Russia’s government has decided which websites its citizens are allowed to read. The mechanism for enforcing that decision is now operational in Moscow.
Since March 6, mobile internet in the capital has been intermittently cut. Some areas are still offline. St. Petersburg residents were warned this week to expect the same.
The official justification is protection against Ukrainian drone attacks, which use cell towers for navigation, the same explanation has been offered across Russia for months.
What’s actually being tested is a “whitelist” system: a government-compiled list of approved platforms that remain accessible when mobile internet is shut down. Everything not on the list simply disappears.
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According to local press, only pre-approved Russian platforms, including social media, marketplaces, taxi and delivery apps, telecom services, and government websites, remain accessible when mobile internet is restricted.
Foreign news sites, independent media, and anything outside the approved perimeter are gone.
The technical backbone is deep packet inspection, or DPI. Telecom providers use it to block most internet traffic while letting approved services through.
It’s the same technology that authoritarian governments have used for years to filter the internet at the infrastructure level. Russia has been rolling it out region by region since at least last summer. Moscow is just the most visible deployment yet.
The whitelist includes mobile operator sites, pro-Kremlin media, government bodies, marketplaces, and Russian social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Max. Notably absent is anything that might let citizens read something the government hasn’t approved.
To get on the list at all, companies must meet strict requirements, including routing traffic through Russian infrastructure, hosting servers domestically, and ensuring users cannot conceal their IP addresses. The structure effectively excludes foreign platforms by design and creates a surveillance requirement for anyone who wants to remain accessible.
The whitelists have been working patchily, with some of the approved websites plagued by malfunctions and accessibility problems. According to Monitor Runet, whitelists have so far been introduced in fifty-seven of Russia’s eighty-plus regions, likely because not all telecom operators have yet installed the DPI systems used to configure whitelisting.
Russian authorities have not confirmed the rollout. No official from the Ministry of Digital Development, Roskomnadzor, or the telecom operators has made a public statement. A source from the Digital Development Ministry told the RBC business daily that the Moscow internet outages were a test of the ability to block access to sites not on the “white list,” saying: “This testing has been going on in the regions for some time, and it has now reached Moscow.”
