He blocked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

He signed a censorship law that led TikTok to disable its functions.

President Vladimir V. Putin has clamped down on free expression in Russia to a degree unseen since the Soviet era. Now he is taking aim at the last western tech platform barely standing in wartime Russia: YouTube.

Putin has not formally banned the US video platform that has more than 2.5 billion users worldwide. But the site has angered Russian authorities, who view the platform as an uncontrollable gateway to anti-war content. They have also decried YouTube for removing Russian propaganda channels as well as videos by Russian musicians subject to western sanctions.

So last summer Russian users experienced a significant slowing of YouTube, primarily on desktop Internet connections. Internet experts have said the sudden and simultaneous drop-offs in traffic could be explained only by deliberate throttling of the service on the part of Russian authorities. The purposeful slowing of the service spread to a wider swathe of the Internet, including mobile networks, in December. Millions of Russians trying to access videos have found them too slow to load or too pixelated to watch.

“This sudden massive drop is 100 per cent artificial,” Philipp Dietrich, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said. “There is no doubt about the fact that this is human-made.”

The results of the broadside against YouTube have so far been mixed, demonstrating the complications Moscow faces in snuffing out an American-made cornerstone of the Russian Internet that for years was seen as practically too big to ban.

YouTube for years has been a staple of daily life for many Russians, streaming everything from old Soviet movies to anti-Kremlin political shows. Some 96 million Russians over the age of 12, or about 79 percent of the over-12 population, visited the site monthly as of July, before the slowdown in service began, according to the research group MediaScope.

But the relationship between the Kremlin and Google, which owns YouTube, has been tense for years. Searing viral YouTube broadcasts transformed the late Russian opposition figure Aleksei A. Navalny into a significant threat to the Kremlin.

His corruption investigation into a palace on the Black Sea built for Putin, released on YouTube in early 2021,
has drawn 133 million views over the past four years, underscoring the power of the platform.

On one level, the throttling looks to have worked. Russian Internet traffic to YouTube is less than a third of what it was this time last year, according to public data released by Google, the streaming service’s parent company.

New York Times News Service