Russia slowly trying to splinter its internet from rest of world, analysts say

Telegram is increasingly blocked and mobile internet users face blackouts in effort likened to Iranian shutdowns

Russia is in the midst of a vast, slow-moving effort to splinter its internet from the rest of the world, say activists and experts, with steep consequences for millions of people who are gradually being cut off.

Unlike Iran’s internet shutdowns earlier this year, Russia’s shutdown is a piecemeal and opaque effort. It is defined by escalating mobile internet blackouts across cities and provinces, growing restrictions on certain kinds of traffic, and new blocks on Telegram, a messaging app essential to communication and daily life for most Russians.

“This is a step backward – a step 100 years back. They might as well switch to paper mail, telegraphs and horses soon,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on X about the blocks.

Arturo Filastò, a researcher at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an internet censorship watchdog, said Russia’s shutdown was “quite a bit more opaque and less visible” than Iran’s. This is because, compared with Iran, Russia’s internet infrastructure is more decentralised, making widespread censorship harder to implement. “They have many more internet service providers that operate and manage their network a bit more independently,” Filasto said.