Russia’s Gosuslugi portal urges users to ditch Gmail amid Moscow’s fight with Google

Users of Russia’s Gosuslugi Federal State Information System have received warnings that accounts registered with Gmail email addresses are in danger of losing portal access due to Google’s alleged suspension of SMS confirmations inside Russia. Gosuslugi encourages users to migrate their accounts to “any other” email service.

Russian officials and Google have been at loggerheads since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine over the American company’s refusal to censor YouTube content about Russian war atrocities in Ukraine. Russian courts have imposed absurdly high noncompliance fines on Google’s Russian subsidiary, which declared bankruptcy in the fall of 2022.

Since the summer of 2024, YouTube access inside Russia has suffered outages and throttled data transfer speeds. State officials blame the slowdowns on aging Google Global Cache equipment, but Internet researchers and Google itself say technical problems are not the cause, indicating that the Russian authorities are responsible.