Runet gets a new boss: The Bell exclusive

The Bell has managed to find out who is behind the latest wave of repression against the Russian internet — from restricting calls on messaging apps to blocking Telegram and waging war on VPNs. These crackdowns have already caused businesses to lose millions, as we previously wrote about, and have also contributed to both a decline in Putin’s approval rating and in support for the authorities overall. As we learned, the reason for the sudden spurt is a change in who oversees the internet within the FSB: the notorious Second Service, whose officers poisoned Alexei Navalny in 2020.

• Since at least summer 2025, the Second Service has been handling online repression. According to The Bell’s sources, shortly before calls in WhatsApp and Telegram began to be blocked in August 2025, the head of the Second Service, Alexei Sedov, met with Putin, “promised to restore order on the internet — and received a free hand.”
• The change in oversight became noticeable at industry meetings and was immediately reflected in the way regulators communicated with the sector. During one meeting at the Ministry of Digital Development, representatives of IT companies saw an officer from the Second Service for the first time in decades. They were handed directives requiring them to combat VPN services on their own, ordered to sign them, and then the papers were immediately taken back without the signatories even being allowed to read them in full, one source told The Bell.
• More than 90 million people in Russia use Telegram each month, including military personnel at the front. After accessibility worsened, the number of Yandex searches for the term “VPN” rose from 12 million in December 2025 to 16 million in March 2026 — the highest level since the start of the war. According to tech expert Mikhail Klimarev, as many as 65 million Russians now use VPNs.
• At the same time, Putin’s approval rating has fallen. According to state pollster VTsIOM, at the beginning of April the president’s approval rating stood at 67.8% — 7.3 percentage points lower than in January and below 70% for the first time since the war began. Bloomberg reported that the blocking measures have already triggered criticism inside the Kremlin, and one immediate consequence could be an easing of restrictions on Telegram. So far there are no signs of this — Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the restrictions “will remain in force as long as necessary.”
• Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev, whom the industry had viewed as an effective lobbyist, has found himself in an unenviable position: he is the one who has to explain unpopular decisions, while having no power to stop them. According to one of The Bell’s sources, “Sedov’s influence is so great that essentially no one can do anything about it.”
• The Second Service’s initial ideas after taking control of the internet were even harsher than what has now been implemented. Security officials proposed automatically fining people through the Gosuslugi state services portal if a SIM card in their name was caught using a VPN. That idea was blocked — but the war against tools that bypass censorship continues.

Why the world should care

The change in who oversees the Russian internet is a structural shift, the consequences of which are already clearly visible. A service that has neither a mandate to negotiate with the industry nor any tool other than bans has been given a free hand — and the result is predictable. If the balance of power does not tilt away from the FSB for some reason, there are no grounds to expect an easing of the crackdown. The reaction of society, and of a considerable part of business and the bureaucracy, is beginning to resemble the response of their Soviet predecessors to Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in 1985 — a backlash that dealt a serious blow to the authority of Soviet power.