The acute budget deficit of the Russian Federation does not prevent the Kremlin leadership from directing colossal financial resources towards strengthening digital censorship, which is becoming an absolute priority of state policy. According to the draft federal budget for the period 2027–2029, the total allocations for the activity of the Main Radio Frequency Center will amount to about 60 billion rubles, with the agency receiving almost 20 billion annually. The massive taxpayer funding demonstrates the authorities’ firm intention to complete the construction of the so-called sovereign internet, completely isolating citizens from objective information.
The government plans to double budgetary spending on the development of an automated internet security system, which is used by regulators to filter network traffic and slow down undesirable services.
Roskomnadzor is rapidly expanding the practice of using technical means to counter threats, which effectively block independent media and popular social networks.
The large-scale increase in funding for regulatory bodies is happening against the backdrop of cuts in social spending, highlighting the regime’s true priorities, which are ready to sacrifice the population’s well-being for the sake of maintaining ideological control.
This fall, Russian authorities moved from targeted restrictions to massive blockages of subnets and large pools of IP addresses, disrupting the stable operation of many popular censorship circumvention tools at the same time.
Such actions deal a serious blow to the technological infrastructure of business and deprive millions of Russians of the last opportunity to use blocked messengers and human rights platforms.
Official documents, which were previously removed from the agency’s website, directly confirm the Kremlin’s long-term goal to achieve a 92% blocking level of such services by 2030.
Additional budget funds are directed towards financing the activities of the Center for Studying and Monitoring the Youth Network Environment, whose 3-year budget will exceed almost 4 billion rubles.
This structure, created by direct order of the country’s top leadership, carries out total ideological surveillance of the younger generation under the pretext of protection from destructive content. In fact, a sprawling system of digital informers is formed at the expense of the state treasury, allowing authorities to promptly identify and suppress any manifestations of free thought among schoolchildren and students.
Alongside increasing technical pressure, the Kremlin seeks to maximally conceal the financial mechanisms of digital repression, hiding from society the true scope of public funds expenditure. The removal of documentation on multi-billion subsidies to the Main Radio Frequency Center from official resources deprives citizens of the ability to control the use of taxes, which are effectively directed towards the destruction of their fundamental civil rights. Complete regulator control and lack of judicial oversight allow turning automated security systems into a tool for the arbitrary destruction of any digital resources that contain critical assessments of the country’s leadership policies.
The state-formed concept of so-called “white lists” dooms the country’s residents to complete informational isolation, pushing them out of the global digital space. Forced dependency on platforms exclusively approved by the authorities narrows opportunities for education, professional development, and international cooperation, creating artificial barriers for millions of users.
The systematic cleansing of independent information sources, combined with aggressive ideological monitoring, turns the virtual space into a space of total control, where any attempts to maintain privacy are viewed as a threat to national security.
