The Kremlin’s latest move against Instagram, confirmed by network monitor NetBlocks early this week, marks another phase in a struggle that has exposed the limits of its own censorship machine. Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who has tracked these controls for years, saw this coming from a different angle. When Western tech firms pulled out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, he warned the effect would be the opposite of what the West intended. The isolation, he argued, would help Putin, not hurt him.
Soldatov’s concern was specific. In the first week of the war, he pointed to social media platforms like Facebook as the last open spaces where Russians could actually talk. They could discuss what was happening inside their own country. They could see what was happening abroad. Cutting that off, he said, would be a gift to the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. The authorities could not just flip a switch on these channels without serious blowback.
Facebook did not immediately shut down. The Kremlin responded by throttling it and Twitter until both were effectively unreachable for most users. That pattern is now repeating with Instagram. The same tactic. The same result. Putin has since ordered blocks on Western media and independent news sites. A new law now makes it a crime to spread information that contradicts the official government narrative.
The irony is that Putin spent years before the war building a digital fortress. It was designed to isolate Russians from global information flows, modeled on the surveillance and control systems used in China. But the fortress was never meant to work this way. It was built for peacetime pressure, not wartime collapse. When Western sanctions hit and the tech companies left, the system began to buckle under the strain.
What Soldatov predicted is now playing out in plain sight. The censorship infrastructure is not seamless. It leaks. Throttling is not a clean block. It slows, it chokes, it frustrates. But it also creates workarounds. Russians are finding ways around the restrictions, using VPNs and other tools. The Kremlin’s control is aggressive, but it is not absolute.
That weakness matters. It suggests that Putin’s information war is not as airtight as he wants it to appear. The throttling of Instagram, like the throttling of Facebook and Twitter before it, is a blunt instrument. It reveals a system struggling to keep pace with the demand for information it cannot control. The more the Kremlin tries to shut down channels, the more it exposes the cracks.
The consequences are real. Independent news sites are gone. Western media is blocked. Social media is throttled into near silence. But the pressure to talk does not disappear. It moves elsewhere. It goes underground. The Kremlin can slow the flow, but it cannot stop it entirely. That is the lesson of the last few months. Soldatov’s warning was not that the censorship would work perfectly. It was that the West’s well-intentioned actions would make it easier for Putin to try. And he is trying. But the leaks are showing.
