An investigation released by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent research organization dedicated to safeguarding democracy and human rights, reveals that websites of banned Russian media outlets can still be easily accessed across the EU in the "overwhelming majority" of cases.

Key findings

ISD analysts identified 58 domains linked to 26 entities sanctioned by the European Commission and mapped the three internet service providers (ISPs) with the largest broadband user bases in six EU Member States: Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia. The results of this testing include:

The enforcement of sanctions on Russian state media by European ISPs remains inconsistent. Across the three largest ISPs in six Member States, less than a quarter of attempts to access the content were effectively blocked.

Even when ISPs were compliant, methods to circumvent sanctions remained easily accessible. ISPs in Germany and France were the most compliant, blocking between 43 to 57 and 24 to 48 percent of domains respectively. However, due to user settings on client devices, routers or applications (such as virtual private networks), DNS (Domain Name System; see Glossary) requests to resolve website addresses may not always rely on resolvers from ISP’s own infrastructure. Instead, they often use third-party resolvers operated by companies like Cloudflare or Russian-owned services, making the blocked content accessible to the user.

Sanctioned domains continue to attract significant online audiences, with a small number of high-traffic sites accounting for a disproportionate share of total reach. Domains only registered more than 50,000 monthly unique visitors in Germany and France. Overall, Germany recorded the highest average monthly traffic, with three domains receiving hundreds of thousands of unique visitors.

Content from banned, Kremlin-aligned media is still widely disseminated on X (formerly Twitter). Between 1 and 31 May, more than 49,000 posts from 2,450 accounts that featured links to sanctioned domains were found on X, predominantly in French and German. This analysis also surfaced anonymous accounts operating with the sole purpose of reposting media articles from sanctioned media.

Gaps in enforcement reflect technical, political and legal shortcomings. Practical issues, such as the failure of the EC to include sanctioned domains on official listings, leave national authorities and ISPs without the guidance needed for effective and targeted implementation. Individual Member States also face their own challenges: for example, legal mandates to enforce restrictions in Slovakia expired in late 2022.