Russia’s digital Iron Curtain

When Natalya, a longtime Russian expat now living in Germany, tries to phone family in southwest Russia, she braces for spotty reception and dropped calls. She no longer bothers with the video function on her web-based messenger apps.

A months-long, ongoing crackdown on the internet in Russia has complicated life for ordinary people within, and far beyond, the country’s borders.

“It’s really hard,” said Natalya, who asked me not to use her last name. She called the overall situation “simply horrible.” Natalya can no longer enjoy the long video chats she used to have several times a week with her brother and mother, a septuagenarian pensioner who lives alone.

“It’s impossible to live without a connection, without the internet,” Natalya told me. “Russia is returning to the Middle Ages.”

Beginning in March, Russians nationwide reported suddenly slower—or dead—connections, specifically on popular messaging and social media apps. These include U.S.-based platforms like WhatsApp and YouTube, as well as Telegram, a formerly Russia-based ­messenger app that is ubiquitous across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. These platforms keep their technical infrastructure outside Russia, where the Russian government can do little to control their content or activity. Instead, the government has opted to restrict access at home.

The impact of reduced internet access has provoked some unusual public criticism from Russian society. In April, a popular Russian expat influencer posted an 18-minute video complaint addressed directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The post went viral, racking up more than 30 million views worldwide.

Even state-run organizations have acknowledged a shift. In July, the Public Opinion Foundation, a government-­affiliated polling group, reported a 5 percentage-point drop in Russians’ approval of Putin, to 66%—the lowest level since the start of full-scale war with Ukraine in 2022. Respondents cited continuing internet blackouts, and a war-related fuel shortage, as key concerns driving their political dissatisfaction.

Russia’s campaign to deliberately slow traffic to the internet’s most popular sites and apps—a technique known as “throttling”—has raised broader questions about freedom of information, the ability of American companies to do business abroad, and digital privacy and censorship among the world’s already-­repressive regimes. Internet limits have added to Russia’s everyday difficulties, as price inflation and higher taxes—both a result of the war—further erode standards of living.

Russian authorities admit they’re behind the interruptions. Government bodies including the Kremlin, which manages Putin’s presidency, and Roskomnadzor, Russia’s telecommunications regulator, have tied the slowdown to the country’s war against Ukraine.

“Kyiv is using increasingly sophisticated methods for attacks, so Russia needs increasingly technological protection measures,” a Kremlin spokesperson said in March. Ukraine regularly sends drones to military targets in Russia, especially to its oil storage and export facilities. Oil sales help fund Russia’s war efforts.

But observers speculate the controls are preparation for potential social ­problems after the war ends.

GOVERNMENT MEDDLING ON THE INTERNET is not new in Russia. In 2012, the country passed a “foreign-agent law.” It allows the government to label any Russian or foreign entity active in Russia that receives non-Russian funding or donations as a “foreign agent,” with potentially anti-­Russian interests. The country’s pioneering law created a new template for repression that is now replicated worldwide, according to the human rights group Freedom House.

Russia’s foreign-agent law has had a chilling effect on international organizations working in the country, including media outlets like the U.S. public news group Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Russia labeled RFE/RL a foreign agent in 2017. Two years later, Russia passed a law to support a “sovereign internet,” also called RuNet, to address perceived online threats from abroad.

In practice, the sovereign internet law centralized control of digital spaces under the Russian government.

Controlling activities increased with the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Late the same year, Russia expanded the scope of its foreign-­agent law, to the point that nearly anyone in Russia—virtually all of whom are online—could be found guilty. Legislators passed a separate law against “discreditation” of the military, in verbal or online criticism, with offenses punishable by jail time.

Since at least mid-2024, Russian authorities have targeted the U.S.-based video platform YouTube. The site is home to many Russian and other independent news outlets, making it a competitor for state-sponsored television.

Russian regulators also are expanding efforts to block virtual private networks (VPNs), a software tool that lets Russian internet users get around throttling on YouTube and other sites that have been degraded or blocked.

In recent months, courts in Moscow and the far-western city of St. Petersburg began issuing fines to internet providers that allowed customers to access YouTube and other sites, mostly Western news outlets, using VPNs or other means. In February, Putin signed a law requiring telecom providers in Russia to block cellular and internet access to customers if the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, requested it.

BUT FOR THE AVERAGE RUSSIANS, who depend on their phones to pay bills, text or call contacts, or otherwise function in modern society, the limited means of communication have disrupted life completely. Some reports claim the blackouts have already cost lives, since slow or no internet can hinder calls for urgent medical care.

Russia’s economy has also suffered. Recent reports have documented widespread damage and even closures among Russian small and midsize businesses, which can no longer complete basic functions like digital payments or online advertising. One Russian news outlet estimated losses between $7 million and $12 million per day, just for businesses in Moscow in the first few days of the March interruptions.

Roskomnadzor claims decreased access to messenger apps will fight cybercrimes like digital fraud and extortion. The regulator justified the operation against Telegram on the grounds that the app failed to comply with relevant laws.

