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MOSCOW: WhatsApp accused Moscow of trying to block millions of Russians from accessing secure communication after calls on the messaging app were restricted, as Russia promotes home-grown social media platforms and seeks greater control over the country’s Internet space. Russia said on Wednesday that it had started restricting some WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, and Telegram calls, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of failing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases.
Text messaging services and voice notes are currently unaffected.
A simmering dispute with foreign tech providers intensified after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Russia blocking Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, slowing the speed of Alphabet’s YouTube and issuing hundreds of fines to platforms that failed to comply with Russian rules on online content and data storage.
“WhatsApp is private, end-to-end encrypted, and defies government attempts to violate people’s right to secure communication, which is why Russia is trying to block it from over 100 million Russian people,” WhatsApp said late on Wednesday.
“We will keep doing all we can to make end-to-end encrypted communication available to people everywhere, including in Russia.”
Telegram said its moderators were using AI tools to monitor public parts of the platform to remove millions of malicious messages every day.
“Telegram actively combats harmful use of its platform including calls for sabotage or violence and fraud,” Telegram said.
In July 2025, WhatsApp’s monthly reach in Russia was 97.3 million people, compared to 90.8 million for Telegram, according to Mediascope data. Third-placed VK Messenger, an offering from state-controlled tech company VK, reached 17.9 million people.
Russia has a population of more than 140 million people.

STEADY DEGRADATION
Russia banning WhatsApp and Telegram users from making calls comes as the government is actively promoting a new state-controlled messaging app, MAX, that will be integrated with government services and which critics fear could track its users’ activities.
Senior politicians are migrating to MAX, urging their followers to come with them. Anton Gorelkin, a leading regulator of Russia’s IT sector in parliament, said he would post to his MAX followers first and said many other lawmakers would soon follow suit. WhatsApp’s other services remain available for now, but the steady degradation of a service is a tactic Russia has employed before, notably with YouTube, where slower download speeds have made it harder for people to access content. Human Rights Watch said in a report last month that Russia has been “meticulously expanding legal and technological tools to carve out Russia’s section of the Internet into a tightly controlled and isolated forum.” Lawmakers have approved a new law that tightens censorship and could have sweeping ramifications for digital privacy, with Russians facing fines if they search online for content Moscow considers “extremist,” including via virtual private networks that millions use to bypass Internet blocks.

KOROLYOV: After getting fined for her environmental protest against a road being built through a national park near Moscow, Irina Kuriseva is back to check on the construction.
“We only want to defend nature,” the 62-year-old told AFP at the Losiny Ostrov (Elk Island) park, a 129-square-kilometer nature reserve with hundreds of species of wildlife including endangered birds.
With dissident voices in Russia almost totally silenced and as the country presses on with its massive military offensive in Ukraine, environmental activism has become highly risky.
“The authorities have become completely indifferent” and laws have been “softened” in favor of polluters and property developers, said one activist, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In the outskirts of Moscow, the issue has become particularly acute as developers continue to build new homes and residents commuting to the capital find themselves stuck in traffic jams for hours.
In Korolyov, a town of 200,000 people, the authorities decided to build a highway that passes through the national park to ease congestion and give access to a new housing development.
In July, Kuriseva and five other activists blocked machinery spreading asphalt in the forest.
They were arrested by police and fined, after spending a night at the police station.
“We were interrogated like criminals who had killed someone,” said Kuriseva, a local resident.
Russian law prohibits construction in national parks but local authorities got around it by arguing that the project consisted of “repairs” to an existing road.
Dmitry Trunin, an environmental defense lawyer with more than 25 years of experience, said this argument amounted to “falsification and fraud.”
“There was never a road there,” he said, explaining that there had only been an unpaved track used by forest rangers which then became just a path through the forest.
Kuriseva said that “asphalt powder” was placed on the path in an attempt to classify it as a road.
The highway is due to be completed by March 2026 at a cost of 5.4 million euros ($6.3 million), according to the regional transport ministry.


Mikhail Rogov, a 36-year-old engineer who also took part in the protest with Kuriseva, said the judge was “smiling” to the defendants in court.
“She told us: ‘If you don’t want any problems, sign these papers, pay your fines and you’re free’,” he said.
The judge, Maria Loktionova, had in 2023 sentenced another environmental activist, Alexander Bakhtin, to six years in prison for three posts on social media criticizing the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Despite the crackdown on dissent, activists opposed to the highway have sought to appeal to President Vladimir Putin to help their cause.
In June, around a thousand people queued outside the presidential administration building in Moscow to submit their complaints.
Putin visited the national park in 2010 and fed a baby elk with a bottle, telling reporters that nature was “a gift from God” that must be “protected.”
The tone from the Kremlin is very different in 2025.
“This is a question for the regional authorities. Don’t get the president involved,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in July when asked about the project by AFP.
Environmental protection “should not be a barrier to development and the comfort of the lives of citizens,” he said.
Trunin said it has become “harder and harder to defend the truth in court.”
“The power vertical takes decisions and law enforcement and monitoring bodies obey,” he said.