Two phones and an app: How Russians skirt Putin’s digital iron curtain

Officials have been pushing Russians to use state-backed alternatives to foreign apps and websites in a drive for “digital sovereignty”.

MOSCOW – In a quiet cafe popular for its free Wi-Fi and good coffee, a Russian interior designer logs onto a virtual private network so she can chat with friends abroad using the US messaging service WhatsApp, which is blocked inside Russia.

Later, she toggles off the VPN to buy a ticket on the Russian Railways website, which bars anyone using the tools to obscure their location. She then picks up a second phone to check for messages from clients on the state-controlled app MAX.

Since the Kremlin ratcheted up control over the internet in 2026, Russians have been turning to increasingly convoluted technical solutions to circumvent state monitoring and restrictions on popular foreign apps like Meta Platforms' WhatsApp and the Telegram messenger.

Frustration over the curbs – together with rising prices, tax hikes and war fatigue – is widely believed to have contributed to Putin's falling approval ratings, which dropped from 75.1 per cent in February to 65.6 per cent in April, according to state pollster VTsIOM, their lowest level since he launched the all-out conflict in Ukraine in 2022. They now stand at nearly 67 per cent.

Officials have been pushing Russians to use state-backed alternatives to foreign apps and websites in a drive for “digital sovereignty”. But some users are wary following warnings from Kremlin critics and some Western tech companies that MAX could be used to track them, which technology giant VK, its owner, denies.

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

“Of course, this is all a huge pain in the backside, but what else can we do?” she said, asking to be identified by one name due to the sensitivity of the matter.

“You get used to it and spend your days turning VPNs on and off, toggling between different messengers and switching between different virtual countries or phones to use the apps and websites you need.”

VPNs work by routing a user’s internet connection through private servers outside Russia. In March alone, there were 9.2 million downloads of the five most popular VPN services from the Google Play store, 14 times more than in the same month in 2025, the Russian daily newspaper Kommersant reported, citing data from Digital Budget, a Moscow-based consultancy that tracks online behavior.

“We’ve never seen this kind of take-up rate before,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, a Russian internet freedom activist based in Lisbon.

Moscow has d