The Russian authorities have deepened their crackdown on popular foreign apps and have begun periodically turning off mobile internet across the country, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build up censorship technology that they plan to expand.
Here is how the government is going about its assault on internet freedom and what Russians are doing to evade the ever-expanding restrictions.
Russia’s Methods of Control
-
A new law means that the authorities do not need to provide any justification when cutting off mobile data.
-
They are making “white lists” of sites and apps that should remain available during an internet shutdown. There isn’t a single list. Instead, there are several compiled by the digital transformation ministry and by Russian mobile operators, with no clear criteria.
A New York Times analysis found that about half of the top 50 websites in Russia by traffic, according to Similarweb.com, are not on the lists and would be blocked, including all foreign services.
-
A type of analysis called deep packet inspection is the core of the internet filtration. Each Russian internet service provider is required to install hardware managed by Roskomnadzor, the telecommunications regulator, that analyzes data passing through the network and kills forbidden connections. This year, Russia plans to increase the monitoring to 100 percent of traffic.
-
Moscow has also improved its throttling, which slows connections so much that it looks as if a site or app is malfunctioning. After the authorities began throttling YouTube in 2024, Moscow suggested that the platform’s failure to update its Russian infrastructure was to blame. Google, which owns YouTube, said that was untrue.
Cloudflare, a U.S. company that helps secure 20 to 30 percent of global websites, began a protocol in 2023 to prevent networks from spying on user activity. In response, Russia began throttling all websites using the service. Now, often only the first 16 kilobytes of a site using Cloudflare load in Russia.
“This shows that they are still stepping up their game quite a bit and, I would say, are on the leading edge of even the current standards being developed,” said Arturo Filastò, the founder of the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which monitors internet censorship.
-
Russia has created a national Domain Name System for easier blocking of websites, and plans to create a database of I.M.E.I. numbers, the individual IDs on cellular devices, which could allow the authorities to block specific users’ SIM cards.
-
Moscow continues to pass laws regulating content. Service providers can report a user who searched for material deemed “extremist,” which can result in a fine.
Russians’ Workarounds
The situation has led to a cat-and-mouse dynamic, with the authorities blocking sites and Russians scrambling to find new circumvention tools.
-
To counter Russia’s improved blocking, tens of millions of people have downloaded VPNs. “By the end of this year, it will be around 50 percent of the country’s internet population, bringing Russia closer to Iran,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, founder of the digital rights organization RKS Global.
As of last month, Roskomnadzor had restricted access to 469 VPN services. Though using a VPN isn’t illegal, the authorities have blocked at least 12,600 online resources that explain how to use VPNs, have banned advertising them and have had dozens of VPN providers removed from the Apple Store. The regulator allocated $25 million this year to develop A.I. technology to block internet traffic that appears to be routed through a VPN. It wants to add this directly to the hardware installed by internet service providers.
-
Within a single week in mid-February, VLESS, a communication protocol designed to evade VPN blocks, was featured in more than 55,000 queries on Yandex, a Russian search engine, a high since the protocol’s introduction in 2020. There was also a sharp rise in searches for a Chinese maker of mesh communication systems, decentralized networks of devices that send messages to one another and can be used to get around blockages.
Avid users of the Telegram app hope that Pavel Durov, its Russian-born founder, will release new ways to circumvent the tools now being deployed against it — methods like VLESS and mesh networks.
“Durov could release a mesh network protocol, and with 100 million users, it could be quite effective,” Mr. Darbinyan said.
-
The messaging app DeltaChat, which is built on existing email infrastructure, could gain traction if outages with “white lists” proliferate.
While Russians will always find ways around censorship and try to keep their digital habits, experts say constant obstruction may ultimately limit access to only persistent, tech-savvy people. Others may settle for state-controlled apps that are easy and work.
“People will fall back to what works, and they won’t think about security in those critical moments,” said Ksenia Ermoshina, an expert on Russian online censorship, “because they will need to find out what happens to their kids at school.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
The post A Cat-and-Mouse Game of Russian Internet Restrictions and Evasion appeared first on New York Times.
