Putin Is Losing the Fight to Keep Russians Offline - Middle East Transparent
Millions of Russians are bypassing Vladimir Putin’s attempts to block access to the internet, and his regime is struggling to keep up. The Kremlin’s ban on Telegram, Russia’s most popular messaging app, triggered one of the strongest public pushbacks against Putin since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There have been unsanctioned protests across the country,
The Kremlin’s ban on Telegram, Russia’s most popular messaging app, triggered one of the strongest public pushbacks against Putin since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. There have beenunsanctioned protestsacross the country, andpublicandprivateopposition from some in the political elite since the February clampdown. Russia’s rulers responded with their now customary mix of repression and minor concessions. Protest organizersfacedsearches and arrests, and a youth movement that rapidly coalesced around internet freedom wasforcibly dismantled. When people in the entertainment industryoffered tentative criticism, the Kremlinmobilized other celebritiesto push back. They framed the ban as serving the “national interest. ”At the same time, Putin’s regime paused further restrictions. A planned fee on “foreign” traffic above a set thresholdwas postponed to the fall, conveniently after the State Duma elections, and a requirement to register the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number of all mobile devices with the governmentwas delayed indefinitely. Both measures, aimed at choking off the tools Russians use to reach independent platforms, are key to the next phase of Kremlin internet control, and can be expected to return. In the first, mostVirtual Private Networks (VPNs),which route online activity through remote servers that cannot be accessed by the authorities, will be designated as “foreign” by mobile phone operators. Users will be billed accordingly, identifying and penalizing access to the workaround. At the same time, the state IMEI register, originally sold as a counter-drone measure, is an attempt to stop thegrowing practice of carrying two phones. Many Russians have one for state services, including Max, the Kremlin-backed national messenger whichtracks user activity, and another which uses VPNs for everything the first phone can’t reach. The widespreaduse of VPNs in Russiastems from a miscalculation in the early weeks of the full-scale invasion. The Kremlin quickly blocked independent news sites and some foreign platforms, including Instagram, but initially left others untouched. This window allowed awareness of VPNs to spread rapidly, with blocked platforms able to use those that were still open to teach Russians how to circumvent the restrictions. And it’s not just the young who have learned to be tech savvy; the curbs helped all ages, including the elderly, to develop their internet skills. The crackdown on VPNs was extended in 2023, but using the same blunt tools applied to blocked content. The regimebanned servicesand pressuredapp stores to withdraw them, but users simply used their newly acquired skills to migrate to whatever hadn’t yet been blocked, and informal peer-to-peer VPN networks began totake over. It was only after 2024 that the regulator shifted to more sophisticated methods and blockedVPN protocolsdirectly, including those thatdisguise trafficfrom the government. Major IT sites, primarily banks and marketplaces, were also required to monitor for VPN use. The Kremlin is now facing a situation in which a very significant share of Russians regularly use circumvention tools. Precise figures are hard to pin down, but it’s possible to discern a rough picture. Download statistics show Russians installed VPN appstenfold more oftenin 2022 than the year before — a pattern repeated after each new government measure. In March 2026, thenumberswere 14 times higher than the previous year. The model from independent analystZaTelekom project, which converts search query volumes into user estimates,puts the Russian VPN user base atup to 66 million—more than 45% of the population— as of April. Surveys fromLevadaandtwootherindependent pollsters suggest similar but slightly lower numbers. Even the estimates of traffic on blocked applications tracked byMediascope, theKremlin-approvedmedia monitor, show that YouTube, WhatsApp, and Telegram have not collapsed to zero. The longer a block remains, the fewer users of these social platforms are retained, yet millions are still accessing blocked services at least once a month. Data for access to independent media shows that it has held up well in spite of the Kremlin’s repression. After YouTube’s 2024 throttling, traffic for independent media on the platform initially surged with the Ukrainian counter-offensive but fell as the block tightened, according to the independent YouScore project that monthly collects the information on Russian-language channels via YouTube API. It then recovered to slightly above pre-block volumes this year. Over the same period, the few Kremlin propaganda channels still operating on YouTube, includingKomsomolskaya Pravda, saw their traffic fall even more steeply. Early evidence from the Telegram blockpoints the same way: independent outlets lost 12–16% of their traffic, while pro-government channels lost as much as 40%. Putin’s failure to shut down independent voices is likely to see the Kremlin, after a pause for the electoral cycle, crank up the pressure on the 30-40% of Russians who regularly use VPN. This can be expected to come through tougher measures, including penalties for users of blocked protocols, and incentives such as the recently announced state-run“government VPN”for IT professionals. The outcome will depend on a race between Roskomnadzor’s ability to decrypt circumvention traffic and the efforts of independent teams and major VPN providers to obscure it. On current form, it’s a game of technological whack-a-mole that the Kremlin will struggle to win. Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a political scientist and Russia expert focusing on elites, the bureaucracy, government data, and the policymaking processEurope’s Edgeis CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications. CEPA