German hosting provider Hetzner Block the site Ukrainian publication Zaporona deleted all site data over the past seven years. edition I mentionedThat this happened in November 2025. The provider indicated the reason for the blocking was late payment in the amount of 174 euros for two months of hosting the site.
As Zaporona editor-in-chief Katerina Sergatskova explained to Meduza, when the editors made the payment, the provider refused to restore access to the site, saying everything had been permanently deleted.
“Usually, due to a small delay in payment, the provider does not disconnect the service and does not delete all data permanently. Such things should not happen – this is very bad for any business,” stressed the editor-in-chief of the Zaporona newspaper.
Sergatskova added that editors did not see payment invoices from the provider in the mail in time, because these letters ended up in spam. “Automatic payments are regularly disabled due to the fact that the Ukrainian organization is subject to Ukrainian regulations. Because of the war, there are very small restrictions on payments abroad,” she explained.
Before blocking the site, the German provider sent letters from Roskomnadzor (RKN) to Ukrainian journalists asking them to remove some of Zaporona’s material (Meduza reviewed this correspondence). In all, Hetzner sent RKN five letters to editors asking to “deal with this matter.”
One of the Zaporona materials, which the Russian agency sought to remove, described how Molotov cocktails were made. It was published in the early days of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. Further evidence has been collected on how the Russian army tortures Ukrainians in the occupied territories. RKN demanded the removal of the material, citing Russian court decisions.
“We wrote to the provider several times and explained that we are Ukrainian media and have nothing to do with Russia,” Sergatskova told Meduza. “This is illegal, Russia has attacked Ukraine, and this is a way to put pressure on us.”
According to her, when Hetzner deleted the publication’s entire website, representatives of the German provider said they “never knew what Zaborona was and what was on their server.” Hetzner claims that the termination of service and deletion of the site was automatically initiated after non-payment of the hosting fees. “They couldn’t help but know that Ukrainian media was on their servers, and that’s just a lie,” Sergatskova said.
Sergatskova says this is not the first time Hetzner has shut down publishing sites based on requests from Roskomnadzor – despite the fact that the German provider does not operate within Russian jurisdiction. In particular, using a similar scheme, Hetzner blocked the Agentura.ru website of Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov in 2023, as well as the Ukrainian site Glavkom.ua in 2014 and the Novaya Gazeta website in 2016.
Zaborona editors ask Hetzner to restore the archive of his materials or transfer this data in any usable form in order to republish it on a new hosting.
“If we cannot restore the archive, we will have to extract Zaporona publications piece by piece from web archives. There is no guarantee that everything published on our website has been saved on the Internet. But we will try. It will take months to restore the archive, although it will not be the good old Zaporona,” says the editorial office.
Elizaveta Antonova