Russia blocked a record 417,000 websites in 2024, according to the independent monitoring group Roskomsvoboda, The Moscow Times reported on January 28.

In total, 523,000 online resources were blocked during the year, but of those sites 106,000 were eventually unblocked. The Kremlin has been ramping up its censorship of the internet as part of its “internet sovereignty” controls that are designed to take tighter control of the information space in Russia after the authorities have largely ignored it for much of the last three decades.

Last year the number of permanently blocked websites doubled year-on-year and was five times higher than in 2022. The unblocking rate also fell sharply, with 183,000 websites restored in 2022, 374,000 in 2023, but only 106,000 last year, The Moscow Times reports.

Adopted in 2016, new Russian legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) requires messenger apps and other “organisers of information distribution” to add additional coding to transmitted electronic messages so that the Federal Security Service (FSB) can decipher them.

The Kremlin’s repression of free speech increased markedly in 2021 following the return to Russia and arrest of the late opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison under questionable circumstances in February 2024. Having followed a policy of “repression-lite” until that point, according to bne IntelliNews columnist and security analyst Mark Galeotti, after Navalny defied the Kremlin by returning home following an attempt to poison him, the gloves came off and the Kremlin began to openly crush civil society and the liberal opposition.

As reported by bne IntelliNews, many Russian journalists continue to try and do their job, but are increasingly restricted by strict laws censoring their coverage of the war in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s policies, and face long terms in jail if they fall foul of the powers that be.

The Federal Tax Service is leading the current internet crackdown, initiating restrictions on 142,000 websites. The censorship authority Roskomnadzor followed closely, blocking over 132,000 online resources. An "unspecified government agency" accounted for more than 62,000 restrictions, while Russian courts – primarily the Moscow City Court – ordered the blocking of over 60,000 websites, with around 50,000 attributed to the City Court alone, the Moscow Times reports.

Notably, more than 85% of the restrictions in 2024 were imposed without court orders, raising concerns over the lack of legal oversight in the enforcement of digital censorship. Experts believe that the “unspecified government agency” category, introduced to Roskomnadzor's registry in late 2022, may serve as a substitute for references to the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office.

Over the last two decades that Putin has been in office, the Kremlin has gradually tightened its control over the freedom of the press. One of the first things that Putin did on taking office in 2000 was to throw media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky into jail, who founded and controlled the highly successful NTV broadcaster, “Russia’s version of CNN.” At the time Gusinsky said that the Kremlin had held a metaphorical “gun to my head” and forced him to give up control of the station that is now controlled by the state-owned Gazprom Media. At the same time, the late oligarch Boris Berezovsky was driven into exile and the state retook control of the leading state-owned broadcaster ORT, now known as Rossiya 1. Since then all the main TV stations have been put under tight state control, but until recently Russia’s internet, known as RuNet, has remained largely free and uncontrolled.

But since 2021, the Kremlin has launched a campaign to bring the internet under the state’s control. In addition to a growing number of banned sites, the widely used VPNs to dodge interest restrictions are increasingly being banned. And popular international sites like YouTube, have seen their bandwidth restricted as it is believed that Roskomnadzor tests new technology tools to further restrict Russians access to international sites. These tests have caused several internet blackouts over the last two years as the technological bugs in the controls are worked out. In July 2021, Russia disconnected from the World Wide Web in the first trial of its sovereign internet technology as the Kremlin anticipates an attempt by the West to cut Russia off from the World Wide Web.

The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, alongside Roskomnadzor, is also reportedly considering restrictions on the harder to block messaging apps, which have widely been used to great effect in protests across the Former Soviet Union (FSU) by demonstrators in recent years.

In particular, during the mass demonstrations in Minsk in the summer of 2020 to protest against Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko mass falsification of the presidential election results, the Nexta Telegram channel played a central role in coordinating the months of protest.

Both the popular messaging services Telegram and WhatsApp have seen disruptions in the last year as Roskomnadzor reportedly tests its new control technology.

In a hilarious bodged job, in 2018 the FSB tried to force Pavel Durov, the owner of a popular message service that benefits from uncrackable encryption, to hand over his security keys so the authorities could read everyone’s messages. He refused. The FSB tried to shut the service down. What followed was a game of cat and mouse, where Roskomnadzor tried to close down Telegram’s servers, only to be hopelessly outclassed by the Russian tech whiz kids, who hopped from server to server constantly one step ahead. At one point the only thing that Roskomnadzor managed to achieve was to shut down its own site, while Telegram continued to work perfectly.

After two years, the Kremlin was forced to give up and introduced a bill to end the efforts to block Telegram. Part of the motivation was that so many Duma deputies rely on the service and value its privacy and the inability of the FSB to read their messages.

Since then Roskomnadzor has invested heavily into new equipment to better control the internet, some of which is reportedly made by US and Israeli companies, and has slowly improved its effectiveness.

Roskomnadzor has already blocked the popular messaging app Viber, citing legal violations. Russian users of the encrypted Signal app also faced disruptions, further limiting access to secure communication platforms. Meanwhile, between July and September 2024, Apple removed 60 virtual private network (VPN) apps from the Russian App Store, bringing the total number of unavailable VPN services to 98, the Moscow Times reports.