Russia And The New Digital Sovereignty
By Gajanan Khergamker
In the uneasy silence that often precedes structural change, Russia has moved with characteristic decisiveness. In February 2026, access to Meta’s WhatsApp was blocked across the Russian Federation, affecting nearly 100 million users and closing the door on one of the last major Western communication platforms still functioning widely within its borders. Roskomnadzor, the state communications watchdog, removed key WhatsApp domains from Russia’s national domain name system, rendering the service inaccessible without circumvention tools such as VPNs. The message was unmistakable. Citizens were encouraged to migrate to MAX, a state-backed domestic messaging platform positioned as a secure and sovereign alternative.
This decisive measure did not arise in isolation. It is anchored in a legal trajectory that began in 2022 when a Moscow court designated Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as an extremist organisation following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. The designation placed Meta in the same legal category as groups considered hostile to the Russian state. Facebook and Instagram were swiftly restricted. WhatsApp survived for a time, largely because of its embeddedness in everyday communication, but its position was always precarious. The Kremlin’s narrative framed restrictions as necessary to counter extremism, fraud and foreign interference. Critics have long argued that the deeper objective is to consolidate control over digital discourse and reduce reliance on Western technology ecosystems.
Telegram, ironically founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, has also faced sustained regulatory pressure. Though immensely popular within Russia and beyond, it has repeatedly been fined and scrutinised for alleged failures to cooperate fully with state authorities on data access and content moderation. The tension underscores a paradox. Even platforms with Russian origins are expected to align unambiguously with state priorities or risk sanction. The broader architecture now taking shape resembles a digital fortress, one in which encrypted, privately controlled communication is increasingly displaced by platforms amenable to state oversight.
Across the subcontinent, a different but equally forceful assertion of authority is unfolding. India’s Supreme Court, in early February 2026, issued a stern warning to WhatsApp and its parent Meta in the context of the long-running controversy over the company’s 2021 privacy policy. That policy had required users to accept expanded data-sharing practices across the Meta ecosystem or risk losing functionality. The Court reminded the company that the right to privacy in India is a fundamental right flowing from Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution, as affirmed in the landmark 2017 Puttaswamy judgment. The bench went so far as to observe that if WhatsApp could not comply with the Constitution of India, it was free to leave the country.
The warning was not theatrical excess. It came amid broader regulatory tightening, including new rules requiring social media platforms to remove unlawful content within three hours of official notification. Indian authorities have made it clear that market access is conditional upon adherence to domestic law, whether in matters of privacy, competition or content moderation. Unlike Russia’s frontal replacement of foreign platforms with state-sponsored alternatives, India’s posture is anchored in constitutional adjudication. The contest is framed not as ideological rejection of foreign technology but as insistence that global corporations must submit to the discipline of Indian law.
The juxtaposition is instructive. Russia’s ban of WhatsApp and promotion of MAX represent an assertive model of digital sovereignty in which the state seeks to command the architecture of communication itself. The designation of Meta as extremist, the blocking of domains and the sustained pressure on Telegram collectively signal a recalibration of digital space as a domain of national security. Control over data flows becomes synonymous with political stability. In such an environment, encryption is suspect and platform independence is negotiable.
India’s approach, though equally firm in tone, is structurally different. The Supreme Court’s admonition draws legitimacy from constitutional doctrine. It is not an attempt to replace WhatsApp with a state-owned messenger but to discipline its practices within a rights-based framework. The emphasis is on consent, data minimisation and respect for fundamental rights. The threat of exit is real, but it operates as a legal consequence of non-compliance rather than as a strategic substitution of ecosystem.
The global context sharpens this contrast. China has long perfected a model of comprehensive digital sovereignty through the Great Firewall, ensuring that Western platforms remain inaccessible and that domestic giants operate within a tightly supervised regulatory grid. The Chinese state does not merely regulate platforms; it engineers the environment in which they exist. North Korea goes further still, offering its citizens only a heavily curated domestic intranet and criminalising unauthorised access to the global internet. Cuba, though less technologically insulated, maintains significant state control over infrastructure and access, with limited and closely monitored digital freedoms.
Japan, by contrast, operates within a liberal democratic framework where privacy statutes and telecommunications laws regulate platforms without seeking to exclude them wholesale. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation similarly imposes stringent compliance obligations while preserving market openness. The emphasis there is on harmonised standards rather than expulsion.
What emerges from this comparative landscape is a fractured digital commons. The once romantic notion of a borderless internet has yielded to a mosaic of sovereign internets, each calibrated to domestic political philosophy. In Russia, the blocking of WhatsApp and elevation of MAX exemplify a state-centric paradigm in which communication channels are strategic assets. In India, the Supreme Court’s warning to WhatsApp exemplifies a constitutional republic asserting that technological innovation cannot outrun fundamental rights. In China and North Korea, control is pre-emptive and structural. In Japan and the European Union, regulation seeks equilibrium between openness and accountability.
The central question is no longer whether states will regulate digital platforms. That debate has ended. The question is how far they will go, and on what normative foundation. Russia has chosen consolidation and substitution, embedding communication within a sovereign frame defined by security and control. India has chosen confrontation through law, invoking constitutional supremacy to discipline corporate conduct. Both approaches reflect a deeper transformation. The internet is no longer merely infrastructure. It is territory, and territory invites sovereignty.
For citizens, the implications are profound. The platforms that mediate daily conversation are now instruments in a geopolitical contest over data, privacy and power. For corporations, the era of benign global expansion without deep local compliance is over. And for courts and regulators, the task ahead is to ensure that in asserting sovereignty, the essential liberties that made the digital revolution meaningful are not quietly surrendered in its defence.
