Moscow may block access to WhatsApp

Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the IT Committee of the Russian parliament's lower house, said that WhatsApp could be placed on a list of restricted software.

"It's time for WhatsApp to prepare to leave the Russian market," Gorelkin wrote in a Telegram post, reported by Reuters. Meta, the messaging app's parent company, has been designated an extremist organization in Russia since 2022, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine.

Last week, President Vladimir Putin issued a directive expiring on September 1st, further restricting communications software and apps from "hostile countries" that have sanctioned Russia. Gorelkin said WhatsApp will likely be one of these services.

Anton Nemkin, a member of the parliamentary IT committee, said that WhatsApp's fate in Russia is sealed. "The presence of such a service in the Russian digital space constitutes, in fact, a legal violation of national security," he told the Tass news agency.

In June, Putin himself signed a law to create a state-affiliated messaging app to rely more on Russian services and less on foreign tech companies. On Telegram, Gorelkin suggested that blocking WhatsApp could help Max, the home-based platform competing with WhatsApp, released in March and operated by "Communication Platform," a subsidiary of VK, the company that develops the social network of the same name, considered Russia's Facebook.