disconnect from the Internet with a digital iron curtain

Imagine a world without Internet It’s not that strange. In October, an AWS outage left the Internet shivering. In December, with Cloudflare sneezehalf the Internet collapsed. These are just two examples that show that, At any tremor, the network wobbles. And they are specific cuts, but imagine that there are 655 cases in a month. Or until 2,099. If they are very specific figures, it is because that is what is happening in Russia. And not because of an error or a server crash.

But because Russia is experimenting to completely disconnect from the global Internet.

RuNet. We told it a few years ago. The Russian Ministry of Statistics noted that the Government had instructed all state sites and services to change their domain names. From a global one to a Russian one. It coincided with Ukraine asking that Russia was disconnected from the network, and that was it: mere coincidence.

According to the rulers, disconnect of the Internet responds to a strategy of defense against cyber attacks (Russia is a power in this sense). According to others, it has more to do with implementing a filtering system similar to the one China operates with its ‘Great Firewall‘. The truth is that we knew this as ‘RuNet’and the strategy that began step by step in 2019 is now colossal.

The new normal. Throughout these years, Russia has been testing disconnection tests. 2025 has been a critical year in this sense, one in which administrations have repeatedly pulled the cable to test the system. They have even been given massive blackouts in regions such as Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia to test the stability of RuNet.

In 2024 They tested in several regionsbut this year has been a ‘massacre’. In May of this year, on the eve of Victory Day40 regions were left without mobile communications. There were 69 “blackouts” of the network, but in June there were 655 and in July the figure increase to 2,099. It is estimated that it exceeds the number of outages in the entire world for a full year.

Data packet loss reported on Cloudflare when Russia has pulled the cord

Roskomnadzor. That’s a key name in this story. To ensure control over Internet access and consolidate it within the legal framework, the Russian government expanded the powers to Roskomnadzorthe state regulator. The entity has the ability to isolate and redirect traffic within Russia in the face of “specific threats” such as cyber attacks, critical infrastructure failures or loss of access to both domestic and foreign networks.

They have the authority to issue binding orders to teleoperators, allowing them to disconnect Russia from the global Internet in an emergency, and in fact, in recent years the authorities consolidated more than half of Russian IP addresses in the hands of seven service providers who are clearly linked to the state.

In the evidence This year, which has left regions without mobile Internet for up to two months, the narrative is defense. If the ukrainian war is that the rules have changed, but in 2025 in particular, lDrones and cyber attacks They have created a totally new battlefield. That is what they hide behind for some of these patterns of cuts, but the problem is that they are occurring in remote regions, such as Omsk, 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Lock. During these outages, users are not completely disconnected, but rather have limited access to websites that are on a government-approved whitelist. Anyone who is not there is blocked or penalized. YouTube is an exampleexperiencing a significant reduction in speed since summer of last year. Any service that uses Google caching is also being throttled. AND cloudflare It is also being penalized by Internet providers.

From Cloudflare itself they affirmed this summer that only Russian users are allowed to upload the first 16 KB of any website. It is a limitation that affects 20% of the entire Internet and 16 KB is not even enough to upload a sad image. WhatsApp, Google Meet, FaceTime or Telegram also have been penalizedto the point that in October there were users who they complained because they did not receive confirmation SMS from those apps to create a new account.

2026 doesn’t look better. The Government has a solution: Max, a super app similar to China’s WeChat with messaging, calls, video, file sharing and banking operations option. With everything that this implies. And, if throughout 2025 new laws and articles have come into force to give more power to Roskomnadzor, on March 1, 2026, Decree No. 1667 will come into force, which will establish new rules for centralized network management, giving more power to the regulator and which will be in force until 2033.

The decree will potentially give Roskomnadzor the ability to pull the cable permanently. For now, what has been experienced in recent years responds to different tests, but it is evident that Russia is preparing for this total disconnection and the creation of an Intranet. Much more controlled and to where VPNs to see what happens abroad are criminalized.

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