Since mid-2025, tens of thousands of mobile internet shutdowns may have taken place across Russia, according to some estimates. Officially presented as a wartime necessity to counter Ukrainian drone attacks, shutdowns result in everyday practical difficulties for the population and impose costs on businesses.

Yet there is mixed evidence that these unprecedented internet restrictions have translated into significant changes in voter preferences or will cause major disruptions to the 2026 election campaign. An expert who wished to remain anonymous examines their political impact.

Shutdowns in numbers

Daily, Russians are dealing with an expanding array of online restrictions as the country approaches its first parliamentary election since the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine. Among the most visible are mobile internet shutdowns, which have become part of everyday life across much of Russia since mid-2025. According to Na Svyazi, an independent monitoring project relying largely on user reports, Russia has experienced around 2,000 shutdowns per month since mid-2025. Not surprisingly, Top10VPN, a digital-privacy website that tracks major government-imposed internet disruptions, ranked Russia first by the number of major shutdowns in 2025.

Authorities justify mobile restrictions as a security measure intended to prevent Ukrainian drones from using cellular networks for navigation. Yet the relationship between attacks and shutdowns is far from straightforward. Independent Russian journalist  found that only around 40% of initial shutdowns coincided with actual drone attacks, while outages also occurred in regions far removed from the frontline, including Siberia and the Russian Far East. This mismatch does not necessarily mean that shutdowns are imposed simply to cut Russians off from the internet. Authorities may also fear potential attacks on military or defense-industrial facilities and act preemptively.

Whatever their rationale, shutdowns create serious everyday obstacles: card payments fail, taxi apps stop working, while navigation, deliveries, banking, and other services become unreliable. These disruptions now affect a large share of Russians across the country. A large online survey conducted in Russia in late 2025 suggested that more than 50% of respondents were either very or somewhat concerned about having internet outages occurring in their region.

But can this massive disruption to connectivity affect electoral dynamics?

Hurting the Kremlin, but unlikely to reshape the race

So far, there is limited evidence that the spread of shutdowns produced a major nationwide shift in public opinion in 2025. According to the Levada Center, a Russian pollster widely regarded as independent, Putin’s approval stood at 86% in May 2025, when shutdowns began to spread, 84% in November, and 85% in December. Party ratings showed similarly little movement. In April 2025, right before shutdowns became widespread, United Russia would have received 58% of the vote among those who had decided which party to support; in November 2025, its support still stood above 50%.

Nevertheless, these aggregate trends do not by themselves prove that shutdowns had no effect. Negative reactions could have been offset by other developments, while national averages could conceal stronger reactions in regions particularly affected by shutdowns. Still, the absence of a visible break suggests that shutdowns alone were not a very serious political shock in 2025. There appears to have been, however, a gradual deterioration in broader public sentiment. Levada Center regularly asks respondents whether they believe that “things in the country are going in the right direction” or that the country is “moving down the wrong path”. The share of those choosing the former declined from 73% in May to 69% in July and 67% in December 2025.

Early 2026 saw a new and more aggressive round of internet censorship. WhatsApp was fully blocked, while the authorities increasingly restricted Telegram. At the same time, Moscow and Saint Petersburg experienced prolonged mobile internet outages. In a March Levada poll, 77% of respondents said they had experienced problems with mobile internet during the recent month, while 55% opposed restrictions on Telegram and WhatsApp. Broader public sentiment also deteriorated. According to Levada, the share of respondents who thought that the country was moving in the right direction fell to 55% in April 2026 and has remained around that level since.

However, it would be a mistake to attribute this broader dissatisfaction to internet restrictions alone. Russians are facing rising prices, higher taxes, broader economic strain, war fatigue, and the growing visibility of the war’s costs. Internet restrictions are better understood as one component of cumulative disaffection. Blame attribution matters too: not everyone experiencing a shutdown will necessarily blame the Kremlin for it, let alone trace the problem back to the war with Ukraine. Moreover, as shutdowns and other restrictions become routine, their political salience may diminish as people adapt to them.

