Good morning.
The Kremlin is afraid.
Trust in Russian leader Vladimir Putin is in decline, according to the state-run pollster VTsIOM. Based on data from April 2026, support has dropped to the lowest levels since Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, suggesting growing public frustration linked to internet restrictions.
The internet in Russia (RuNet) is now under the control of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (the main successor of the Soviet KGB), previous restrictions on Telegram and WhatsApp have turned into a total blockade (in a bid to promote state-backed super app MAX), and the onoing war on VPNs (which allow people in Russia to trick the state, bypassing restrictions by routing their internet traffic through servers in other countries) leaves people with almost no options.
The official reason behind these measures is combating terrorism and national security – although the underlying aim is control, which is especially important in the context of the so-called State Duma ‘elections’ scheduled for September 2026.
The 2024 terrorist attack at Moscow’s Crocus City concert hall, in which 151 people were killed and over 600 were injured, was a shameful episode for counterterrorism agencies and a new source of criticism against the Kremlin.
In July 2025, the state-owned news agency Tass reported that terrorists had been recruited via Telegram. And so the internet crackdown started to harden.
In an op-ed for the think-tank Carnegie, Maria Kolomychenko, investigative journalist from Russia, notes that “the scale of the latest bans surpasses even those imposed immediately after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022”.
And this escalation is feeding public frustration inside Russia.
“The internet restrictions have turned a large number of people against the ruling class, if not against Vladimir Putin personally,” Mikhail Komin, an EUobserver collaborator and political scientist at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the New York Times. “That’s why we’re seeing approval ratings drop and people who never spoke out on political issues suddenly getting political.”
And rather than surrendering to the blackout, Russian citizens are trying to find a way around.
In March 2026 alone, VPN downloads on Google Play skyrocketed to 9.2 million — a 14-fold increase compared to the same period in 2025, according to the state-affiliated business daily Kommersant.
But even as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier in April that these measures were temporary, Kolomychenko warns they will be difficult to roll back. Such crackdowns do not happen in a vacuum.
“Even if the pressure is temporarily eased, that will not change the Russian authorities’ overall approach to internet governance,” the Russian journalist writes.
An anonymous source close to the Kremlin and quoted by Reuters explained that “the situation is frustrating everyone, including loyalists, and this is holding back the momentum [to crack down further]” which also makes it “highly unlikely” for things to get worse.
Nevertheless, demonising the internet can easily be read as a sign of desperation and insecurity: Open spaces such as those online make it more difficult for Vladimir Putin to fully control information flows, and, as a result, alternative narratives to the war in Ukraine, the West or anything else one can imagine.
“The state has already opted for complete ideological control and is prepared to bear the costs: not only the technological ones, but the political and economic ones too,” Kolomychenko also said.
As during the Cold War, when censorship and the jamming of foreign radio broadcasters were all about ideological control, modern barriers on the internet only suggest internal unease.
A paper of the University of Michigan Law School notes that the Soviet Union spent about 250-300 million dollars a year on radio jamming.
It is estimated that internet shutdowns in 2025 cost the Russian economy roughly $12bn, with over 37,000 hours of blackouts affecting nearly the entire population, making it the world’s champion of internet censorship.
This week, the EU Commission president talked about Russia being left behind a ‘digital Iron Curtain’. She also said that, historically, “all walls eventually fall,” suggesting that the Kremlin’s efforts to control the narrative will be in vain.
One can only hope that this happens rather sooner than later.
Elena Sánchez Nicolás, editor-in-chief
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