Russia's foreign-press blockade: 264 blocked news domains — more of them Ukrainian than Russian

More of the news Russia blocks is Ukrainian than Russian

Voidly's confirmed-national blocklist for Russia — domains measured blocked across three or more independent Russian networks (the OONI natblock floor) — holds 608 domains, of which 264 are News Media. That is the largest distinct-news-outlet block-set of any country in the corpus: 2.4× Iran's 110, 7.5× Saudi Arabia's 35, 15× Turkey's 17.

The signal no monitor has quantified from a confirmed-multi-network floor is whose press it is. By top-level domain, the 264 blocked news domains break down:

Only 32 of the 264 blocked news domains (12%) are Russian .ru. More — 36 — are Ukrainian .ua: 1plus1.ua, 24tv.ua, 5.ua, hromadske.ua, censor.net.ua, day.kyiv.ua, atr.ua. Beyond Ukraine, the blocked set reaches across the neighborhood and the diaspora — Baltic (15min.lt, diena.lv, freecity.lv), Bulgarian (24chasa.bg), Israeli-Russian (9tv.co.il), Slovak (dennikn.sk) — plus a long exile-press tail on generic TLDs (belsat.eu — the Poland-based Belarusian broadcaster, kavkaz-uzel.eu, themoscowtimes.com). Over 50 of the 264 carry a foreign country-code TLD; the majority of the set is non-Russian.

This reframes "Russia censors the internet." The bulk of the press Russia is confirmed to wall off is not domestic dissent outlets — it is foreign and exile journalism, overwhelmingly from the country it is at war with and its neighbors. It is a measured, per-outlet, machine-readable map of a wartime information blockade.

It lands on the 12 February 2026 state-DNS escalation

On 12 February 2026, independent monitors recorded Russia's first documented mass deletion of records from its state National Domain Name System (NSDI): of 50 sites tested, 13 had no NSDI entry, returning NXDOMAIN on state DNS (The Insider). The removed set is itself foreign/exile press and platforms — BBC, Deutsche Welle, Current Time, Svoboda (RFE/RL), The Moscow Times, alongside YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Tor Project and Windscribe. Every one of those named news outlets appears in Voidly's confirmed-national blocked set — independent OONI-grounded measurement corroborating the state-DNS event from the outside.

The context is the dominant censorship mode of the period: per Access Now's #KeepItOn 2025 report, there were at least 313 shutdowns across 52 countries, and for the third year running conflict was the leading trigger. Russia's foreign-press blocklist is what conflict-driven information control looks like at the per-domain level.

Honest caveats (read before you cite)

1. This is a FLOOR, not a census. "Confirmed-national" means measured blocked across ≥3 independent networks (OONI natblock). Domains not in the set are not measured-confirmed, not necessarily accessible. 264 is a conservative lower bound on news outlets Russia blocks.
2. GFW-style censors are UNDERCOUNTED by this measure — and that is visible in the data: China shows just 1 confirmed-national news domain here, which is obviously an undercount. Russia tops this metric partly because its blocking is DNS-manipulation-dominant (~85% per Voidly's technique-fingerprint work), so it registers cleanly in a DNS-confirmed floor; China's TCP-reset/SNI apparatus does not register the same way. Read "#1 in confirmed-blocked distinct news domains," NOT "the most censored country."
3. "Most of the news Russia blocks is foreign," NOT "Russia blocks all foreign press." The claim is about the composition of the confirmed-blocked set, not coverage of the entire foreign-press universe.
4. TLD is a proxy for outlet origin. A .com may be Russian exile media hosted abroad; the robust, origin-unambiguous signal is that Ukrainian .ua domains (36) outnumber Russian .ru (32) in the set.
5. Voidly is the analysis layer on OONI's confirmed-national data, not an independent measurement network — corroboration of an upstream.

Reproduce every number

Each endpoint self-documents its methodology and asks to be credited as "Voidly." Numbers live as of 26 June 2026; the blocklist is CC BY 4.0 and each domain carries an evidence permalink.

• Russia's full confirmed-national blocklist (608 domains, 264 NEWS, machine-readable): /v1/measurement/national-blocks-export?country=RU&format=json
• News-blocking leaderboard (RU 264 #1, IR 110, SA 35, TR 17, … CN 1 — the floor caveat in action): /v1/measurement/category-leaders?category=NEWS
• Corpus spine: /data/incidents/stats
• Source event: The Insider — Russia's 12 Feb 2026 NSDI mass-DNS deletion