The Russian mobile data ban

Sunday 1 February 2026

Russia’s newest experiment in information control is not, strictly speaking, a single ban. It is a method: switch off the mobile internet when the state wishes, then selectively switch it back on for those services the state approves. What presents itself as a security measure, or as a piece of technical housekeeping to reduce public irritation, is also a political architecture. Once built, it is difficult to resist, because it can be justified as “temporary” even when it becomes routine.

In 2025 Russian regions increasingly resorted to mobile internet shutdowns, frequently explained as necessary to disrupt Ukrainian drone attacks that rely on network connectivity for navigation and control. At the same time, Moscow began to formalise an exception regime: a list of domestic services that would continue to function during blackout conditions, using what the Ministry of Digital Development described as a “special technical solution”.  This is the heart of the matter. A shutdown is blunt. A shutdown with a “white list” is a governing instrument.

What the “ban” looks like in practice

For ordinary users, the experience is deceptively simple: mobile data stops working, or becomes intermittent, while calls and text messages may remain. The modern effect, however, is not merely inconvenience. In 2026 a smartphone is a wallet, a map, a public services terminal, a workplace and a library. Switching off mobile data is switching off the possibility of spontaneous access to information, coordination and dissent in the public square.

The Russian state’s answer has been to reassure the public that essential digital life can continue. In September 2025 Reuters reported that Russia published a list of locally developed applications and services meant to keep working during mobile internet shutdowns, including online government services, marketplaces, the Mir payment system and the state-backed MAX messenger. The same report noted what was omitted: major foreign platforms such as WhatsApp and YouTube, despite their popularity. 

By December 2025, reporting on subsequent updates described the contours of this white list more concretely: major Russian platforms such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, the Gosuslugi government services portal, Yandex services, and large marketplaces such as Ozon, Wildberries and Avito. Later updates reportedly added state bodies’ websites, further ministries, and law enforcement or prosecutorial institutions, alongside practical “life administration” services such as Russian Post, banking services (including Alfa-Bank), the 2GIS navigation service, and resources linked to the Central Bank. The same reporting described inclusion of telecom operators’ resources, which has an obvious logic: if citizens cannot access the operator, they cannot pay, complain, or comply. 

Two features stand out.

First, the white list is not merely about what people want. It is about what the state needs people to do. Pay, authenticate, identify themselves, travel in predictable ways, receive official information and use state-aligned channels for communication.

Secondly, the list is not framed as censorship. It is framed as continuity. That framing matters because it changes the public psychology. The question becomes not “why is the internet being censored?” but “which services will be exempt this time?” That is how a temporary emergency posture turns into normal administration.

Which apps and websites are exempt, and why those ones

If one reads the exemptions as a map of priorities, a coherent political economy appears.

Gosuslugi, Russia’s central government services platform, is effectively a digital gatehouse for interactions with the state. Keeping it available preserves obedience and reduces administrative friction. 

Mir and domestic banking services keep commerce and salary payment functioning, which in turn stabilises social order. 

Marketplaces such as Ozon, Wildberries and Avito represent consumer life, but they also function as logistical arteries. In a sanctions economy, domestic distribution is political infrastructure. 

Yandex is not merely a search engine. In Russia it is an system of mapping, transport, payments, advertising and media surfaces. Keeping Yandex alive during a blackout preserves a domestically steerable layer of “the internet”, while foreign search and social platforms remain unreachable. 

VK’s services, including the MAX messenger that Russia has promoted, are the social counterpart to this arrangement. Reuters has described MAX as state-backed and part of a broader push to promote home-grown services. Where foreign platforms are harder to pressure or monitor, domestic ones can be legislated into compliance.

All of this can be defended as a response to wartime security pressures. Yet wartime does not explain the direction of travel. The direction is towards a segmented internet: a permitted zone that functions, and an unpermitted zone that fades from practical reach.

From censorship to managed reality

Russia’s internet controls have grown steadily since 2022, with the state progressively restricting or blocking major platforms, experimenting with technical measures that make circumvention harder, and expanding the legal basis for repression tied to online activity.  Reporting in late 2025 described an accelerating crackdown, including restrictions on major communication tools and increasing pressure on services that will not comply with state demands. 

It is tempting to treat these measures as an authoritarian reflex. That is true, but incomplete. The more interesting question is how the state learns to govern through connectivity itself.

