The Guardian: Putin Refuses To Ease Internet Blockades
8- 24.05.2026, 20:33
- 4,402
The siloviki have sold a course for further tightening of nuts in the Russian Federation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused to make concessions to members of the political elite who have tried to persuade him to refrain from tightening Internet blockades, The Guardian reported, citing two sources familiar with the discussions.
Privately, the president's press secretary Dmitri Peskov and the first deputy head of his administration Sergei Kiriyenko, who oversees domestic policy, have tried to soften the Internet crackdown, which is being promoted by the FSB's second service. However, these attempts have not been successful, sources told The Guardian.
"As long as the war continues, Putin will favor the security services," one of them said.
The wave of internet shutdowns that started about a year ago in the regions and then reached Moscow along with the blocking of Telegram has become a cause for black humor among Moscow's elite, The Guardian writes. "At the dinner table, everyone discusses the internet. We are now something closer to North Korea," says one Kremlin insider. The Chinese scale of internet censorship, once laughed at in Russia, has now become a cause for envy, The Guardian points out.
Internet repression has already dropped Putin's ratings to a record low since 2018, and caused the strongest surge of discontent with the authorities in 8 years - from domestic and foreign to economic and social policy.
In response, the Kremlin changed the methodology for calculating Putin's ratings, and they "crept" up again. Thus, according to VTsIOM, in the week ending May 17, 69.4% of Russians "approved" of the president's work - 3.8 points more than at the end of April, when Putin's official rating was at its lowest since the beginning of the war (65.6%).
Putin instructed back in 2017 to create a de facto "separate internet" for Russia - with its own system of root domain name servers (DNS), "duplicating" the already existing one, would be independent from the control of international organizations and would protect, among other things, Russian users from "targeted influences." A year later came the law on the "sovereign runet," which significantly expanded Roskomnadzor's powers to manage traffic within the country.
In 2019, Putin claimed that Russia is "not moving" toward "closing" the internet, has no plans to restrict its operation, and that the "sovereign internet" and "free internet" are not contradictory.
Seven years later, in February 2026, Putin signed a law authorizing the FSB to disconnect Russians' communications and requiring operators to immediately comply with orders from intelligence agencies to block the internet.
Internet blocking is promoted by the FSB, but the Russian regime in many ways retains its pre-war form: there are still quite influential technocrats, there are still large corporations, on which the budget depends - the course of total digital control is being implemented without their approval and against their wishes, says Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
The question arises - who is who, says Stanovaya: "The current situation pushes the FSB to more rigid actions. The resistance of the elite itself provokes an even tougher response from the security services, forcing them to redouble their efforts to restructure the system to suit themselves. The response to the public objections of loyalists will be new repressions.
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