Svalbard Governor website cannot be opened from Russia

People in Russia cannot open the websites of Sysselmesteren (the Governor of Svalbard) and of the local newspaper. The pages do not load from inside the country, though a VPN gets around the problem. The Barents Observer reports that two more sites are affected. These are the site of Store Norske (the state-owned mining company), which formerly ran coal mines on Svalbard, and that of the local authorities in Longyearbyen. Complaints first appeared in late March, but the Barents Observer found the trouble goes back to November 2025.

None of these sites is in the official register of banned resources kept by the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor. The Prosecutor General's Office has not restricted them, which it did in the case of the Barents Observer. Governor Lars Fause told the outlet he had not heard about the situation. He said many people lose access to information about Svalbard and about the work of his office.

Mikhail Klimarev, an internet security expert who heads the Internet Protection Society, said the cause may lie in how blocking is done technically. The Svalbard sites are not banned themselves. They sit on IP addresses that are under restrictions. He compared it to a block of flats where police, unable to reach one rule-breaking tenant, weld the main door shut for everyone. Most sites share addresses on hosting such as AWS or Cloudflare. The domain thebarentsobserver.com is blocked through two IP addresses, and the local newspaper's site uses the same ones. The governor's site shares an address with an online casino that Roskomnadzor has blocked.

Owners can ask the hosting provider for a new address, after which access normally returns almost at once. They can also buy a dedicated address for an extra fee. In 2018 Moscow's Tagansky District Court dismissed a lawsuit by the company Zhivaya Fotografiya over its blocked addresses.