We all know how aggressive the Russian offensive against internet freedoms has become in recent years. A week before SplinterCon Paris took place, FaceTime and Snapchat were blocked at once. The country is decisively moving toward a “whitelist reality” — meaning, in a very Soviet, totalitarian fashion, that citizens may use only those services explicitly approved by the government, while everything else is restricted or banned.

It’s not my role to assess the effectiveness of these measures. What I will try to do is to talk about Russia’s ambitions to export the Kremlin’s model of internet control to other continents. Some of you remember how many years Russian diplomats spent attempting to impose the Russian-Chinese vision of “digital sovereignty” on the international community through organizations like the UN. Those efforts were only partially successful — for instance, one example is the evolution of language around “cyber” and “information” security. But in this short article I want to focus on a more recent development that began in the spring of 2024.

In late April 2024, Nikolai Patrushev, then still head of Russia’s Security Council (but we all know him as a former head of the FSB and a close friend of Putin), chaired a conference in St. Petersburg of top security officials from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The main topic of that conference was information sovereignty and security. Instead of just preaching the Russian vision of internet control, Patrushev did something else – he made a pitch to the participants. He presented a list of Russia’s top cybersecurity companies that could help their governments gain control of their information spaces

Patrushev listed seven companies, including Positive Technologies, sanctioned by the US for helping Russian spy agencies recruit new talent; Cyberus – this company was launched by former employees of Positive Technologies and closely affiliated with Positive;  Kaspersky Lab; Solar, the national telecom operator Rostelecom’s security branch.

As I said, the audience consisted of top level security services officials from those countries. And those security mandarins were left under no illusion that any Russian offer would come with a backdoor for Russian intelligence: when Patrushev delivered his opening speech, Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, was seated at his right hand. And yet, as we see now, Patrushev’s pitch was remarkably successful.

Since that meeting in St. Petersburg in April 2024, most of the companies listed by Patrushev made significant achievements overseas. Let’s take, for instance, Positive Technologies, an undisputed leader on the Russian cyber security market.

Positive Technologies got a distribution agreement with Mideast Communication Systems in Cairo, gaining a strategic launch pad for its services in Africa and the Middle East—particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Positive Technologies has been attractive to Riyadh because the company provides protection against so-called advanced persistent threat attacks— and the company helped the Saudis identify the groups targeting telecommunications and military industries in Saudi Arabia.

In Qatar, Cyberus Foundation, an affiliate of Positive technologies — signed a strategic agreement with Al-Adid Business, owned by a member of the ruling family of Qatar. The deal is to develop Qatar’s cybersecurity capabilities, including by establishing Cyberdom Qatar and Hackademy, institutions for training cyber experts in the country. In Central Asia, Cyberus also secured a partnership with the Collective Security Treaty Organization. 

It is in Africa, where Russia’s cyber-expansion has been particularly active. Kaspersky Lab, for example, has signed an agreement with Smart Africa, a partnership among 40 African countries. Kaspersky is also involved in the African Network of Cybersecurity Authorities, an initiative established in February 2025 to “tackle cross-border cybersecurity challenges across the Continent.”

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has continued to promote the companies on Patrushev’s list.

For instance, this June, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—the annual Kremlin-backed conference — had Yury Maksimov, the co-founder of Positive Technologies and Cyberus, as one of its key speakers. And Maksimov spoke, predictably,  of the need for digital sovereignty for the countries that “don’t have complete technological independence.”

Some might argue that the expansion of these Russian companies into Africa and the Middle East has nothing to do with the Kremlin or Russian intelligence. After all, they lost any chance of securing contracts in Europe following 2022 — so where else are they supposed to go? I would argue, however, that what we are seeing is an effort closely coordinated with the Kremlin, and with Russian intelligence in particular.

At the St. Petersburg Forum, Cyberus’s pitch was echoed and reinforced by Andrey Bezrukov. Bezrukov is one of the ten Russian “illegals” from the SVR — Russia’s foreign intelligence agency — who were arrested in the United States in 2010 and later swapped. He belonged to the same group as Anna Chapman, the red-haired Russian spy and socialite. After the swap, Bezrukov reinvented himself as a foreign policy expert and was given a well-paid position at Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company.

But what makes Bezrukov relevant to our discussion today is his latest role: he now chairs the Russian Association for the Export of Technological Sovereignty. And let me remind you that this entire development began with Patrushev’s pitch — delivered while he was flanked by Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR.

So what makes Russia’s pitch to Africa and the Middle East so appealing? Unlike China, where censorship was built into the system from the very beginning, Russia introduced large-scale online censorship only in 2012. This created a challenge: the country’s digital infrastructure had already been built on Western technologies, without government interference. But that is precisely why the Russian model is appealing to other countries whose communications infrastructure is built on Western technologies: Russia provides an example that a censorship and control layer can be added to an already established, Western-built internet infrastructure. And during Putin’s last visit to India in late November 2025, Bezrukov led an effort to promote Russian “digital sovereignty” to Indian IT entrepreneurs.