For weeks, Moscow has been waking up without internet. Phones have become useless objects: websites are inaccessible, messages don’t go through, and payments are blocked.

In February 2026, Putin signed a law granting the FSB security services the power to shut down the internet at any moment—even without a real threat.

By March, outages had become a daily occurrence, also hitting St. Petersburg. According to Top10VPN data, Russia had already recorded 37,166 hours of blackouts in 2025—the highest number in the world—with estimated economic losses of $11.9 billion. It’s easy to imagine the scale of the current disaster.

The main target is Telegram. On February 10, 2026, Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, began throttling its use. On February 24, Pavel Durov, the app’s founder, was accused of “terrorism” (whatever that means). By mid-March, 80% of requests to its servers in Russia were failing. Today, one in four messages never reaches its recipient.

But the Kremlin isn’t stopping there: it’s pushing users toward Max, a state-run app that collects data without encryption and is already used by 77.5 million Russians every month.

The “digital iron curtain” is no longer a dystopian nightmare. As of March 1, 2026, Moscow gained the power to completely isolate the Russian internet—Runet—from the rest of the world. The official reason was to protect against increasingly frequent Ukrainian drone attacks, which connect to local networks to locate and strike targets.

Yet analysts suspect another motive. U.S. and Israeli raids on Iran wiped out much of the regime’s leadership by hacking surveillance cameras across Tehran. Putin saw the risk of similar cyberattacks against his inner circle. His paranoia became law, and the process of cutting Russians off from the global internet accelerated in March: better to shut everything down than risk being spied on and betrayed.

“Whitelists”—lists of approved sites during blackouts—have become the Kremlin’s tool for controlling what Russians can see. Between February and March 2026, the Ministry of Digital Development repeatedly updated these lists, which include banks like Alfa-Bank, VTB, and PSB, but exclude others like Sberbank, T-Bank, and Gazprombank. Government and regional services are included, but major e-commerce, social media, and messaging platforms are not. During outages, only whitelisted domains work; everything else vanishes. The problem? Essential business sites—logistics, bookings—are often left out, forcing companies and citizens to improvise offline solutions. In Moscow, some neighborhoods lost access even to emergency services, despite supposedly being “protected.”

The economic damage was immediate. In Moscow alone, businesses—couriers, restaurants, transport services—lost an estimated €7 to €60 million per day. In St. Petersburg, the taxi and delivery service Taksovichkoff saw a 13% drop in rides in January, while its competitor Citymobil lost 65%. It’s not hard to guess what happened in March. Businesses have resorted to walkie-talkies and paper maps. Even politicians were left in the dark: the Duma, Russia’s parliament, experienced two consecutive days of blackouts, with deputies unable to connect to the building’s Wi-Fi.

But the consequences are even graver for the military fighting in Ukraine. Telegram was the tool used by pro-war military bloggers and troops to coordinate attacks, download maps, share drone footage, and, crucially, raise funds. Now it’s unusable. Units are forced back to radios or makeshift alternatives like Starlink, which Elon Musk stopped providing to the invading army weeks ago. The backlash was swift: influential channels like “Two Majors” and “Fighterbomber” called the move “operational suicide.”

Ilya Remeslo, a pro-Kremlin blogger who even joined the case against Navalny, called for Putin to be tried for war crimes. His reward? Commitment to a psychiatric clinic.

The irony: the outbreak of conflict in Iran should have been a boon for Moscow, driving up gas and oil prices. Instead, it deepened Putin’s paranoid delusions. Obsessed with security, he cut off Russians’ internet access on their phones. He took away that sweet, constant drip of dopamine that numbs even the most suffering soul. He removed the endless distraction, the saturation of every free moment, that keeps subjects from dwelling on their hatred for their ruler.

And, above all, he deprived soldiers at the front of a lifesaving tool. Never have so many Russians been killed by Ukrainians as in these past days.

What could possibly go wrong?

After all, these are the inconveniences of dictatorships. Luck may strike, the geopolitical winds may blow in your favor, but no breeze is fair for a ship steered by a hypochondriac old man terrified of betrayal.