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Russia’s FSB Second Service has taken control of internet policy, driving a crackdown on VPNs, foreign messaging apps and online payments, The Bell reported.
The security branch has long been associated with political repression and opposition cases, citing sources in the IT, telecom and payments sectors.
According to the report, the shift began at least last summer and has since been tied to restrictions on calls in WhatsApp and Telegram, the wider campaign against VPN tools and the full blocking of some messaging services.
One source in the Russian IT industry told The Bell that he saw a representative of the FSB’s Second Service at a recent meeting in the Digital Development Ministry for the first time in decades of work in the sector.
“Everything changed because the initiative in the sector was seized by the Second Service. Now they go everywhere, they decide everything,” the source said.
The Bell reported that the Second Service, officially the FSB Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and the Fight Against Terrorism, was given control over Runet at least by the summer of last year.
The report said the service is now trying to clear the internet of what it describes as hostile means of communication.
A telecom source told The Bell that the Second Service is now responsible for the internet in Russia, while a source in the payments market said inspections were recently carried out at several major payment services over whether they were processing user payments to VPN providers.
According to the report, major payment operators were ordered to stop such operations immediately.
One source from the IT industry described a recent meeting in the Digital Development Ministry where executives from telecom and internet companies were told they must take responsibility for fighting circumvention tools used by Russians to bypass internet restrictions.
The source said those who did not comply were threatened with punishment, including the loss of tax benefits and exclusion from state-approved “white lists.”
The Bell said such treatment was unusual for industry executives, who were more accustomed to the ministry presenting itself as a defender of the sector.
A former top manager at one of Russia’s largest IT companies described the transfer of internet oversight from FSB “technicians” to the Second Service as a “big shift” for the industry.
The Bell said one source claimed that around the same time the internet crackdown began, Second Service head Alexei Sedov met with President Vladimir Putin and promised to restore order online.
“Sedov supposedly promised Putin to restore order on the internet—and received carte blanche,” the source told The Bell.
The report said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to The Bell’s request for comment on that claim.
The Bell described Sedov, 71, as a long-serving security official who has headed the Second Service since 2006 after being appointed by Putin.
The report also said the Second Service inherited the functions of the Soviet KGB’s Fifth Directorate, which was responsible for fighting so-called ideological subversion and persecuting dissidents.
The Bell said the push against foreign messaging platforms intensified after a July 2025 Tass report under the headline that the perpetrators of the Crocus attack had been recruited through Telegram chats.
Less than a month later, authorities announced restrictions on calls in both Telegram and WhatsApp, the report said.
Ahead of the full blocking of Telegram in February 2026, articles critical of the platform appeared simultaneously in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Rossiyskaya Gazeta, both described as being based on FSB materials.
According to The Bell, one article said terrorist acts against Darya Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky and nine senior Russian military officers had been committed using Telegram, while another said Telegram had become the main tool of NATO intelligence services and what it called the Kyiv regime under wartime conditions.
Both articles said Pavel Durov’s actions were being investigated under an article on aiding terrorist activity.
The Bell said telecom and IT issues had previously not fallen under the authority of the Second Service.
A veteran of the sector told the outlet that even major initiatives such as the Yarovaya law or the sovereign Runet project had traditionally been handled by technical FSB structures, namely the Information Security Center and the Scientific-Technical Service.
Those units, according to the report, were familiar to the market and often worked through seconded officers in the security departments of large tech firms.
By contrast, one source said the Second Service deals with politics and the fight against what it sees as social and ideological deviance.
The Bell said the unit is associated with extremism cases, surveillance of opposition activists, the designation of organizations as undesirable or foreign agents, and ideological control in culture and religion.
It also said the service gained broad notoriety after journalists found that its officers had tried to poison Alexei Navalny in 2020 and had been involved in the poisoning of Vladimir Kara-Murza.
The Bell reported that the push to block foreign platforms has not only affected users but also created tension inside the government and presidential administration.
The security bloc had long pushed the idea of blocking foreign platforms, the report said, but Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev was left to publicly explain and implement unpopular measures.
According to a source familiar with the ministry, Shadayev had previously been seen as an effective lobbyist for the industry, credited with promoting state services, tax breaks, mobilization deferrals for IT firms and support for switching large companies to Russian software.
But another telecom source told The Bell that in the struggle with the Second Service, Shadayev had no chance of prevailing.
“In this fight Shadayev cannot win anyway - not the same weight category,” the source said.
The report added that one of the more extreme ideas discussed in the latest VPN round would have required the industry not only to detect users of circumvention tools but also to issue automatic fines to SIM-card owners through Gosuslugi.
That idea was blocked, according to the report, but the rest of the anti-VPN campaign remained in place.
The Bell said the blocking of the country’s most popular messaging apps and nearly two months of mobile internet shutdowns in Moscow had also produced political side effects.
Telegram had more than 90 million monthly users in Russia, according to the report, but authorities failed to degrade it gradually the way they had YouTube.
The result, one source said, was that even a small increase in degradation quickly made the platform nearly unusable.
According to Yandex search data cited by The Bell, searches for the term “vpn” rose from 12 million in December 2025 to 16 million in March, the highest levels since the start of the war.
Tech expert Mikhail Klimarev estimated that the number of VPN users in Russia may have reached 65 million this spring.
At the same time, VTsIOM recorded a decline in Putin’s approval rating, which The Bell said fell 7.3 points from January levels to 67.8% by early April.
The report said the approval rating had not dropped below 70% since just before the start of the war in Ukraine.
The Bell also cited a Bloomberg report saying the latest wave of repression against the free internet, said to have been inspired by the FSB, had faced criticism from some senior officials who warned about the political and economic risks of the restrictions.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, one possible result could be a weakening of the Telegram block.
But The Bell said there were no signs yet of any such easing.
After the Bloomberg article, Peskov said internet restrictions would remain in place as long as “necessary,” according to the report.
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