News aggregator Google News was blocked beginning Friday night by Rostelecom, Russia’s largest digital provider, along with at least four other major internet service providers, according to the nonprofit group NetBlocks, which monitors internet censorship. Google News was available only about half the time on Moscow’s city telephone service, MegaFon, NetBlocks said.
Other monitors reported that Telegram, a messaging, news and social networking program that is widely popular in Russia, had significant outages in cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as points on the route to the capital from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, which Wagner troops controlled.
One of the blocked VKontakte groups, with nearly half a million subscribers, has been used by Wagner to post job openings and promote the group as an effective fighting force in Ukraine. The speed with which Russia moved to block content related to Wagner showed a substantial increase in the country’s ability to control what news its residents have access to in the 16 months since the Ukraine war began.Shortly after the war started in February last year, major international digital services such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok were