The "whitelist" of the Ministry of Digital Development, which includes websites and services that remain operational during mobile internet restrictions, now includes 900 resources. The head of the agency, Maksut Shadayev, stated this, emphasizing that the list has practically reached its limit. According to him, telecom operators are unable to support an unlimited number of such resources due to technical infrastructure limitations.
Technical Infrastructure Limits
"We must understand that there are, naturally, limits on the 'whitelist'; it cannot be infinite. There are technical limitations for telecom operators here," the Interfax agency quotes the minister as saying. Thus, the expansion of the list is hindered not by administrative reasons, but by the purely technical capabilities of the telecom infrastructure: each resource in the list requires a separate traffic routing configuration on the operators' side, and upon reaching a certain threshold, the load becomes disproportionate.
Restructuring Selection Criteria
Shadayev recalled that "whitelists" should include services that are most popular among Russian users. However, according to him, the ministry is now working to streamline the list and is simultaneously changing the resource selection technology. "Now we are trying to organize this technology a little bit, because we have services that, perhaps, are not super popular, but are vital, for example, electric charging stations or medical services. We are now restructuring the approach," the minister explained. This means that in the future, the "popularity" criterion will be supplemented or partially replaced by the "vital necessity" criterion.
Context: What Are 'Whitelists' and When Did They Appear
So-called "whitelists" — lists of sites and services that must be accessible during mobile internet outages — appeared in Russia in the autumn of 2025. The Ministry of Digital Development regularly updates the list. Initially, the logic of the list was built around the most massive internet services; however, as experience accumulated, it became obvious that a number of services critical for daily life (medical portals, electric charging systems, financial applications) do not always make it into the list based solely on audience size criteria.
Requirements for Expanding the List
The issue of expanding "whitelists" was previously raised by Anton Nemkin, a member and coordinator of the "Digital Russia" party project, who reported in June 2026 that, taking into account public requests, it is necessary to include additional financial, medical, and other services in the list, Vedomosti reports. Shadayev's statement about restructuring the approach can be viewed as a departmental response to such requests, although formally the ministry has not yet announced specific changes in the selection criteria.
Additional Context: Combating VPN Masking
Beyond expansion issues, "whitelists" have become the object of another direction of the Ministry of Digital Development's work. According to RBC, the ministry sent a letter to hosting providers, web protection services, and CDN providers requesting that they isolate IP addresses of resources from the "whitelist" into separate subnets. The goal is to exclude the possibility of these IP addresses being used by organizations that have not received the appropriate authorization, including for hosting VPN services and other content prohibited in Russia. According to the publication's source, unauthorized sites can indeed end up in "whitelists": companies are checked upon connection, but the content of the resource may be changed later.