A “blackout plus white list” model is materially different from simply blocking a handful of opposition websites. It trains citizens to live inside an official digital environment, where their banking, travel, messaging and government interactions remain possible, while access to independent sources becomes unreliable, slow, legally risky, or socially marginal.

Global Voices, describing Russia’s creation of a white list approach in 2025, captured the inversion: rather than blocking a few sites and allowing the rest, the state creates a protected list that remains reachable while “everything else” becomes the exception. This is a conceptual shift from censorship as a series of bans to censorship as a default condition.

The result is not merely fewer opinions. It is a narrower sense of what is real. If the only reliably accessible sources are state-linked news agencies, domestically controlled social networks and official service portals, then the citizen’s informational diet becomes structurally aligned with the state’s interests, even without constant overt propaganda. The user does not have to be convinced. She simply has to be habituated.

Renewed totalitarianism in a digital key

Totalitarianism, in its classical twentieth-century form, sought to organise the whole of life: work, speech, associations, travel, education and private belief. What the internet offered, for a time, was friction. Alternative sources were one click away. Private networks formed faster than police could infiltrate. Anonymity, even imperfect, gave dissidents room to breathe.

The contemporary state has learned to reverse those advantages. The internet can be made legible. Digital identity can turn a population into a directory of trackable nodes. A messenger can become a tool of social mapping. A search query can become evidence. A “safety” rationale can become a pretext for pre-emption.

In January 2026 Ukrainian reporting summarised concerns about proposals in Russia to link social networks and messaging to mandatory passport identification, effectively requiring online actions to be attributable and traceable, under a narrative of a “legal and safe internet”. The specifics of such proposals may evolve, but the impulse is consistent with the broader trajectory described by independent analysts: tightening control, reducing anonymity and isolating the information space from foreign platforms and external narratives. 

There is a further element: the gradual criminalisation not only of speech, but of access. When a state begins to punish citizens for searching for or reading forbidden materials, it moves from policing expression to policing curiosity. Reporting in 2025 described new legal constraints and monitoring powers that penalise the consumption of “banned” material, alongside more aggressive technical restrictions. This is where totalitarianism becomes more than a metaphor. The state does not only demand silence. It demands that the citizen learns not to know.

The geopolitical echo, and why Ukraine should care

It might seem, from Ukraine’s vantage point, that Russia’s internal internet repression is Russia’s domestic affair. It is not.

First, it affects the informational battlefield. A Russia that can reliably prevent her population from accessing external reporting about casualty figures, corruption, mobilisation pressures or battlefield setbacks has greater freedom to prolong war. The pain is localised and managed, while dissent is fragmented.

Secondly, the model travels. Once a state normalises “shutdowns for security” with a list of approved services, other states and other institutions learn the lesson, often for reasons that begin as legitimate. A terrorism scare becomes a precedent. A protest becomes a justification. A cyber incident becomes a permanent policy.

Thirdly, Ukraine has her own history of restricting hostile information resources, particularly Russian platforms used for propaganda and influence. Freedom House has noted the legal and practical complexities of such sanctions regimes. The distinction, therefore, is not whether any restrictions exist. The distinction is whether restrictions are bounded, reviewable and targeted, or whether they become a general system of managed reality in which only approved channels remain usable.

Ukraine’s democratic resilience depends upon avoiding the seductive logic that because Russia weaponises information, Ukraine should answer by narrowing her own information space. Ukraine can, and should, defend herself against hostile influence operations. But she must do so without adopting the habits of the adversary, because those habits do not remain tools. They become institutions. And institutions, once built, tend to serve whoever holds power next.

The quiet change: from open internet to permitted internet

The most insidious feature of Russia’s current trajectory is its incrementalism. Each step can be rationalised.

A drone threat, therefore a blackout. 

A blackout is inconvenient, therefore a whitelist. 

Foreign apps facilitate crime, therefore restrictions on calls and services. 

Circumvention tools enable “extremism”, therefore pressure against VPNs. 

Anonymity enables irresponsible speech, therefore proposals for digital identity. 

At no point does the state need to announce a doctrine of total control. The doctrine emerges from the sum of measures.

For the citizen, the change is experienced as a thinning of the world. Some links no longer open. Some calls no longer connect. Some news is only reachable through unstable workarounds. Some conversations feel risky. The safe route becomes the official route. The official route becomes the normal route. The normal route becomes the only route.

That is how renewed totalitarianism arrives in the twenty-first century. Not always through mass rallies and grand ideological proclamations, but through a network that works only where the state permits it to work, and only for the purposes the state considers “socially significant”.