Russians are finding ways to skirt Putin’s digital iron curtain – one phone at a time
In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer logs onto a virtual private network so she can chat with friends abroad using the U.S. messaging service WhatsApp, which is blocked inside Russia.
Later, she toggles off the VPN to buy a ticket on the Russian Railways website, which bars anyone using the tools to obscure their location. She then picks up a second phone to check for messages from clients on the state-controlled app MAX.
Since the Kremlin ratcheted up control over the internet this year, Russians have been turning to increasingly convoluted technical solutions to circumvent state monitoring and restrictions on popular foreign apps like Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and the Telegram messenger. The biggest crackdown of its kind under President Vladimir Putin has at times disrupted banking, transport and e-commerce, irritating people ahead of a September parliamentary election, according to statements from Kremlin-friendly opposition parties, prominent bloggers and business leaders. Even some social media influencers, who usually stay clear of politics, criticized the restrictions.
Frustration over the curbs – together with rising prices, tax hikes and war fatigue – is widely believed to have contributed to Putin’s falling approval ratings, which dropped from 75.1% in February to 65.6% in April, according to state pollster VTsIOM, their lowest level since he launched the all-out conflict in Ukraine in 2022. They now stand at nearly 67%. Officials have been pushing Russians to use state-backed alternatives to foreign apps and websites in a drive for “digital sovereignty”. But some users are wary following warnings from Kremlin critics and some Western tech companies that MAX could be used to track them, which technology giant VK, its owner, denies.
Quarantining the app on a second phone feels safer, said Irina, the 41-year-old interior designer.
“Of course this is all a huge pain in the backside, but what else can we do?” she said, asking to be identified by one name due to the sensitivity of the matter. “You get used to it and spend your days turning VPNs on and off, toggling between different messengers and switching between different virtual countries or phones to use the apps and websites you need.”
VPNs work by routing a user’s internet connection through private servers outside Russia. In March alone, there were 9.2 million downloads of the five most popular VPN services from the Google Play store, 14 times more than the same month last year, the Russian daily newspaper Kommersant reported, citing data from Digital Budget, a Moscow-based consultancy that tracks online behavior.
“We’ve never seen this kind of take-up rate before,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian internet freedom activist based in Lisbon.
Moscow has designated Darbinyan a “foreign agent,” a term it applies to people it views as engaged in anti-Russian activity.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said repeatedly that internet controls are necessary when Russia is locked in what officials cast as an existential clash with the West over Ukraine. But Putin instructed the government in April to tread more softly, telling lawmakers it was “counterproductive” to “focus solely on bans and restrictions.”
Government officials did not respond to questions for this article.
While many authoritarian countries impose strict limits on internet use, Russians had grown accustomed to a degree of online freedom. Security services have long sought to silence domestic critics, but authorities rarely interfered with people’s ability to use foreign apps or access Western media content before the Ukraine war.
Since last year, the FSB security service, successor to the Soviet-era KGB, has been ordering telecom companies to shut down the mobile internet for days at a time in regions across Russia, saying Ukrainian attack drones can use it to aid navigation.
Authorities have also been blocking or slowing connections to a growing list of apps and websites, which state communications regulator Roskomnadzor alleges are platforms for illegal and extremist content.
