Moscow is calling Apple's removal of the VKontakte family of apps (Russia's largest social network) and Max, Russia's state mandated messenger, political censorship.
In 2025, Russia asked Apple to remove 1,213 apps from its App Store, more than the next several countries combined, most of them VPNs that Russian users relied on to bypass state internet censorship. This week, the same country accused Apple of "political censorship" after the company blocked two Russian apps from its store and cut off push notifications for apps Russians already had installed.
The asymmetry is the story. Russia has spent years pressuring Apple to enforce its censorship boundaries. When Apple acted against Russian state-aligned apps instead, Moscow framed the move as political persecution. The result is a single week that lays bare what kind of internet Russia is trying to build, and what Apple's compliance footprint looks like inside it.
Apple pulled a cluster of VK-affiliated apps from the Russian App Store — VK Video, VK Music, VK Messenger, Mail.ru, the classifieds app Yula, and the news aggregator Zen (formerly Dzen) — without notice, according to Russian officials and news reports. The main VKontakte social network app itself appears to remain available for download, per at least one local report, even as the broader VK family was disrupted. Existing installs continue to work, but push notifications have been cut. Apple separately blocked Max, a state-mandated messenger that, according to an exile publication quoted in Ars Technica, hides multiple surveillance tools, including a neural network designed for eavesdropping on users.
Apple told reporters the VK removals were due to sanctions compliance. The company has not publicly detailed the legal basis for blocking Max. VK, the company behind VKontakte, formally accused Apple of political censorship and announced a "switch to Android" campaign for affected Russian users, a line that doubles as a migration pitch and a political accusation.
Russian officials followed the same script. The Kremlin publicly demanded an explanation from Apple, with Russian regulators accusing the company of political censorship and framing the move as part of a broader Western campaign against Russian internet services. The Moscow Times reported VK's parallel accusation, in which the company pointed to Apple's compliance with sanctions enforcement as the unstated driver.
The numbers behind the argument are in Apple's own 2025 App Store Transparency Report. Russia led the world in removal demands by a wide margin: 1,213 apps, most of them VPN tools aimed at circumventing Roskomnadzor, Russia's internet regulator. Vietnam was second at 335. The remaining gap to every other country is large. Russia's pressure on Apple to remove Western-aligned apps, especially those that help citizens route around domestic censorship, has been the dominant feature of the company's compliance relationship with Moscow for years.
What is new is the reversal. The apps Apple is now blocking are not Western platforms Russia wants walled off. They are the state's preferred domestic alternatives: VKontakte as the social backbone, Max as the mandated communications layer. Apple is being asked, in effect, to treat the Russian state-aligned stack the way Russia has long asked it to treat foreign VPNs.
CGTN, the Chinese state broadcaster, covered the removal as Apple acting "without notice" inside a narrative of US tech overreach. Russian officials have made the same characterization. That framing is itself worth noting: it sits comfortably inside the same script Moscow is using, and it tells a non-beat reader that the political reading of this event is not limited to Russia.
What the episode leaves on the table for Russian iPhone users is the choice VK has now made for them: stay inside an Apple ecosystem where the domestic social stack has been partially unplugged, or move to Android, where the same apps install without friction and where parallel Russian services run by default. Apple's sanctions-compliance posture, whatever the legal merits, has now aligned it, for the first time visibly, with the same enforcement logic Russia has spent years demanding of it. The country that asked Apple to remove the most apps in 2025 is the same country now asking Apple to justify removing two of its own. Both demands cannot be neutral, and Apple cannot answer both at once.