“We are absolutely open to working with any domestic or foreign internet resources,” the regulator said. “But on one very simple condition: respect for Russia and its citizens, and compliance with the laws of the Russian Federation.”

To move its citizens away from Western-based apps, Russia is rolling out a new, state-approved “super app,” called Max. It’s billed as a one-stop shop for various digital functions and promises to have all the capabilities of rival messengers. New cellphones sold in Russia are now required to come with Max preinstalled. But unlike WhatsApp and Telegram, Max does not have the same protections against hacking or other prying eyes.

Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Russian founder who was recently declared a “terrorist” by Russian security forces, railed against the crumbling freedoms on Russia’s internet—and what Russian powers may choose to do with increased visibility into citizens’ digital lives.

“Russia is restricting access to Telegram to force its citizens onto a state-controlled app built for surveillance and political censorship,” Durov wrote in a February post on X. “Telegram stands for freedom.”

Some Russians, like Natalya in Germany, can’t use Max even when they try. The expat attempted to download the app and couldn’t, she said. The effect has isolated Russians across the country’s large global diaspora.

The U.S. federal government has expressed its own concern over Max. In December, the U.S. House held a hearing about the new app and its connection to the Russian government’s mass surveillance aspirations.

RUSSIA’S INTERNET CRACKDOWN likewise hinders U.S. companies, especially tech firms, doing business abroad. WhatsApp, a part of the U.S.-based Meta group of tech companies that also owns Facebook and Instagram, in February accused Roskomnadzor of throttling its platform, too.

“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp,” the company said on X in mid-February. “Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia.”

The foreign-agent law also limits revenue from donors and online advertisements. Entities deemed foreign agents are required to carry a stigmatizing warning label on their digital and physical locations, imposing further, reputational loss.

Other Russian acts of interference include standing “platform blocks” against some of the world’s largest social media and messaging apps—most of which are U.S.-based. According to a summary report of internet shutdowns in 2025 from the internet freedom group Access Now, findings showed that ongoing blocks in place against U.S. tech companies include Discord, Facebook, Facetime, Instagram, Signal, Snapchat, WhatsApp, X, and YouTube.

The same report noted that many internet shutdowns during 2025 did not correspond with the times of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory, and that many Ukrainian drones do not need the internet to operate at all.

Experts in technology and digital freedoms fear Max and other Russian measures could enable snooping from the Russian government itself, akin to China’s model of countrywide monitoring. The same experts say Max is partly modeled on WeChat, a Chinese app approved by the government in Beijing.

Chinese web restrictions have been dubbed the “Great Firewall,” while the latest Russian limits are now called the “Digital Iron Curtain”—a reference to the limits on freedom and information in the days of the Soviet Union.

Advocates at Access Now reported in March that Russia “leads the way” among the world’s repressive governments and their internet policies. The effects—for Russia, and for the surrounding regions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia—are dramatic, according to Anastasiya Zhyrmont, a policy ­manager at Access Now.

“Internet shutdowns are no longer isolated incidents” in these regions, Zhyrmont said. The new pattern could establish an authoritarian precedent, “where shut­­downs become the default response to political and security challenges everywhere.”

Other policy groups were raising the alarm on Russia’s internet meddling before its latest moves. In its report for 2025, called “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy,” Freedom House moved Russia to the “lowest possible score of freedom of personal expression,” alongside a rogue’s gallery of human rights abusers that included Belarus, Iran, and Venezuela. Amid its mass protests ahead of its war with the United States, Iran also resorted to internet blackouts and other free-information denials.

Later reporting found that Russian government agencies helped Iran impose its internet restrictions. As of this summer, Iran had partially restored web access for its citizens. But a system called “whitelisting”—allowing access to government-approved sites, with continued blocks against other sites—remains in place in Iran, RFE/RL said.

On April 7, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations issued a statement condemning both China and Russia for their support to Iran and Iran’s control of its people by digital means.

“They sided with a regime that seeks to intimidate the Gulf into submission, even as it brutalizes its own people during a national internet blackout for daring to imagine dignity and freedom,” said Ambassador Mike Waltz, who leads the U.S. Mission.

ONCE COMPLETE, Russia’s sovereign internet will be an autonomous, worldwide web that Russians may be forced to use instead of the global internet’s current, Western-dominated model.

According to a Reuters news report from March, foreign diplomats in Moscow wonder if the internet crackdown may be preparation for the eventual return of hundreds of thousands of Russian troops now deployed in Ukraine. This, like other Russian repressions, echoes with history. In 1989, following the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, returning soldiers caused major social upheaval across the Soviet Union, which disintegrated in 1991.

Putin, a young KGB officer at the time, later remembered the Soviet Union’s collapse as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” The Russian president no doubt wants to avoid a new disaster on his watch.

Yet for ordinary Russians like Natalya and her family members who remain in Russia, a broken internet is another reason to end the Ukraine conflict for good.

“Even those who support the regime in Russia understand that this isn’t normal,” she said. “But they’re so intimidated, they’re afraid to express themselves, their emotions—even by telephone.”