Internet Outages Hitting Russia’s Regions Far Harder than Russian Cities with Far-Reaching Consequences for Demography, Media Use and National Security, Nisnevich Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 11 – Until a year or two ago, Moscow celebrated the extension of the internet to ever more cities and villages of the Russian Federation; but now, there are ever more cases when providers are turning off the internet to these places, with far-reaching consequences for the country as a whole, Yuliy Nisnevich says.  

            Even more than television, the extension of the internet to small towns and villages in the Russian Federation reduced the differences between life there and life in the cities because rural Russians could get things local institutions couldn’t supply, a development that helped tie the country together, the HSE scholar says (newizv.ru/news/2025-12-11/smysla-zhizni-bez-interneta-net-kak-provintsiya-perezhivaet-otklyucheniya-seti-438158).

            Without the internet, Nisnevich says, “residents of villages and rural settlements now live as they did in Soviet times. There is no telephone, people can’t use banking services, televised media don’t work, and one can’t even call  taxi.” Older people sink into their old ways, but younger people are increasingly inclined to flee to the cities.

            As a result, over the last five years, the rural population of the Russian Federation has fallen by 804,000, three times the size of the decline of the population of cities, Rosstat satistics show. There are many causes for this, of course; but the increasing unreliability of internet services in rural areas is certainly one of them.

            According to Nisnevich, internet outages are leading to “a new fragmentation in the country,” one in which young people are fleeing to the cities and older age groups are returning to television, not because either especially wants to but because they had been increasingly relying on the Internet and now can’t.