Russia moves closer to a state-controlled internet
Russia has sharply increased internet censorship and platform restrictions since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In a new policy brief, SITE researchers Violaine D’Ortona, Jonathan Lehne, and Maiting Zhuang show how the state has gained greater control over online information.
The internet enables information and opinions to flow rapidly and at low cost, including across national borders. It allows individuals to coordinate collective action on an unprecedented scale. Many authoritarian governments, therefore, seek to control the online information environment. This policy brief examines the evolution of internet control in Russia and documents how censorship and network disruptions have intensified since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Drawing on three complementary datasets - Access Now’s Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project (STOP), the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) initiative, and the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) - we document a sharp increase in internet disruptions, platform blocking, and website censorship in Russia since 2022. We argue that this expansion of censorship was enabled by a longer-term shift from a relatively decentralized system of internet regulation towards a centralised infrastructure capable of monitoring, filtering, and controlling internet traffic at scale.
Key highlights from the FREE Network policy brief
- Internet restrictions have risen sharply since 2022. Three different datasets show growing levels of shutdowns, outages, blocked websites, and restrictions on messaging and social media platforms in Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Russia has built a more centralised system of internet control. The 2019 Sovereign Internet Law and the installation of TSPU equipment have given authorities stronger tools to monitor and filter traffic across many internet providers at the same time.
- The change is gradual rather than an abrupt nationwide blackout. The policy brief argues that Russians are being cut off from parts of the global internet step by step, making the expansion of state control less visible than a single large-scale shutdown while still fundamentally changing what users can access online.
Click here to read the full policy brief to learn more
Meet the authors
Violaine D’Ortona, Master student, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon; Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
Jonathan Lehne, Assistant Professor, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), Stockholm School of Economics.
Maiting Zhuang, Asssistant Professor, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), Stockholm School of Economics.
About SITE
The Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) is a leading research and policy center on economic development in low-and middle income countries, with a particular emphasis on transition in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe.
About the FREE Network
The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE Network) is a joint initiative by SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Vilnius), BICEPS (Riga), CenEA (Szczecin), ISET-PI (Tbilisi), AUA (Yerevan), and KSE Institute (Kiev). Together, these research institutes form an extensive network of leading academic experts on economic issues in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
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