By Murad Rakhimov | 2026-04-07

By March 2026, Moscow residents were navigating their city using paper maps and the stars. Mobile internet across the capital's central neighborhoods had collapsed. Nothing loaded -- not Gosuslugi, not the Russian Railways site, not VKontakte. Not even a virtual private network (VPN) helped.

This is what the end of open internet looks like in Russia -- not a sudden switch, but a slow dimming, region by region, until the lights go out in the capital too.

From regions to the capital

Russians outside Moscow have lived with regular internet blackouts since the start of the war in Ukraine, which authorities frame as security measures against drone attacks. Authorities in 83 regions have imposed mobile internet shutdowns at least once since May 2025, with border regions like Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov experiencing disruptions on more than 70 percent of days. But the shutdowns have reached Kamchatka -- far beyond any Ukrainian drone's range -- making the security rationale increasingly difficult to believe.

By March 14, the outages spread to the entire Moscow region. On March 24, independent Russian media outlet The Bell reported that the blackout was ordered directly by the Russian government, with the Federal Security Service (FSB) providing internet service providers a map of areas where connectivity should be disabled.

The human cost is immediate. Tatyana, a 68-year-old pensioner in the Moscow region, lost contact with her granddaughter, who had relocated to Kazakhstan with her husband after the partial mobilization in fall 2022.

"Before we could at least see each other on video calls. But now it's impossible to reach them on Telegram or WhatsApp. And they don't use Max because they're afraid of their phones being tapped," Tatyana told Kontur.

Max is the Kremlin's answer to foreign messaging apps — a national platform pre-installed on all devices sold in Russia since late 2025, designed to replace services like WhatsApp and Telegram under Russia's "sovereign internet" program. Users are not convinced.

"Everyone knows that Max is the FSB," said Airat, a resident of Naberezhnye Chelny. "Of course we're forced to use it now, but we don't say, write or send more than we need to through it."

Maxim, a Saint Petersburg resident, described the broader toll. "The internet is abysmal. Apps break down. It makes life very hard, especially when you're trying to work with bank transfers and food and shopping deliveries," he told Kontur.

Telegram blocked, VPNs squeezed

The crackdown has now reached Russia's most widely used messaging platform. Telegram is used by more than 90 million people in Russia each month. On Feb. 10, 2026, Roskomnadzor -- Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media -- officially confirmed it had begun slowing down Telegram's service, citing violations of Russian law. The platform was largely inaccessible across Russia by mid-March, weeks ahead of an April 1 deadline authorities had publicly signaled. Telegram founder Pavel Durov called the restrictions an attempt "to force citizens to switch to a state-controlled app built for surveillance and political censorship."

For some, workarounds still exist -- barely. Elena, a resident of Leningrad Region who works in a Saint Petersburg shopping center, uses WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger only at home, where her son abroad pays for a VPN. At work, she had relied on Telegram.

"It's impossible at work. Right now I only use Telegram, but it's been suspended in recent days," Elena told Kontur.

Russia has been tightening the screws on VPNs since 2017, when they were required to restrict access to banned websites or face being blocked. By February 2026, Roskomnadzor had blocked nearly 500 VPN services. In 2024, authorities banned the dissemination of information about bypassing blocks and prohibited advertising for VPN services, imposing heavy fines. Since March 24, VPN connections from Russia surged 800 percent, with over 1.13 million connections observed in just three days, according to VPN monitoring data.

The economics of the shutdown are stark. Less than one week of mobile internet disruption in Moscow cost businesses an estimated 3–5 billion rubles ($34.8–58 million), according to the business daily Kommersant. The crackdown has drawn criticism even from within the Kremlin's own orbit. Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region, called for Roskomnadzor to "be put on trial," asking who would answer for deaths caused by people unable to get drone warnings because mobile internet was shut down.

German Klimenko, the Kremlin's former internet affairs adviser, predicted in a March 5 interview with the pro-Kremlin radio station Komsomolskaya Pravda that Russia's anonymous internet may be effectively gone by 2028.

"I think that by 2028 we'll all most likely be in a very difficult situation if we need to visit a banned website. It's easy to do that now, but in 2028 it will truly be hard to do so," Klimenko said. He framed Russia's internet trajectory as moving toward a Chinese model rather than North Korean isolation — something people can "live with."

Two new laws have given the Kremlin the legal architecture to back that prediction. In February 2026, Parliament passed a law granting the FSB the power to order targeted communications shutdowns at will. On March 20, Putin signed a law allowing internet access to be shut down at any time and for any duration, even without the presence of external threats.

Back to analog

As the sovereign internet takes shape, older technologies are making a comeback. SMS traffic, which had declined steadily since the early 2010s, grew 12–15 percent in summer 2025. Muscovites began seeking out walkie-talkies, pagers and MP3 players. The Chitai-Gorod bookstore chain reported a 48 percent jump in paper map, atlas and guidebook sales between March 6 and 10. One State Duma deputy from United Russia proposed restoring phone booths in large cities, connected to "secure" internet.

The implications extend beyond Russia's borders, said Galym Ageleuov, a digital rights expert from Kazakhstan.

"We are in a single information network space with Russia. In wartime conditions that enables Moscow to influence us and minimize our sovereignty. Our agency is under the threat of 'big brother,' whether that's Russia or China. So the digital concentration camp will affect us all," Ageleuov told Kontur.

Russian blogger and rights activist Alexander Kim pushed back on the idea that the crackdown is purely a wartime measure.

"Back in 2017–2018, any noticeable activity online, even active commenting on political topics, drew the attention of law enforcement agencies," he told Kontur. "It's the overall focus of the regime's policies, and it stems from its authoritarian nature."

State Duma elections are scheduled for September 2026, and analysts note that even authoritarian electoral cycles require narrative control -- limiting semi-autonomous voices reduces the risk of fragmentation inside the loyalist camp. The internet crackdown, on that reading, is not just about the war. It is about what comes after.