Russia Continues Creation of Sovereign National Internet
Luke Rodeheffer
Executive Summary:
The Russian State is seeking to massively expand its ability to surveil and filter internet traffic by upgrading systems to deal with increasing traffic volumes and increasing fines for providers who do not fully comply.
Russia is also pursuing further restrictions on virtual private networks (VPNs) by pressuring platforms to block those using them and requiring mobile operators to charge higher fees for those using more than 15 gigabytes of traffic from abroad.
The Kremlin is aiming to restrict civilian use of digital encryption and create full-spectrum internet surveillance, which will likely expand further in the coming years.
The Russian state is continuing its rapid creation of a sovereign national internet space. It has established new funding and initiatives to block civilian use of virtual private networks (VPNs), expand internet surveillance, and consolidate control over telecommunications providers. The Russian Ministry of Digital Technologies announced plans at the end of March to dramatically increase the computing power of the Technical Measures for Countering Threats (TSPU) system through 2030 by 250 percent, reaching 954 Terabit per second (Tb/s), with estimated costs of 15 billion rubles ($200 million ) (Kommersant, March 25). The new set of technologies is intended to fill gaps in the current monitoring system, which now covers nearly 100 percent of all traffic, from broadband providers to mobile providers to nodes connecting the Russian segment to the broader global internet (see EDM, November 25, 2024). This is an improvement over 2023, when only 80 percent of traffic was subject to the system’s filtering (Habr, October 27, 2025).
This is a massive increase in computational capacity. The average internet traffic across the entire Russian segment of the internet was 30 Tb/s in 2024, according to information technology (IT) industry sources quoted in the Russian press (Kommersant, March 25). This increase in computing power is necessary to analyze all the country’s growing internet traffic with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies while expanding censorship systems and new attempts to bypass the surveillance system.
The project has the working title Automated System for Supplying Security (ASBI). It will replace the current TSPU system, which cannot handle very high traffic volumes, leading to content bypassing the filtration and monitoring systems. An incident that occurred during the night of March 22 demonstrated this, when the system temporarily broke down (Kommersant, March 25). RosKomNadZor’s General Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) has already confirmed that it is using artificial intelligence to detect and block other VPN technologies among the general public (see EDM, November 25, 2024).
The legislation would impose hefty fines of 4 million rubles ($53,500) on any internet service provider (ISP) that did not fully comply with the filtration systems (Interfax, April 6). Russian courts have already issued fines for 28 violations between October 2025 and March 2026 (Kommersant, April 6). The Russian Ministry of Digital Technologies and telecommunications providers are also discussing new licensing, costing between 1 million and 50 million rubles ($13,300 to $668,000), and instituting minimum capital requirements for ISPs, as well as the ability to remove the licenses and ban providers for non-compliance without a court order (Vedomosti, April 2). These new moves could push smaller providers out of the market, which have less budget for monitoring or fines, paving the way for the consolidation of the provider space by larger providers that collaborate more closely with the Russian state.
This is not the only massive regulatory burden that ISPs have faced in 2026. Since the beginning of the year, ISPs and telecom operators must store all user text messages, audio, and video for three years, a massive increase from the six months required by the Yarova laws in 2016 (RIA Novosti, January 1). Meeting the computing and storage requirements for such massive volumes of data will be a severe burden on providers, further burdening smaller providers with fewer resources.
The number of VPN services that RosKomNadZor is able to block has reached 469, a 70 percent year-on-year increase (RBC, March 30). Western instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp have faced either blacklists or had their traffic massively reduced, with RosKomNadZor seeking to prevent phone and video calls taking place on the popular platform (TASS, August 13, 2025). The national Domain Name System (DNS) that Russia has been testing now blacklists 368 domains, including those belonging to human rights organizations, Facebook, YouTube, the Tor browser project, and independent news organizations (Monitor Runeta, March 3).
The Russian state is also seeking to coerce the country’s largest digital platforms into assisting with the mass VPN crackdown, threatening to revoke their accreditation if they do not comply (RBC, April 2). This includes a request from Minister of Digital Technologies Maksut Shadayev to block access to Russian digital platforms for users detected using VPNs, as well as requiring mobile operators to charge higher fees for anyone who uses more than 15 gigabytes of traffic from international locations. It remains unclear, however, whether these requirements will be implemented (RBC, March 30).
Major Russian internet platforms have expressed concern that these new restrictions on VPNs will reduce internet traffic to their platforms (Kommersant, April 10). It also remains unclear how much user data these large platforms will now be required to share with RosKomNadZor. The Russian state is pushing ahead with these initiatives. Deputy of the Russian Duma’s Committee on Information Policy Andrei Svintsov announced that the next stage in Russian censorship policy would be to massively slow down traffic from users of illegal VPNs, so that “every online service will slow to a crawl, including Telegram” for such users (RBC, March 12). These new moves illustrate that restricting civilian use of digital encryption and creating full-spectrum internet surveillance remain top priorities for the Kremlin and will likely expand further in the coming years.
This article was originally published in Eurasia Daily Monitor.