Putin wants all-encom­passing internet censorship. Can he do it?

Did Putin panic after Khamenei’s death?

Specu­lation that Putin had ordered the shutdown because he feared that he could suffer a similar fate as Khamenei was backed up by a later media report, which said that the Kremlin had ordered a special video surveil­lance service to be taken down out of security fears. The successful attack on Iran’s supreme leader was appar­ently made possible by hacked CCTV (closed-circuit television) data.

Temporary outages have continued, especially during the May 9 military parades, in which Russia commem­o­rates the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Because of safety fears, this year’s main parade in Moscow was shrunk to a few foot soldiers without military hardware.

The shutdowns have widespread conse­quences for ordinary Russians’ daily lives – preventing the use of online maps, apps to order taxis and even the use of ATMs to withdraw cash.

And while most people in Russia have for years grown used to partial internet censorship, the situation has escalated this year. After virtually all foreign messaging services — WhatsApp, Signal and others — were blocked, the author­ities began in the spring to throttle Telegram, the most important domestic provider, which also offers a route to reading lots of forbidden content. Instead, Russian users are being pressured to switch to the new state-approved Max messenger, which many people suspect of sharing personal data with the security services.

Censors step up fight against VPNs

But the state is also stepping up its campaign against the most important tool to bypass state censorship – “virtual private networks” (VPNs), which conceal users’ locations. In late March, the government appar­ently ordered national internet companies (retailers, banks and search engines) to block users detected to be using VPNs. And state censor Roskom­nadzor reportedly intends to block more than 90 percent of VPN providers in Russia by 2030. Apple, which in 2024 admitted cooper­ation with Russian author­ities, citing the risk that it might have to cease opera­tions in Russia, has been busy removing VPN services from its App Store. As of June 16, the Apple Censorship project recorded 829 apps censored in the “Utilities” category, which includes VPN clients.

Even simple internet searches have become risky. A law that came into force last year makes it a criminal offense merely to search for content classified as “extremist.” In Russia, this poten­tially includes content related the LGBT movement, the rights of Indigenous people and ethnic minorities and the human rights organi­zation Memorial.

Putin’s Paranoia

Behind all this appar­ently lies Putin’s deep-rooted paranoia toward the internet as a space for the free exchange of infor­mation. As early as 2014, the former KGB officer described the internet as a “CIA project.” The 73-year-old is known for using neither the internet nor mobile phones. At public appear­ances, Putin likes to read from handwritten notes — as he did during the online cabinet meeting on April 23, where he justified the internet restric­tions as a measure against “terrorist threats.”

Russian media reports suggest that Putin has ordered control of the internet to be passed to his cronies at the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the Soviet KGB’s main successor agency. The exile outlet The Bell reported in April that the respon­si­bility now lies with the FSB department respon­sible for fighting the opposition — officially, for the “protection of the consti­tu­tional order.”

The aim of the new internet policy is probably a whitelist system, in which all content is blocked by default and only state-approved services, ranging from news to banks and e‑commerce, remain acces­sible. The recent shutdowns were appar­ently also used to test this model in real life.

But have these growing restric­tions created potential for protest? So far, the security forces seem to have largely suppressed meaningful public dissent. At the end of March, a group of young activists who went by the name “Red Swan” — Aly Lebed — was appar­ently success­fully prevented from organizing nationwide protests against the blocking of Telegram.

More bizarre but also telling is the story of beauty blogger Victoria Bonya. In an Instagram reel published in April, the Monaco-based influ­encer claimed that Putin knew nothing about the internet blocks and ensuing hardships, because officials were hiding these problems from him After the video received millions of views on Instagram — a platform banned in Russia — Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov publicly assured that the “issues” raised by Bonya were being worked on.

Putin’s approval problem

While a loyal blogger like Bonya, who touts the classic Russian narrative of the good Tsar being misin­formed by nefarious boyars, poses little danger to the Kremlin, there is plenty of evidence that Putin’s approval ratings are falling. According to state pollster VTsIOM, they dropped from just under 80 percent at the beginning of the year to 65.6 percent at the end of April — although this figure was not published (and is still missing) on VTsIOM’s website.

The Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling institute, most recently found a figure of 79 percent for April and May; in January it had still been 84 percent. Levada sociol­o­gists also recorded a sharp rise in uncer­tainty among the Russian population. The share of respon­dents who expressed a positive view of the country’s devel­opment fell from 67 percent in December to just 55 percent in April.

That trend also became visible among the Kremlin-controlled “systemic opposition.” While the ruling United Russia party’s ratings dropped below 30 per cent in April, the New People party — which can be described as mock liberal — shot up to more than 13 per cent, according to VTsIOM. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov even warned of a new revolution in Russia.

Last hope: Total censorship techni­cally impossible

Clearly, this change of mood has several causes. The Russian economy is feeling both the effects of Western sanctions, new taxes and the Kremlin-imposed priority for the arms industry. And as Ukraine succeeds in sending more and more drones farther into Russia, the war is moving deeper into the awareness of the population. Aggressive internet censorship has just added another source of pain.

Yet, although mobile internet has returned in places like Moscow and St Petersburg, it is clear that the new censorship regime is not going to go away soon. Some observers’ hopes that the restric­tions will be eased once the “pragmatic camp” in the Kremlin gains the upper hand have not materi­alized – the pragma­tists have osten­sibly proven weaker than the siloviki, the hardliners in the security services. More impor­tantly, though, the central decision-maker is and remains Putin, who has clearly decided that people in Russia should use only a “sovereign,” state-censored internet.

So will the internet-savvy Russian population just put up with this?

The biggest hope that remains is that a full imple­men­tation of Putin’s vision will be techni­cally impos­sible. Many experts argue that the Russian internet cannot be completely censored because it has been allowed to expand uncen­sored and decen­tralized for too long.

Others point to the fact that in the cat-and-mouse game with state censors, the IT sector may ultimately retain the upper hand. A recent article by Deutsche Welle’s Russian service argued that the number of internet users in Russia is so large that it pays off for VPN providers to keep devel­oping new loopholes to get around government blocks.