Putin wants to control all access to information that citizens of Russia can see so he cut off YouTube. The channel was popular in Russia, as it is here in the U.S. He previously closed all independent Russian media.

The Washington Post reported:

Russians are losing access to YouTube, the last major Western social platform freely available in the country, cutting them off from information independent from the Kremlin and alarming internet freedom advocates, journalists and opposition activists.


The throttling of YouTube, widely used for everything including watching cartoons and exposés on government corruption, comes amid fears that Russia will also shut down the Telegram messenger app after its founder, Pavel Durov, was detained by France.


The move comes as Russia is increasingly cracking down on any alternative sources of information, especially online, and has been pushing its citizens away from foreign-based social media apps to locally developed ones over which it has tighter control, such as its video-streaming alternative RuTube.


In early August, Russian users who had grown used to playing cartoons on YouTube to distract their children or having meals with shows playing in the background began reporting that the videos were not loading. By Aug. 3, state media reported that the service stopped playing high-resolution videos in almost all browsers running the desktop version in Russia.