MoscowRussia imposed hard blocks on YouTube, Telegram, and VPNs used to bypass them.
The Kremlin escalated from months of throttling to full platform cuts, severing the country from global internet backbones.
Russian citizens now have no reliable route to blocked content.
Sources: BBC
THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE
Russia's 2019 Sovereign Internet Law required all traffic to flow through state-controlled exchange points and mandated that ISPs install deep-packet inspection equipment called TSPU. The law's stated purpose was resilience against foreign cutoff; its actual function was giving Roskomnadzor a centralized kill switch over any protocol, domain, or platform.
HOW DPI BLOCKING WORKS
Deep-packet inspection reads not just the destination of a packet but its contents and metadata signatures. Modern DPI can fingerprint VPN protocols, Tor handshakes, and even obfuscated tunnels by their statistical traffic patterns — which is why simply running a VPN is no longer enough in jurisdictions that have invested in this hardware.
THE GREAT FIREWALL TEMPLATE
China's Great Firewall, built since 1998, is the working model every authoritarian regime studies. It combines DNS poisoning, IP blocking, DPI, and TLS fingerprinting — and crucially, the domestic platform stack (WeChat, Weibo, Baidu) that gives users a functional alternative. Russia copied the filtering architecture but never built the alternative stack at scale.
THE SUBMARINE-CABLE LAYER
99% of intercontinental data moves through undersea fiber-optic cables, not satellites. Russia is unusual: most of its international bandwidth runs overland through fiber crossing into Finland, the Baltics, and via terrestrial links to Frankfurt and Stockholm. Cutting 'the internet' for Russia is closer to closing border crossings than severing cables.
WHY THE VPN ARMS RACE NEVER ENDS
Each side iterates: censors learn to fingerprint a protocol, developers ship an obfuscation layer, censors fingerprint the obfuscation. Tools like V2Ray, Shadowsocks, and Cloudflare's WARP each had windows of effectiveness in China and Iran measured in months, not years. The asymmetry favors the state because it controls the chokepoint and can afford to block aggressively, accepting collateral damage to legitimate traffic.
THE SPLINTERNET
The term describes the gradual fracturing of one global internet into national or bloc-level networks with different rules, content, and protocols. Russia, China, and Iran are the most advanced examples; the EU's data-localization rules and US export controls on chips and cloud services pull in the same direction from the other end. The 1990s vision of a single open internet is closing.