Matthew Luxmoore

Now, after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, Russia was a country that was very open to Western business presence inside the country.

But when Vladimir Putin came into power as president in 2000, he understood that the Internet was something that could become a problem for Russia.

And that really became clear to him when protests erupted against his return

to power for a third presidential term in 2011.

And his main opponent, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, began to really harness the internet in a way that no other Kremlin critic had done before, using blogs online and social media, Facebook,

and other things like that to criticize the government.

The Russian government started to look for ways in which it could replace Western apps that are popular inside the country.

But what really accelerated this process was the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the government understood how much of a threat foreign messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp are for the government.

VK was created initially as a Facebook clone.

The Russian government took over VK and merged it into this bigger tech enterprise run by the son of the deputy chief of staff to Putin.

So a highly placed government official is now running this company and it's very much in with the Kremlin and backed by it.

There's been a lot of grumbling about this, about the effort to voice Max on people.

But we really have to look at Max's emergence kind of in a broader context of the many different ways that the Russians are trying to censor the internet right now.

It's not just this new super app that they're trying to

spread across Russia.

It's also various internet outages, mobile internet outages that have been happening across the country.

Essentially, right now in central Moscow, you can be walking around and you're not even able to use the mobile internet on your phone.

And it's not just in Moscow, it's all across Russia.

Intermittently, the mobile internet just goes off, sometimes for weeks at a time.

And local authorities are citing the threat from Ukrainian drones, which