Two cell phones and an app: how Russians circumvent Putin's "digital curtain"

In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer accesses a virtual private network (VPN) so she can chat with friends abroad using the American messaging app WhatsApp, which is blocked inside Russia.

Later, she turns off the VPN to buy a ticket on the Russian Railways website, which prevents access to anyone using tools to hide their location. Then she takes out a second cell phone to check messages from customers on the state-controlled app, MAX.

Since the Kremlin tightened control over the internet this year, Russians have resorted to increasingly complex technical solutions to bypass state monitoring and restrictions on popular foreign apps such as Meta Platforms' WhatsApp and the Telegram messenger.

The biggest repression of its kind under President Vladimir Putin's government has already disrupted banking, transport and e-commerce services at times, angering the population ahead of a parliamentary election in September, according to statements from opposition parties close to the Kremlin, influential bloggers and business leaders. Even some social media influencers, who generally avoid politics, criticized the restrictions.

Frustration with limitations - along with rising prices, higher taxes and war fatigue - is widely seen as a factor in the drop in Putin's popularity, which fell from 75.1% in February to 65.6% in April, according to state-run think tank VTsIOM, the lowest level since he began the large-scale conflict in Ukraine in 2022. It currently stands at around 67%.

Authorities have been encouraging Russians to use state-run alternatives to foreign apps and websites in a campaign for "digital sovereignty." But some users are wary after warnings from Kremlin critics and some Western tech companies that MAX could be used to track them - something tech giant VK, its owner, denies.

Isolating the app on a second phone seems safer, said Irina, a 41-year-old interior designer.

"Of course this is all a huge headache, but what else can we do?" she said, asking to be identified only by her first name due to the sensitivity of the topic. "You get used to it and spend your days turning VPNs on and off, switching between different messengers, and switching between different virtual countries or cell phones to use the apps and websites you need."

The wave of VPN downloads
VPNs work by routing the user's internet connection through private servers outside of Russia.

In March alone, there were 9.2 million downloads of the five most popular VPN services on the Google Play store, 14 times more than in the same month last year, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported, citing data from Digital Budget, a Moscow consultancy that monitors online behavior.

"We have never seen this kind of adoption rate before," said Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian internet freedom activist based in Lisbon.

Moscow has classified Darbinyan as a "foreign agent," a term used for people the government considers to be involved in anti-Russian activities.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has repeatedly said that internet control is necessary as Russia is engaged in what officials describe as an existential confrontation with the West over Ukraine.

However, Putin instructed the government in April to act more cautiously, telling lawmakers it was "counterproductive" to "focus only on bans and restrictions."

Government authorities did not respond to questions for this report.

Although many authoritarian countries impose strict limits on internet use, Russians had become accustomed to a certain degree of freedom online.

Security services have long tried to silence domestic critics, but before the war in Ukraine authorities rarely interfered with people's ability to use foreign apps or access Western media content.

Since last year, the FSB security service, successor to the former Soviet KGB, has been ordering telecommunications companies to turn off mobile internet for days at a time in regions of Russia, claiming that Ukrainian attack drones could use it for navigation.

Authorities have also been blocking or slowing connection speeds for a growing list of apps and websites, which communications regulator Roskomnadzor says are platforms for illegal and extremist content.

WhatsApp and Telegram have accused Russia of trying to force users to adopt less secure, government-controlled apps.

The outages intensified in March, with a nearly three-week internet outage in Moscow that angered senior bureaucrats who rely on the internet and Telegram to coordinate votes for the ruling United Russia party, according to two sources close to the Kremlin and analysts.

"The problem is not whether the regime will be able to guarantee the result it wants (it will), but whether the electoral process will be smooth," Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior researcher at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in April.

Even loyal government employees download VPNs and carry multiple cellphones to keep government-controlled apps like MAX separate from the rest of their digital lives, the sources told Reuters.

Some also remove the microphone and camera from devices with MAX installed, in case the FSB can access them, one of the sources said.

"Even if you're not doing anything wrong, no one wants the FSB to read your messages," the source said.

"Cat and Mouse Game"
Putin's special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, does not hide his use of VPN, regularly publishing on X, which cannot be accessed inside Russia without this type of tool.

Although the use of VPNs is not illegal, Roskomnadzor has restricted access to hundreds of them, creating a cat and mouse game with users who have to keep downloading new services to access the content they want.

In April, government bodies, banks and large online retailers, acting on instructions from the regulator, began preventing people with VPNs enabled from accessing their websites. The move coincided with a 10% drop in internet traffic at Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon, according to Digital Budget.

"As market participants note, many users do not disable the VPN to access the website and simply lose interest in making a purchase if they cannot open the product page," Digital Budget said in a Telegram post.

The percentage of Russians who admit to using a VPN increased from 23% in 2022 to 36% this year, according to the Levada Center, an independent research institute that is on Moscow's list of foreign agents.

Younger, more tech-savvy adults sometimes buy VPN subscriptions for their parents or set up their own custom VPNs. But many Russians prefer to use apps and websites that work without these types of tools.

MAX, launched last year, has more than 85 million daily users, its owner said in May.

Interviewed by Reuters TV near Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre, half a dozen office workers and passersby offered a snapshot of public opinion. Half expressed irritation with the digital environment; others said they have adapted and don't use VPNs.

"Most Russians simply do not see the need for any extra work, what is readily available is enough for them," Levada Center director Denis Volkov wrote in April.

When navigation apps stopped working in Moscow in March, couriers from Flowwow, an online flower and gifts marketplace, used sellers' Wi-Fi networks to download routes to customers' addresses, said Yuri Semichastnov, the site's head of logistics.

Sales of paper maps more than doubled in the capital during the outage, according to data from Wildberries.

As frustration grows, the Kremlin has softened its rhetoric in recent weeks, assuring the public that mobile internet blackouts are temporary.

A plan for mobile operators to charge customers an extra fee for using more than 15 gigabytes of foreign data per month was delayed in May, according to Russian media, which said the requirement aimed at VPN users would likely be introduced after the election.

Putin also called on the government and the FSB to work together to ensure that critical services such as healthcare platforms and online payment systems remain operational.

Still, Irina, the interior designer, doesn't expect her digital life to get easier anytime soon.

"In Russia we have a saying: nothing is more permanent than what is temporary," she said.

Source: CNN