The Russian government has been seriously restricting the formerly free RuNet for at least 10 years, creating an extensive list of websites and platforms that internet providers have to block within Russia. Except it is doing something strikingly different now. This year the Russian authorities created a ‘white list’ of websites that are not to be blocked, while everything else would not be available for users in Russia. For now, this is only supposed to work when ‘mobile’ internet is shut down. But experts do not doubt that this is the future that awaits Russian internet users, turning the country into a version of North Korea, and the internet into “inside-net.”
The invention of white lists is supposedly connected to multiple and long-term mobile internet shut downs that have been going on in Russia for the most part of 2025. Pretext for these shutdowns is that allegedly, Ukrainian drones that blow up Russian oil infrastructure use mobile Internet to identify targets. According to Telegram Chanel “Na svyazi” which follows daily mobile internet shut downs, for example, on September 27, 2025, 54 regions of Russia reported mobile internet shutdowns. And in 30 regions, along with mobile internet shutdowns, white lists of available websites were also implemented.
The internet sources included in the white lists are only Russia-based. At the moment of writing this article, those included are:
websites of the Russian government and the Presidential Administration,
Gosuslugi services (Russia’s official e-government portal for public services, like passports, taxes, healthcare)
some online bank services
local social media platform VK and messenger Max,
platform Mail Ru (email provider and news aggregator)
the system for online voting in Russian elections
Yandex services (Russian tech company’s ecosystem: search engine, maps, mail, taxi, etc.), Ozon and Wildberries marketplaces (major Russian online shopping platforms similar to Amazon)
mobile/network operators
Avito (popular Russian classifieds site for selling/buying goods, renting apartments, jobs), Yandex Zen (content and blogging platform with personalized news and articles)
Rutube (Russian video hosting platform, similar to YouTube)
official website of the Mir payment system (national Russian payment card system an alternative to Visa/Mastercard)
KinoPoisk (Russian movie and TV platform for streaming, ratings, and film information — similar to IMDb + Netflix)
Two of Russia’s largest supermarket/grocery store groups
2GIS (Russian digital maps and city directory service with detailed business listings and navigation — like Google Maps plus a business directory)
As of now, the white lists are only expected to be applied during mobile internet shutdowns. But looking at the large spectrum of services they cover, these might also be implemented for all internet connections in Russia.
Mikhail Klimarev, head of the NGO League for the free Internet, said in an interview to Global Voices that he expects that these measures could be realized in about three years.
In addition, Russian authorities have already declared a war on VPNs: they use DPI to identify and block many common VPN protocols. Along with that, the Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an executive order prohibiting the advertisement of VPN services everywhere in Russia.
Recently, the Russian government started to block all particular sources of traffic, so they can identify whether it might be internet calls, gaming, streaming or even VPNs. This means that even before the white lists are introduced, the government is already cutting off communication with the outside world for a lot of people in Russia — or at least at the moment, voice communications via the internet.
On August 11, 2025, Russian users began reporting problems with WhatsApp and Telegram calls. Connections became unstable, with entire sentences dropping out, making conversations nearly impossible to continue. Using VPNs did not improve call quality.
As Denis Yagodin, former Director of Innovations at Russian NGO in exile Teplitsa. Technologies for Social Good, wrote in his LinkedIn post, these are not app-specific crackdowns.
Russia isn't targeting these platforms individually – they're systematically dismantling the technical infrastructure that makes free internet communications, including voice calls, possible. Through deep packet inspection (DPI), Russian censors can identify and throttle VoIP protocols regardless of which app you're using. It's protocol-level censorship, not app-level blocking. The technical mechanics are elegant in their simplicity. Every messenger – whether it's WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, or Viber – relies on the same underlying technologies for voice calls: VoIP protocols, WebRTC for browser-based calling, and UDP/TCP data streams for audio transmission. Russia's censor can now use DPI to scan packet signatures and identify VoIP traffic patterns in real-time. They don't need to know if you're using WhatsApp or Telegram; they just need to recognize that you're making an internet call and block it at the protocol level. It's like cutting all the phone lines instead of disconnecting individual phones. This creates a perfect storm of plausible deniability. Since Signal and Viber are already banned, and most Russians primarily use WhatsApp and Telegram for calls, the broader public assumes these specific apps are being targeted. Meanwhile, the real casualty is the basic ability to make free voice calls to anywhere in the world. What looks like app-specific censorship is actually infrastructure-level control – a blueprint that other governments are studying with interest.
