In 2018, Russian authorities attempted to block Telegram, but Roskomnadzor's actions failed. The messenger continued to work despite millions of inaccessible IP addresses in Russia and massive disruptions to other services. In response, the state built a new model of digital censorship: through the 'sovereign internet' law and the implementation of deep packet inspection (DPI) equipment. At the same time, human rights activists began to suspect Telegram of cooperating with the Russian authorities. The new blocking of the messenger, which has become the primary means of communication for Russians over the years, has prompted propaganda to recall that the court decision to ban access to Telegram has never been overturned. 'Novaya-Europe' recalls the history of confrontation between censors and Pavel Durov and asks an expert: will blocking be more effective under the 'sovereign internet' conditions? Participants of a rally for a free internet and in support of the Telegram messenger in Moscow, April 30, 2018. Photo: Sergey Ilyinitsky / EPA. How Roskomnadzor tried to block Telegram The confrontation between Roskomnadzor and Telegram began after the adoption of the 'Yarovaya package' in 2016. It includes two laws, one of which obliges messengers to register with Roskomnadzor's registry of information distributors from July 20, 2016. In addition, they must identify their users, transfer encryption keys to the FSB, and store user messages in Russia. Failure to comply with these requirements should result in blocking services in Russia. Telegram founder Pavel Durov refused to comply with the new requirements. He emphasized that 'Telegram does not provide data or encryption keys to third parties, including governments,' and 'laws passed in individual countries will not affect this policy.' In the summer of 2017, Roskomnadzor sent an open letter to Pavel Durov threatening to block the messenger. A few days later, the head of the agency, Alexander Zharov, warned that days were numbered before a block. Durov himself explained that the registration data of Telegram's publishing company is publicly available and, 'if the regulator's wishes are indeed limited to this, I have no objection to using this data to register Telegram Messenger LLP in the registry of information distributors.' At the same time, he reiterated that he would not comply with the 'unconstitutional and technically unfeasible' 'Yarovaya law.' As a result, Roskomnadzor temporarily abandoned the idea of blocking the messenger. In the autumn of 2017, a Russian court fined Telegram 800,000 rubles for refusing to hand over user correspondence keys to the FSB. The messenger's management repeatedly explained that fulfilling the FSB's demands was technically impossible. In particular, in secret chats with end-to-end encryption, keys are created and remain only on users' devices, not being transmitted to Telegram servers. Therefore, the FSB's demands effectively mean interference with the service's operation mechanism itself, rather than simply access to existing data. In April 2018, a court ordered Telegram to be blocked in Russia. After that, Roskomnadzor added Telegram's websites to the registry of information banned for distribution in the Russian Federation and instructed providers to start blocking addresses. To do this, more than 1 million Amazon and Google IP addresses, whose cloud infrastructure Telegram used, were blocked in Russia. This led to large-scale communication problems not only in Russia but also in Belarus. Services that were not related to Telegram were affected. For example, online stores, SkyEng school, 'Ptichka' courier service, Viber messenger, 'Odnoklassniki' social network, 'Open Science' association, and others did not work. Telegram itself also became inaccessible to some users, but generally continued to function, partly thanks to VPN and proxy servers. Flash mob against the blocking of the Telegram messenger in front of the Roskomnadzor building in St. Petersburg, April 13, 2018. Photo: Anatoly Maltsev / EPA. A month later, Roskomnadzor added over a thousand more IP addresses to the registry of banned websites. The messenger itself continued to operate, while WhatsApp, Viber, and several other services were mistakenly caught in the mass blocking. Confrontation Despite repeated attempts, Roskomnadzor failed to completely stop Telegram's operation. In addition to using the cloud infrastructure of major providers, Telegram quickly changed IP addresses and distributed traffic, making the blocks ineffective. The application also has built-in support for proxies (SOCKS5 and MTProto), which allowed users to easily bypass restrictions. In fact, only the web version of the messenger was blocked, but many users connected to it via VPN. "Roskomnadzor's own technical capabilities for deep traffic filtering were not yet developed enough to effectively isolate Telegram without seriously impacting the entire internet infrastructure. The Russian public sided with the messenger. On April 30, 2018, a rally in support of Telegram, organized by the Libertarian Party and agreed with the city authorities, took place in Moscow on Sakharov Avenue. Pavel Durov called for people to attend the rally. According to the organizers, the event, under the slogans of internet freedom and demands for the resignation of Roskomnadzor's leadership, gathered more than 10,000 people. Rallies with paper airplanes as a symbol of the messenger took place across the country: users launched them from their apartment and office windows. Roskomnadzor's New Strategy After the situation with Telegram, it became clear to the authorities that they would have to abandon 'carpet' IP blocking and find a new model of control. As a result, in 2019, Russia adopted the law on the so-called 'sovereign internet.' Its initiators were several senators and deputies, with Andrey Klishas being one of the main authors. The authorities explained the necessity of the law by protecting the Russian segment of the network from possible external threats and risks of disconnection from the global internet. The document obliged telecom operators to install equipment through which Roskomnadzor can centrally manage internet traffic. The law also provides for the creation of a national domain name system so that Russian websites can continue to operate even in case of problems with international infrastructure. In fact, the law created a legal basis for stricter and more centralized control over internet traffic within the country. " To avoid repeating the mistakes of 2018, the authorities also began to use more sophisticated blocking methods. For example, DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) — a technology for analyzing internet traffic at the level of packet content, not just by IP address or domain. It allows identifying which service a user is accessing, what protocol is being used, and, if necessary, slowing down or blocking a specific type of traffic. In Russia, its large-scale implementation began precisely after the adoption of the 'sovereign internet' law: telecom operators began installing special equipment for centralized traffic management at the request of Roskomnadzor. In practice, DPI was used, for example, to slow down Twitter in 2021 and YouTube in 2024. Rally for a free internet, Moscow, March 10, 2019. The rally was a response to the 'sovereign RuNet' bill. Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP / Scanpix / LETA. In parallel with the implementation of DPI, Russia continued to develop the SORM system — an infrastructure for intercepting and storing data by telecom operators. Formally, SORM has existed since the 1990s, but in the 2010s and especially in the 2020s, the requirements for operators significantly increased: storage volumes and technical access capabilities expanded. Operators are obliged to install equipment that allows special services to obtain information about user connections, traffic metadata, and, in cases provided by law, the content of transmitted data. This infrastructure is built directly into communication networks and operates at the provider level, not individual services. "There is a difference between 2018 and 2026" In June 2020, Roskomnadzor officially announced the lifting of restrictions on Telegram. Formally, this was explained by the messenger's readiness to participate in countering extremism and terrorism. In the following years, Telegram continued to operate in Russia and became the most popular means of communication, actively used by officials and government agencies. By October 2018, the monthly Russian audience was almost 9.3 million people, and by November 2025, the number of unique Telegram users in Russia reached approximately 105 million people. Practically until 2025, no further attempts at large-scale blocking were made, despite the overall tightening of internet regulation. At the same time, TASS emphasizes that the court decision to block Telegram is still in effect, as it has not been overturned. The messenger's lawyers filed an appeal, but it was rejected. Cyber lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan told 'Agentstvo' that Roskomnadzor had been violating the law for six years by unblocking Telegram. "The court ordered Telegram to be blocked in 2018, but Roskomnadzor couldn't do it for 2 years, and then didn't. It's still unclear why the agency decided it had the right not to comply with the court's decision. But there's a difference between 2018 and 2026,' Darbinyan told 'Novaya-Europe.' According to him, firstly, the agency itself has become a 'monster — a super-regulator in the internet sphere,' and since the fall of last year has actually been granted extraordinary powers to block whatever and however it pleases. In addition, the censor's arsenal now includes not delegated censorship to providers in the form of orders to block certain domains, IPs, and subnets, but a 'high-tech automated censorship machine in the form of TSPU with very modern DPI under the hood and plug-in neural networks.' "And Durov is no longer the same. In 2018, he called on people to take to the streets, launch paper airplanes, and gave grants to support MTProto proxies in Telegram, but now he has limited himself to an edifying post about the futility of the decision to strangle Telegram,' the expert points out. Darbinyan believes Durov can be understood, because when his messenger was 'just expelled from Russia,' its main audience was in Russia. Now Telegram is 'a big tech with a billion-strong audience, of which Russians make up only 1/10.' Therefore, business interests have shifted to other parts of the world, and 'you can't take responsibility for calling people to the streets now.' At the same time, the expert notes that against the backdrop of attempts to block Telegram, the administrative boost for the national messenger MAX did not happen. He points out that people can be forced to install MAX at gunpoint, but forcing them to use it for private communication and reading channels is a very difficult task. "As we can see, people are more willing to install a VPN to stay with Telegram than to use MAX. Yes, it will probably lose about 20% of its current audience, but we also see how actively the VPN audience is growing. According to our estimates, it already constitutes almost half of the country's internet population, and this inspires optimism,' says Darbinyan. Has Telegram cooperated with the Russian authorities? In 2025, the human rights project 'First Department' reported that the FSB was initiating treason cases against Russians who wrote to bots or feedback accounts of Ukrainian Telegram channels. According to human rights activists, at the time of detention, law enforcement officers already had the correspondence of the defendants with these channels. "The way the messages became available to the FSB is unknown. Possible explanations included the use of special technical means and possible cooperation between Telegram and the Russian authorities. 'Important Stories,' citing a leak of a border crossing database, reported that Durov visited Russia more than 50 times between 2015 and 2021, despite claims that he had not been to his homeland for a long time due to security concerns. The publication also published an investigation into Telegram's server infrastructure. Journalists found that part of the network infrastructure was serviced by Global Network Management (GNM), a company associated with Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Vedeneev, who had previously collaborated with Pavel Durov. The investigation mentioned links between structures affiliated with Vedeneev and Russian state contracts. In particular, they were involved in implementing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies for controlling user traffic. A technical feature of the MTProto protocol was discussed separately — the presence of an open device identifier (auth_key_id), which is added to each message in Telegram. Experts noted that with access to the network infrastructure, this identifier can be seen and correlated with IP addresses and activity times. This does not allow reading correspondence, but theoretically makes it possible to track the fact of sending or receiving messages by a specific device. Telegram itself denied the accusations. The company stated that the servers belong to Telegram, third parties cannot access them, and correspondence is not transferred to government bodies.
