Russia Threatens Full Ban on WhatsApp, Pushes Mandatory Adoption of State-Backed ‘Max’ Messenger

Moscow’s ultimatum echoes Beijing’s 2009 expulsion of Google services that cleared the way for WeChat’s rise, and it fits a lineage of Russian moves toward a “sovereign internet” begun with the 2019 Runet isolation law and earlier state control of telegraphs after the 1917 revolution. Long-running trends converge here: states reclaiming data jurisdiction, wartime information clamp-downs (heightened since the 2022 Ukraine invasion), and the global fracturing of the open web into national stacks. Whether Max catches on or not matters less than the precedent: by hard-wiring a surveillance-friendly app into every device, the Kremlin normalises turnkey data access that could endure for decades, shaping how future Russians communicate, organise politically, and interact with the outside world. On a 100-year horizon, this episode is another brick in the slow retreat from the borderless internet ideal toward 19th-century style spheres of communication sovereignty—potentially as irreversible as the partitioning of the global telephone system after World War II.