The “national messenger,”, which has been developed by state-affiliated domestic social media platform VK, has immediately acquired a reputation of being a surveillance machine that would keep all one’s messages, calls and search and give them to the authorities freely. In addition, “Max,” as the new messenger is called, will at the moment only work with Russian or Belarusian SIM cards, which means that those living abroad would not be able to use it. Even if Russians who emigrated in hundreds of thousands after the full scale invasion of Ukraine started (and some before that) can get a hold of Russian SIM card, there is a new initiative of Roskomnador, that would block calls from Russian SIM cards on roaming or foreign SIM cards on both messengers as well as mobile phone calls.
Nevertheless, the Max app is currently present in both Google Play Store and App Store in Russia.
One of the last laws that came in force this autumn prohibits any kind of advertisement on Facebook and Instagram in Russia, since Meta was declared an extremist organization and blocked in the spring of 2022. However, Instagram remained a popular platform for non-political bloggers, who continued to cooperate with brands and advertising agencies. According to the Russian Association of Communication Agencies (AKAR), the blogger market on Instagram alone amounted to RUB 11.5 billion (about USD 130 million ) in 2024.
According to online opposition media outlet Meduza, a brief and incomplete timeline of the most important internet censorship actions of the Russian government starts in 2015.
The first large scale victims were copyright-related (which is similar to the way Western countries dealt with platform regulation: copyright was the first reason for moderating content as well). Russia’s most popular torrent tracker, RuTracker, and the largest online library, Flibusta, were blocked in 2015.
The first foreign social media platform that was blocked in Russia was LinkedIn in 2016. Officially, the reason was because the platform did not store the data of users within Russia. However, it did not have a lot of Russian users (around only 6 million in 2016), and the blocking went almost unnoticed.
Further on, in 2018, the government attempted to block Telegram messenger and succeeded only in part, but in 2020, authorities lifted the ban, claiming Telegram was ready to fight “terrorism and extremism.”
In 2021, there was a government crackdown on Tor Browser (a popular anonymity tool), and they also began blocking VPN services (later banned in dozens).
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in 2022, the government, under the pretense of war-time censorship, started to block many more internet sources and platforms.
In 2022, authorities blocked Facebook and Instagram, fully blocked Twitter (which had previously only been slowed down), Chess.com (largest online chess platform), Patreon (subscription platform for creators), Google News (but not Google search), and most independent Russian media sites.
The next phase started in 2024 and continued all through 2025. The government blocked messengers Viber, Discord, and Signal (popular secure messenger) and began partially blocking WhatsApp and Telegram. YouTube became practically inaccessible. It blocked Ficbook (largest Russian fanfiction website).
In 2025, sites using Cloudflare (which helps bypass censorship without VPN) were disrupted.
In the summer of 2025, a nationwide blocking of WhatsApp was announced, with authorities planing to replace it with a “national messenger.”
Mikhail Klimarev does not doubt that Telegram, too, will be blocked in the near future.
Russia is moving, no, running towards an inside-net. Not only access to news and information, but even to people-to people communication with those from abroad, is shrinking day by day. Klimarev is afraid that, when Telegram is blocked, it will be harder to inform people about VPNs that they and other activists offer for people within Russia. Opposition media, computer savvy immigrants, and NGOs are selling or giving out access to smaller VPNs with unknown protocols spread around hundreds of servers. This is a game of cat and mouse with the Russian authorities, who periodically find and block these VPNs, too. But it works — for now. However, if the Russian government finally decides to turn the country into a North Korea, VPNs would be useless.
(NS)
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