Finally, the parties allowed to compete in today’s Russia — and thus in a position to make internet restrictions a campaign issue — operate within the constraints of a political system controlled by the Kremlin. That said, the New PeopleRead Term in glossary party has made opposition to internet restrictions a visible part of its campaign, while the Communist PartyRead Term in glossary has also criticized some of these measures. It has even been argued that New People has managed to channel broader frustration over internet restrictions while remaining within the boundaries of Russia’s managed political system. Yet the party has hardly established clear ownership of the issue. In a Russian Field survey conducted in June 2026, only 15% of respondents identified New People as the party most actively defending digital rights and opposing internet restrictions, while almost half could not name any party associated with this position.

All this suggests that internet restrictions matter to Russians and may contribute to more negative assessments of both the situation in the country and those in power. But their electoral effects are likely to be much less direct. Therefore, it is unlikely that frustration over shutdowns and other internet restrictions will automatically translate into votes against United Russia in the 2026 State Duma campaign.

Disrupting the internet without disrupting the voting process

Shutdowns are also unlikely to cripple the Kremlin’s electoral machinery. At first glance, mobile internet outages might seem problematic for the remote electronic votingRead Term in glossary, which will be available in more than 30 regions during the upcoming elections. This mode of voting has become an important, if highly controversial, component of Russian elections. Independent monitors have repeatedly criticized the system as opaque and vulnerable to manipulation, making it easier to secure favorable results for the Kremlin.

Yet shutdowns themselves may pose only a limited obstacle to electronic voting. In June, the authorities announced that resources used for remote electronic voting had been added to the so-called “white lists” — lists of websites and services that remain accessible when mobile internet is restricted. Moreover, public-sector employees and employees of state-owned or state-dependent companies, who are particularly exposed to administrative and corporate electoral mobilization, can be pressured to vote at their workplaces. To the extent that such voting takes place on computers connected to fixed-line internet, mobile shutdowns may pose less of an obstacle.

The communication side of such administrative and corporate mobilization is potentially more vulnerable. Telegram and WhatsApp have long allowed managers to send voting instructions, coordinate turnout, and require employees to confirm that they have voted. It has therefore been argued that restrictions on these platforms could disrupt what had become a well-established and highly centralized system of electoral mobilization. Yet the Russian state has also been building a substitute: the state-backed MAX messenger. Levada estimates that MAX usage rose from just 6% in August 2025 to 42% by March 2026. Since September 2025, MAX has also been mandatory for pre-installation on new smartphones and tablets. Schools, universities, state institutions, and some employers have meanwhile pushed students and employees to move their communications to the platform.

Many Russians are wary of MAX, in part because of concerns about state surveillance. Some officials and other users reportedly even keep MAX on a separate phone. Yet from the perspective of electoral mobilization, how enthusiastically people adopted the messenger matters less than whether they have it. The social groups most vulnerable to administrative pressure are also among those whom the state has been particularly active in moving onto MAX. Restrictions on Telegram and WhatsApp may therefore make the Kremlin’s mobilization machinery less convenient and efficient, but without depriving it of a communications channel altogether.

Long-term consequences

For sure, Russia’s shutdowns and wider internet censorship do not help the authorities politically. They create everyday irritation and probably contribute, alongside other problems, to worsening perceptions of the country’s direction and declining support for those in power. Yet there is little reason so far to regard them as a central factor in the 2026 Duma election. Russians have had more than a year to adapt to shutdowns, responsibility for the disruptions is not necessarily attributed directly to the Kremlin, and the state has insulated important elements of its electoral mobilization system from mobile internet restrictions.

The more consequential effects may emerge beyond the Duma vote, though. Shutdowns and restrictions on foreign messengers can gradually push Russians toward state-backed or state-controlled platforms such as MAX and VK. This can make independent information harder to access, increase the state’s capacity to monitor communication, encourage self-censorship, and make bottom-up organization and collective action more difficult. In the long run, the political significance of Russia’s increasingly restricted internet may therefore lie less in how Russians vote in September and more in how further restrictions limit an already tightly controlled political space.