Russian telecom operators have just admitted a significant decline in mobile internet use across the country— up to 40% in some regions. Overall, a national decline of up to 10% is expected by the end of the year.
This is new; there was no parallel decline in 2024–2025; thus the present-day change is caused not by the worsening Russian economy but by the Kremlin’s interfering hand. It is an act of policy.
This years-long effort was the ultimate goal of the Kremlin and the FSB all along. It is true that the decline in mobile internet use affects economic activity, which has already been under a lot of pressure because of the war and Ukrainian drone attacks. It’s worth remembering that the Kremlin and its security services are happy to pay whatever economic price their political aims require.
Their main concern is to wean Russians off their phones and away from sharing online what they witness in their daily lives. It’s a recognition that internet footage can damage public morale — from a drone attack to protests to riots. The FSB seems unable to prevent people from posting such videos, including the latest campaign against the warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s Amazon.
A few years before the start of the full-scale invasion, the Russian authorities recognized that the major challenge online was not posed by content created by the hard-core opposition, like Navalny’s organization, or foreign media, like Radio Liberty and the BBC Russian service, or Russian media in exile.
Rather, it would be content generated by the users themselves on social media — the sort of stuff people see from their windows.
To curtail this essential feature of social media was the main reason for introducing the Russian Sovereign Internet a few years before the start of the full-scale war —it was built to create a switch allowing censors the option to isolate a region or city where a crisis deemed dangerous for the political regime was unfolding.
Since the war started, more repressive measures were introduced to complement this technical system to prevent ordinary users from generating and sharing dangerous content. First, global social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were banned and blocked, and Russian outlets were heavily censored. Second, posting footage of drone attacks became punishable. Initially, this was with fines, but the FSB has now hinted that those posting videos of attacks could be accused of high treason.
But even the security services understand that in a time of danger and destruction, the urge to share could become almost irresistible. The threat of punishment, even high treason charges, may not stop Russians from sharing.
The next option is to try to change social behavior. This was tried once, at the start of the war, when people were taught not to discuss politics in public. A wide range of measures were applied to change this bad habit — from outright repression to all sorts of rumors — including claims that people were being denounced by their fellow passengers on the Moscow metro for checking news on Ukrainian media. As a result, Russians did indeed stop talking about sensitive things in public spaces, including public transport and coffee shops.
Since the summer of 2025, a new effort to change social behavior has been underway — most importantly, to wean them off mobile internet. It was introduced first in regional centers, like Nizhny Novgorod, and as a result, the majority of Nizhny’s residents moved to old-fashioned public Wi-Fi networks. The map of publicly available Wi-Fi nodes in coffee shops and libraries became a sought-after thing.
The experiment faced its biggest test this year, when the authorities extended the shutdown to the two great Russian cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Mobile internet interruptions were implemented incessantly, using a variety of excuses.
The shutdowns did create outrage from ordinary people and the elites — after all, it may be illegal to protest against the war but not so much against an inconvenience in everyday life. Most blamed the FSB, but in truth the measure was implemented with the full consent of a Kremlin paranoid about political stability.
As a result, some habits did change. The popularity of public Wi-Fi rose sharply. In the first half of 2026, the number of connections to public Wi-Fi networks increased 3.5-fold compared to the first half of 2025.
But this model works, apparently, only when things are stable and predictable and there is time to plan for one’s actions — in business and private life, in other words, the Kremlin may be able to change routine behavior.
But when drones hit refineries, when petrol stations are suddenly without gas, and queues form miles down the road, Russians keep posting and sharing videos, expressing their frustration and outrage. For that phenomenon, the Kremlin currently has no good answer.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book , Our Dear Friends in Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in 2025.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
