Russia is slowly trying to isolate its network from the rest of the world, analysts say

Russia is in the midst of an intense, slow-moving effort to cut off its internet from the rest of the world, activists and experts say, with dire consequences for the millions of people who are slowly being cut off.

Unlike Iran’s internet shutdown earlier this year, Russia’s shutdown is a minimal and transparent effort. It is characterized by increased blackouts across cities and provinces, increasing restrictions on certain types of traffic, and new blocks on Telegraph, a messaging tool that is essential to communication and daily life for many Russians.

“This is a step back – a step 100 years back. They may change paper letters, telephones and horses soon,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X in blocks.

Arturo Filastò, a researcher at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), a network monitoring broadcaster, said Russia’s shutdown was “much easier and less visible” than Iran’s. This is because, compared to Iran, Russia’s Internet infrastructure is more degraded, which makes it difficult to implement. “They have a lot of network service providers that operate and manage their networks bit by bit,” Filasto said.

The shutdown is based on government-mandated devices being sent to different networks, with different levels of performance. As of March 20, data from OONI shows more and more Telegraph outages, with probes running on more than 500 different networks showing widespread disruption and service.

“I translate into pigeon mail,” said a Russian netizen in a video broadcast by a Belarusian TV station. “I pay for the internet and I feel like I’m being ripped off every month. They’re just taking my ridiculous amount of money and I’m not using the advanced benefits!”

Analysts at Amnezia VPN, which makes anti-blocking tools, say Telegram’s blocks are more powerful and show greater technical ability than Russia’s previous attempts to block the platform. They described access problems in more than a dozen places including Moscow and St Petersburg.

They said that censors are “restricting more and more, no longer worrying about something breaking or getting out of control”.

This may grow further. Russian authorities have elsewhere hinted that they will ban Telegram entirely from the beginning of April, with the head of Russia’s Rostelecom saying in March that WhatsApp is “dead” and Telegram will soon follow. Both look set to be replaced by the government-run domestic messaging service, Max.

Russia has also shut down mobile networks across large parts of the country for at least a year, allowing access to only a “white list” of pre-approved locations.

Earlier this month, the telephone network in central Moscow was completely shut down, causing widespread disruption as users were unable to access banking services or make phone calls.

Russian retailers have reported increased sales of pagers, paper maps and mobile phones as people try to cope with the disruptions.

For most of the past year, the blocking of the internet and other forms of internet monitoring have been hidden by official reasons and plausible deniability, said Amnezia and Filastò. At first, the authorities justified the shutdown of mobile networks – which were often limited to remote areas – as a defense against Ukrainian drones.

Amnesia’s critics say that earlier mobile network blackouts were an experiment and that censors used them carefully, trying to minimize the risk to businesses.

Now, they said, “reforms seem to be announced as soon as they are ready”, and Roskomnazdor, the Russian telecommunications authority, was “testing how the economy will work under strict restrictions at any time of the year”.

They said: “According to what has been predicted, the shutdown of Moscow will become the norm.”

Although the authorities have not yet closed the home network, they have the technology to do this and it may be soon. “We have observed the closure of similar conditions in Iran and we can draw conclusions about how this can be used in Russia,” the analysts said.