On February 10, Russian authorities used the National Domain Name System for the first time to block YouTube: the video platform’s domain was removed from the database, so the system could no longer resolve its address. According to the project Na Svyazi, by February 11 at least 13 popular resources had been removed from the NDNS, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Tor, Windscribe, APKMirror, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Svoboda, The Moscow Times, and other media sites.
Leonid Yuldashev, an IT specialist and coordinator of Russian-language projects at eQualitie, told Novaya-Europe that this method had not previously been used for censorship. He said that since the summer of 2024, YouTube in Russia had first been artificially slowed through TSPU equipment and DPI, and was later effectively blocked, although access still varied by region and provider.
The NDNS was introduced in 2021 after the “sovereign Runet” law and mirrors the global DNS, the internet’s “address book.” If a site’s entry is missing, the browser does not receive its IP address and the page does not load. Yuldashev said this means the authorities are no longer merely denying access but effectively making the service’s address disappear.
“We have repeatedly pointed out that Russia is building the infrastructure of a sovereign internet. In the long term, this is far more dangerous than a simple block,” Yuldashev said.
He called the possibility of address substitution especially dangerous: users could be redirected to a different site, including a state-controlled one. That creates risks of phishing and data interception. Mikhail Klimarev predicted that the gap between the global DNS and the Russian system would keep widening, making the domestic internet increasingly isolated.
In Yuldashev’s view, the authorities’ goal is not only to restrict YouTube, which was already barely functioning for many users, but also to test how this blocking infrastructure works in practice. VPN services, as well as Tor and the Ceno browser, remain the main tools for bypassing restrictions.