The American messaging application WhatsApp will cease to function in Russia in 2026, announced the vice president of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy, Andrei Svintsov. “By the end of the year, Roskomnadzor will take a set of measures to completely block WhatsApp. This is related to the fact that WhatsApp belongs to the company Meta, declared extremist in Russia,” the deputy told TASS. He called these measures “absolutely justified”, considering that parliamentary elections are to take place in Russia in 2026.
In turn, Roskomnadzor announced on January 15 that it sees no reason to lift the restrictions imposed on WhatsApp. In August, the authority blocked the possibility of making calls through the application, citing “the fight against scams”, and in the fall it began to deliberately slow down the application. In December, Roskomnadzor warned that a complete blockage of WhatsApp is imminent, arguing that the service continues to violate Russian legislation and is used to deceive citizens and involve them in “terrorist activities”.
In reality, WhatsApp is already not functioning normally in Russia: by the end of 2025, over 90% of attempts to connect to the application’s servers from the country failed, according to the director of the “Internet Protection Society”, Mikhail Klimarev.
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