Putin’s “great crackdown” on the internet: the panic of a regime losing control

Over the past week, as reported by Reuters, mobile internet has been jammed or completely shut down every single day in central Moscow, St Petersburg and other major cities. Office workers stare at blank screens, teenagers frantically switch VPNs to reach Instagram, and taxi drivers curse as navigation apps die mid-ride. WhatsApp is gone entirely. Telegram – the last major messaging lifeline for over 100 million Russians – is throttled, investigated, and pushed toward oblivion. More than 400 VPN services have been blocked since January, a 70% jump in months.

New laws hand the FSB the power to cut any citizen offline on command and even run its own network of pre-trial detention centres.

This is not a technical upgrade. This is the “great crackdown,” as diplomats and analysts are already calling it – and it screams panic.

Officially, the Kremlin insists it is all about security. Ukrainian drones are using cellular networks, foreign companies refuse to obey Russian law, NATO is sowing discord. Dmitry Peskov calls it lawful necessity. Putin himself, addressing the FSB on the fourth anniversary of the Ukraine invasion in February 2026, ordered the agency to fortify the “information and digital space.” But the timing and scale tell a different story.

We are now deep into the fifth year of a war that was supposed to last weeks. The economy groans under sanctions. Casualties mount. War fatigue is no longer whispered only in kitchens – it leaks online despite years of propaganda. Young Russians do not log on primarily for politics; they want Snapchat, Instagram, uncensored music, and contact with friends abroad. Yet even that everyday escape terrifies the regime. As one young Muscovite told Reuters anonymously, “If these quite old politicians want to block everything, why haven’t they made any Russian apps that are actually interesting?”

The deeper fear is historical – and personal. Investigative journalist and security expert Andrei Soldatov points to the ghosts of 1989 and 1991: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan sparked chaos and veteran discontent; the USSR’s collapse tore the security services apart. Putin, a former KGB officer, lived that nightmare. Today his security apparatus is racing to ensure that neither a peace deal nor a protracted war triggers the same unravelling.

The Institute for the Study of War notes that the 2025-2026 escalation in censorship is explicitly designed to suppress backlash against future demands for more sacrifices – manpower, money, loyalty — and to neuter any opposition ahead of the September 2026 State Duma elections, where the Kremlin already fears a sullen electorate.

Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, put it bluntly: this is “a sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people.” Eight senior foreign diplomats in Russia told Reuters the measures go far beyond anything seen before. They are not defensive; they are pre-emptive. The regime that once confidently flooded the internet with its own bots and trolls now treats every unfiltered message as an existential threat.

What makes this panic especially revealing is how it contradicts the image Putin has cultivated for 25 years. The strongman who stared down sanctions, annexed Crimea, and survived Prigozhin’s mutiny now acts as if a teenager’s VPN is more dangerous than Ukrainian drones. Behind the walls, the calculation is grim: if ordinary Russians can still talk freely, compare notes, and see the gap between state television and reality, the entire edifice risks cracking.

History suggests such crackdowns rarely work for long. The Cold War censorship was being circumvented and ultimately brought glasnost – and the collapse of the USSR. Now Russia is improvising under wartime strain, and its own citizens are already finding workarounds. Every jammed connection, every blocked app, every FSB order only fuels resentment and drives dissent deeper underground.

The “great crackdown” is not a demonstration of strength. It is the sound of a regime that once promised Russians a return to great-power glory now quietly admitting it cannot survive contact with the truth. Behind the Kremlin walls, Putin is not consolidating power. He is barricading the doors – because he knows the walls are already trembling.

With Reuters, with additional content by EUalive.

Caption: People walk on Red Square on a warm and sunny day in Moscow, Russia, 13 March 2026. Moscow has experienced unusually warm weather this week, with temperatures reaching nearly +14 degrees Celsius. EPA/SERGEI ILNITSKY