Between February and March 2026, Russia showed four internal trend lines particularly clearly: the tightening of digital control, the increasingly widespread repression of dissent, social deterioration in the peripheries, and a top-down corruption that continues to emerge just as the state is demanding sacrifices from the population.

Already at the beginning of February it was clear that the decisive terrain would become that of communications: Roskomnadzor [federal communications and media authority] was tightening its technical control of the network, there was open talk of ever more extensive blockades against Telegram, the use of belye spiski[white lists] of authorised sites was growing, and even Russian Linux-based systems were ending up affected by censorship mechanisms so crude that they were hampering security updates themselves.

At the same time, the push towards Max, the ‘national’ messenger, was advancing, promoted not only as a technical alternative but as an instrument of administrative and political realignment.

In the same weeks, power continued to weld security, public morality and discipline of bodies.
The case of comedian Artemij Ostanin, sentenced on 4 February to a harsh prison sentence for some jokes interpreted as social hatred and offence to believers, showed how narrow the boundary between speech and crime had become.

At the same time, on the social level, increasingly brutal mechanisms were emerging: orphans pushed into the military contract as a shortcut to obtaining a home, religious and political pressure to restrict abortion, micro-practices of surveillance in public spaces such as phone checks in the St. Petersburg metro.
These are not disconnected episodes, but a single pedagogy of the regime: educating citizens to the idea that every sphere of private life can be subordinated to the national emergency.

In mid-February, the squeeze was seen above all on the terrain of remembrance. On the second anniversary of Aleksej Naval’nyj ‘s death, guarded commemorations and official objections to international analyses of poisoning reappeared.
In the same climate, Anna Politkovskaya ‘s plaque was once again destroyed and the Museum of the History of the Gulag changed its name and setting, sliding towards a more neutral and politically useful narrative of ‘memory’ centred mainly on Nazi crimes.

The repression did not only affect symbols: the journalist and activist Ol’ga Komleva, detained for political charges, was even deprived of medication for diabetes for internal bureaucratic reasons within the penal colony, while Aleksandr Dočenko, convicted for anti-war tickets, died after a heart attack against a background of opaque information to his family. The logic is always the same: it is not enough to imprison, one must also administer the body and the memory.

23 and 24 February, around ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’ and the fourth anniversary of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, saw one of the most revealing contrasts of the period.
On the one hand, the patriotic liturgy, on the other hand, the numbers of civilians killed on Russian territory and military casualties, which the powers-that-be continue to not publicly confirm.

Federal television even avoided explicitly mentioning the fourth anniversary of the war, while in Moscow and St. Petersburg citizens left flowers at the monuments of Lesja Ukraïnka and Taras Ševčenko under the eye of the police. In the same hours, two major state newspapers published almost identical texts about Pavel Durov and Telegram, with the tone of preparatory material for an official campaign: the messenger was described as a hybrid threat and almost an infrastructure of terrorism. It was the political prelude to a quantum leap in the control of the network.

Between the end of February and 1 March, this leap became more visible in terms of repression as well.
The data collected in the document speak of more than four thousand defendants in war-related proceedings, thousands of convictions and practically no acquittals, a sign of justice turned into an assembly line.
The case of 17-year-old Arsenij Turbin, one of the country’s youngest political prisoners, well illustrates the logic of exemplary overkill. In the same climate, opposition activist Ekaterina Duncova was detained during a simple letter-writing evening for political prisoners and in Novosibirsk a ban was prepared on a demonstration for internet freedom and against the possible blocking of Telegram.

Repression now affects not only organised protest, but also the smallest gestures of solidarity or remembrance.

The first days of March then brought to light two other typically Russian fronts: systemic corruption and digital leverage.

On 2 March, Ekaterina Šul’man was sentenced in absentia to a year’s penal colony for not putting the plaška [obligatory label] of ‘foreign agent’ on her Telegram channel, while Timur Ivanov, a former deputy defence minister already convicted of corruption, was still trying to get himself sent to the SVO [special military operation], as if the front could become a moral wash for high-ranking corrupt people.

On 3 March came perhaps the most eloquent figure of all: over 43,000 corruption offences registered in Russia in 2025, the most in thirteen years.
On the same day, there was also talk of the first fully automatic application of the package of restrictions linked to the reestr voinskogo učëta [electronic register of military obligation]: a young man who failed to show up at the voenkomat [military commissariat] would have his driving licence, business activities, property records and other essential aspects of civil life blocked.
Repression becomes software.

Between 4 and 6 March, the internal degradation of the system manifested itself almost caricaturally. A Russian helicopter was allegedly shot down near Millerovo by Russia’s own PVO [air defence] during operations against drones; in Bodaibo, Siberia, the mayor ended up under house arrest after the winter crisis of municipal services that left homes and schools without water and heating; former First Deputy Defence Minister Ruslan Calikov was arrested for embezzlement, money laundering and bribery.

In the same hours, the Bank of Russia extended restrictions on foreign currency withdrawals, while the FAS [Federal Antimonopoly Service] hinted that even advertising on Telegram could become illegal. It is no longer necessary to formally ban everything: it is enough to make it clear that every space remains revocable.

Perhaps the most sensational and revealing event of the entire March, however, remains that of the Novosibirsk region.
Between 8 and 19 March, under the pretext of pasterellëz [pasteurellosis] and rabies, thousands of cattle were slaughtered or driven away in the countryside, often without documents shown to the owners, with police, OMONs, vets and roadblocks.

Some farmers told of animals being killed in their absence, others denounced derisory compensation, others were fined or arrested for protesting.
Svetlana Panina, who has become a symbol of this crisis, chased the agriculture minister in the corridors of the regional government, who fled from the confrontation. The governor finally defended the measures as ‘severe but necessary’, while around the case emerged the riches of federal minister Oksana Lut, including real estate and jewellery worth enormous sums.

It is a near-perfect scene of present-day Russia: in the countryside, cows and family incomes are being culled, in the ministries, watches and flats are being hoarded.

In the second half of March, the conflict between state and society definitely centred around the web.
In St. Petersburg and Moscow, mobile internet interruptions followed one another, with access allowed only to ‘whitelisted‘ services; in Perm’, a demonstration against network blockades was called off at the last minute; in Krasnodar, rallies against the closure of Telegram were pushed to the periphery.

On 17 March, technical data showed that Telegram’s accessibility in Russia had plummeted, with a very high share of failed requests, due to RKN ‘s [Roskomnadzor] use of TSPUs [technical means of countering threats].
Yet, just as power was attempting the leap to total control, its cracks were also appearing: Forbes reported that the filtering infrastructure could not always handle the volume of traffic and that services that had already been blocked sometimes reappeared. The repressive machine appears huge, but not omnipotent.

The very last days of the period add two very strong closing images. On 16 March, the documentary ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin‘, filmed by school videographer Pavel Talankin with David Borenstein, won an Oscar, recounting the transformation of the Russian school into a propaganda laboratory.

On 18 March, Vladimir Osipov, convicted for anti-war posts and ill, died in a SIZO [remand prison] without receiving adequate treatment.
Between these two extremes lies perhaps all the political sense of the last two months in Russia: on the one hand, the system that attempts to rewrite reality, memory, education and even the Internet; on the other, the reality that continues to leak out, in films, in flowers left at monuments, in technical data, in village protests, in letters to prisoners, in bodies that power can no longer hide completely.