications "not controlled by the state", the regulator went after Telegram again — throttling, restrictions on file transfers, a ban on advertising. The legal basis, conveniently, was that never-overturned court ruling from 2018. We did say the paper would go off.
Now for the interesting part: did it work? By all appearances, not really. According to media reports citing closed polling, the public reacted to the call blocking and the forced migration overwhelmingly negatively, and even the Kremlin, according to several outlets, had privately judged the campaign a failure by the end of 2025. The cherry on top: by mid-2026 MAX's developer was under EU sanctions for assisting the suppression of civil society. It is hard to devise worse advertising for a messenger than the state's ardent love and sanctions for that love, simultaneously.
Internet by list
And yet the real rupture came not through legislation. On 7 May 2025, on the eve of the Victory Day parade, mobile internet vanished across Moscow for several hours, on every network at once. At the time it looked like a one-off security measure. It turned out to be the premiere of a new genre.
The official logic: Ukrainian drones use mobile networks for navigation, therefore the networks must be switched off. Now the figures from Na Svyazi ("Staying Connected"), a project that counts shutdowns nationwide: 69 outages in May 2025, 655 in June, 2,099 in July. For comparison: across the whole of 2024, specialist monitors counted 296 internet shutdowns worldwide, across 54 countries. Russia beat the global annual total in a single month.
From the autumn of 2025 the shutdowns acquired infrastructure — the "whitelists". During restriction hours, operators' equipment passes traffic only to approved resources: the state services portal, banks, marketplaces, taxis, Russian social networks, MAX. Everything else is unreachable. A VPN is no help: anything not on the list is blocked, including every foreign address. By late November, by Na Svyazi's count, whitelists were operating in 57 regions. Ulyanovsk region went furthest of all, announcing officially that mobile internet would be gone "until the end of the war". The one remaining escape route is the cable: fixed-line home wi-fi is not yet covered by the restrictions. Yet.
This is the inversion we began with. For twenty years the Russian internet lived by the principle that everything not forbidden is permitted. Now, during restriction hours, the opposite applies: everything not permitted is forbidden. That is not a tightening of the old system. It is a different system.
This isn't China. It's something else
"So they've built a Chinese firewall" is the commonest comparison, and it is inaccurate. A March report by the IT department of FBK — designated an "extremist organisation" in Russia — takes the difference apart in detail. China built its controls from the outset around a handful of border chokepoints: the country's entire external traffic passes through a few gateways, where it can be conveniently filtered. The Russian internet grew differently — organically, with hundreds of cross-border links — and forcing it through chokepoints was no longer possible. So Russia went the other way: it pushed the filters inwards, towards the access networks, planting the TSPU practically next to the subscriber. Hence the signature quirk of Russian blocking: it works at your neighbour's but not at yours; one way in Tula, another in Tver.
The model has a hole in it: it cannot see traffic that never passes through the operators at all. Satellite internet is the obvious loophole, and the state understands this perfectly well: Starlink terminals do not officially function in Russia, the military jams them with electronic warfare, and the long-promised domestic equivalent stubbornly refuses to take flight — a subject we have examined at length in our analysis of how Russia jams Starlink and what lies behind the promises of a "Russian Starlink".
The scoreboard
Let us now tally, honestly, what the whole edifice has achieved. The scoreboard is not kind.
The drones — the official reason for all of it — have not stopped flying. Novaya Gazeta Europe (designated an "undesirable organisation" in Russia) calculated that 85% of shutdowns in the regions it studied fell on days when no drone attacks were reported at all — while refineries and logistics burnt throughout 2025 and continue to in 2026. The public has not voluntarily moved to MAX: operators' indirect data and polling show no such migration. VPNs, despite the protocol blocking and the advertising fines, are in rude health: the arms race between shield and sword continues. The bill, on the other hand, is entirely material: according to figures from the AKAR advertising association, traffic to the largest advertising platforms fell 10–15% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 amid the outages; couriers, taxis, car-sharing and retail — every business that lives on a smartphone — are suffering most. And so are you, every time the hour strikes and you cannot order a taxi, pay for your shopping or reach your family.
Where we could be wrong
Any honest analysis is obliged to ask itself: under what conditions does this conclusion collapse? Here they are.
First: if the whitelists reach fixed-line internet, the last mass loophole closes — isolated reports of such tests have already surfaced, though none is independently confirmed. Second: an end to the war, or a freeze, would strip the shutdowns of their official pretext — at which point the system either begins to be dismantled or, on the contrary, becomes permanent; the Ulyanovsk precedent reads both ways. Third: the claim that shutdowns do not stop drones is methodologically vulnerable — it is impossible to prove how many attacks did not happen because of them. And fourth, most uncomfortably: MAX may yet win not by persuasion but by the absence of alternatives. The Chinese experience suggests that if you strangle foreign services for long enough, the convenience of the permitted ecosystem eventually defeats the habit of the blocked one.
The upshot
Here is what is established. The system has passed through three phases: targeted registry blocking (until 2018), infrastructure-level filtering via the TSPU (2019–2024), and whitelists with mass shutdowns (from 2025). Each new phase began after the failure of the last — and the Telegram fiasco was not the system's defeat but its finest teacher. Technically, the state has grown by an order of magnitude: what it could not do to a single messenger in 2018 is now done routinely to the internet of entire regions. And it is no copy of China — it is a home-grown, decentralised and therefore uneven construction.
What remains a hypothesis is the main thing: whether it will hold. The stated goals have not been met, the costs are mounting, and no voluntary affection for the permitted internet is anywhere in evidence. If the trends persist, by the end of 2026 Russia will have not a hermetic firewall but something in its own way more convenient for those in power: a network that can be switched off in parts — without warning, without explanation and without answering for the consequences. The switch has been built. The only question now is who will flick it, and how often.
Sources
This analysis draws on reporting by TASS, Interfax, Kommersant, RBC, Forbes, Novaya Gazeta Europe and Verstka; data from the Na Svyazi project and the Internet Protection Society; the report by FBK's IT department; figures from Mediascope and AKAR; and specialist technical publications. Some data originates from parties to the conflict or from organisations with a declared position and cannot be independently verified; quantitative estimates (shutdown counts, audience and traffic figures) are attributed to their sources and may vary between monitors. Novaya Gazeta Europe is designated an "undesirable organisation" in Russia; FBK and Meta are designated extremist organisations there.