https://tagesschau.de recently started providing Russian subtitles for daily news.

However, the page https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/russisch/ is neither accessible from a Russian ISP nor via Cloudflare WARP:

Access Denied

You don’t have permission to access “http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/russisch/” on this server.

It is accessible via Proton VPN NL-FREE, however, for example.

It’s known that sometimes the site blocks streams in due to licensing issues with some clips, though the content in question is videos, not streams.

Someone has reached out to https://tagesschau.de about this, and got a response that can be summarized as “they think it may be Russian censorship”.

That seems not very likely, considering that the 403 response is received via HTTPS. Furthermore, both https://www.tagesschau.de and https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia are accessible; just not /multimedia/russisch/.

It would seem that the blocking is likely done by the site itself, but given their response and that they themselves started providing Russian subtitles suggests otherwise.

The x-debug-data: origin=gcp response header hints at their usage of Google Cloud Platform. Could it be that GCP is performing this blocking for some reason? Is there any similar blocking in another site that could support this theory?

Finally, is there some possibility it could nevertheless be censorship from Russia’s side?

Блокировка на стороне сайта. Сообщение 403, вероятно, формирует WAF сервиса Akamai или продуктов Microsoft. Возможно DDoS защита по совокупности параметров и стоит обновить/попробовать другие браузеры.