We’re All Russians Now

A woman is sitting in a Moscow café right now, doing something that would have seemed utterly paranoid ten years ago. She’s got two phones on the table. She opens the first one, connects to a VPN, and fires off a WhatsApp message to a friend in Berlin. Then she closes that app, toggles off the VPN, and uses the same phone to book a train ticket on Russian Railways… which, helpfully, bans anyone who appears to be hiding their location. Then she picks up the second phone to check for work messages on MAX, the state-approved messaging app that has somehow accumulated 85 million daily users in under a year.

Her name is Irina. She’s an interior designer. And she has a second phone.

Reuters published a piece on all of this last Friday, framing it as a portrait of life inside Putin’s “digital iron curtain.” Which it is. It absolutely is. The Kremlin has been on a tear this year, cracking down on foreign apps and VPNs with the kind of energy usually reserved for things the government genuinely finds threatening… which tells you everything you need to know about how much they fear ordinary people simply talking to each other. The crackdowns have been so blunt, so poorly aimed, that they’ve disrupted banking, transport, and e-commerce in the process. Nothing quite like accidentally breaking your own economy in pursuit of information control. Still, here we are.

The detail in the Reuters piece that I keep turning over is this: even loyal government officials carry multiple phones and use VPNs to keep the state-mandated apps quarantined from their actual digital lives. Think about that. The very people building and enforcing the curtain are quietly living on the other side of it. That’s not ideology. That’s just self-preservation dressed up as compliance.

And Irina, bless her, ends the piece with a line that deserves to be carved somewhere: “In Russia, we have a saying: Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.”

Brilliant. Devastating. Moving on.

Here’s the thing I want to stay with, though. Because it would be very easy to read the Reuters piece and feel smug about it. Poor Russians, living under authoritarian digital control, forced to juggle burner phones and VPNs just to have a normal conversation. How dreadful. How very not-us.

Except.

France, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, and Canada have all, in the past year, issued official government advice telling their citizens to bring burner phones when travelling to the United States. Not to Russia. Not to China. To America. The land of the free, home of the brave, and also, apparently, home of border agents with the legal authority to copy the entire contents of your phone without a warrant, without suspicion, and without needing to give you a particularly good reason why.

The numbers aren’t small anymore. US Customs and Border Protection searched more than 55,000 electronic devices in fiscal year 2025. That’s up 33% from 2023. And 2026 is already on pace to smash that record, with over 32,000 searches completed in just the first half of the year. American citizens returning home are not exempt. Nearly 14,000 of those searches in 2025 were conducted on US passport holders coming back from holiday.

There are proposals on the table to make visitors from visa-waiver countries hand over five years of social media history before they’re even allowed to apply for permission to travel. Not at the border. Before they leave home. The US Travel Association… which would very much like tourists to keep coming and spending money… has warned of a “chilling effect” on international travel. Which is a very polite way of saying: people are being put off visiting, and some of them are arriving with phones that have been deliberately wiped clean of anything interesting.

Irina’s two-phone system is not a Russian problem. It’s just a Russian version of a problem that is spreading.

Hong Kong amended its National Security Law in March of this year to give police the power to demand device passwords from anyone passing through its airport. Anyone. Including tourists in transit who aren’t even visiting, just changing planes. Refusal is now a criminal offence. Canada can compel you to unlock your device at the border. The UK is not exactly a fortress of digital privacy either, and the less said about Australia’s encryption laws the better.

What we are witnessing, globally, is the gradual normalisation of the idea that your digital life is not yours when you cross a border. That the photographs on your phone, the messages to your mother, the notes app full of half-formed thoughts and shopping lists… these are documents, not memories. Potentially incriminating documents. Property of the state, briefly on loan to you.

The framing matters. When Russia does it, we call it authoritarian control. When America does it, we call it border security. When the EU quietly advises its officials to use disposable handsets when visiting Washington, we file it under “precautionary measures.” Same behaviour. Very different vibes.

And most people, like most Russians, simply adapt. They don’t protest. They adjust. They buy a second phone, or they wipe the first one, or they learn to live in a carefully curated version of their digital selves that they’re comfortable having a stranger in a uniform scroll through at 6am in an airport.

The Levada Centre… Russia’s most respected independent polling organisation… found that most Russians “simply do not see the need to go to any extra trouble.” The information environment they have access to is sufficient for them. They’ve adapted so completely that the adaptation no longer feels like adaptation. It just feels like Tuesday.

I wonder what percentage of British travellers planning a trip to Florida this summer are thinking about whether their social media history is clean enough to avoid a problem at Miami International. I suspect it’s growing. Slowly, quietly, without anyone quite announcing it, the mental pre-flight checklist is getting longer.

Delete that tweet. Make that account private. Maybe just get a cheap Nokia for the trip.

The thing about iron curtains is that they’ve never been as absolute as the name suggests. The original one had gaps too. People found ways around it. They always do. Irina’s VPN, the EU official’s burner phone, the delivery driver using the flower shop’s Wi-Fi because the navigation apps went dark in Moscow in March… these are all the same gesture. A small, practical act of insisting that the life inside your head belongs to you and not to whoever is currently in charge of deciding what’s allowed.

What’s different now is the geography. The gesture used to be required only in certain places, and you knew which places those were. The list was shorter. Easier to avoid if you wanted to.

The list is getting longer. Quietly, incrementally, plausibly justified each time with perfectly reasonable-sounding language about security and compliance and the need to protect us all from something or other.

Two phones. A VPN. A cleared browser history. A social media presence that you’ve pre-edited for an audience you never asked for.

Welcome to the new normal. It doesn’t have a name yet. But it’s arriving everywhere, and it’s bringing luggage.

Until Next Time