Yurii Dud, one of Russia’s most influential independent YouTubers in exile in Barcelona, regularly lambasts his country’s invasion of Ukraine. He exposes and decries torture and violence in Russian prisons. His film on the spread of HIV in Russia attracted 13 million viewers in its first week.
Yet despite mounting efforts to censor the Internet, the Kremlin fails to silence him. Millions of Russians back home tune in via virtual private networks (VPNs), which Dud openly advertises on his show. Dud knows that his viewers in Russia depend on them; the Kremlin does too.
Russia’s struggle to ban VPNs underlines the power of the Internet to cross borders and leap over restrictions. It’s not just authoritarian states that struggle, either. On the weekend that the UK began enforcing its Online Safety Act, requiring websites that host violent or pornographic content or unmoderated forums to implement strict age-verification measures, downloads of Proton VPN surged by 1,800%.
Russians do use VPNs. A lot. VPN downloads in Russia grew from 12.6 million in 2021 to 33.5 million in 2022 — a 167% increase, with almost 23% of the population installing a VPN that year. When Instagram and Facebook were declared “extremist” and blocked in March 2022, VPN installs spiked by more than 11,000% above the norm in a single day. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, overall VPN demand rose by nearly 2,000% in a week. By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world.
Every few months, Russian officials declare victory over circumvention tools. Roskomnadzor, the state communications watchdog, claims to have blocked hundreds of VPNs and has forced Apple and Google to remove dozens from their app stores. Parliament bans advertising them.
In practice, VPN ads still run on Telegram and Russian tech blogs. A 2023 survey of Russian influencers showed that 48% continued to earn money on Instagram despite the platform being officially blocked. Nearly one in five said they would lose their entire income unless they migrated followers to Telegram or VKontakte, the two dominant Russian messaging and social-media platforms.
Russia’s government also needs the same tools it pretends to ban. VPNs keep businesses connected to international systems and allow state agencies to reach foreign suppliers and clients. So instead of an outright prohibition, Moscow has chosen ambiguity — a strategy that suits authoritarian control. VPNs are not formally illegal, but everything around them is being criminalized. Since March 1, 2024, it has been illegal to share information about circumvention tools — including guides, reviews, or even lists of working services — and websites that do so can be blocked and fined. This year, a new law introduced fines for searching for “extremist” content and for VPN providers that refuse to connect to the state registry of blocked sites and filter traffic.
Formally, VPNs are not punishable but can be treated as an aggravating circumstance — evidence of “intent” if the state wants to build a case. The message is clear: you might not get fined for accessing Meduza, a leading independent Russian-language news outlet now operating from abroad, or BBC Russian, but you’ll think twice before sharing the link. Fear does the filtering. Political scientist Ekaterina Shulmann calls it “behavioral censorship”: the art of teaching people not to test the limits.
Technically, Russia’s censorship machine has grown far more capable. The 2019 “sovereign internet” law forced telecom operators to install deep packet inspection equipment and laid the foundations for an autonomous Runet. Since then, authorities have repeatedly used this infrastructure to slow, block, and reroute traffic. Over the past two years, Roskomnadzor has throttled YouTube, blocking thousands of websites using Cloudflare’s Encrypted Client Hello. From January to April 2025 alone, Roskomnadzor restricted access to 12,600 materials “promoting VPN services,” twice as many as in all of 2024. TOR has been blocked, unblocked, and re-blocked. Specific VPN protocols like OpenVPN, IKEv2, and WireGuard have been targeted directly, forcing providers to rely on obfuscation and constant technical improvisation.
At the same time, Russia is experimenting with something more radical than classic website blocking: turning the internet into a patchwork of “approved” islands. Since May 2025, mobile internet shutdowns have rolled across more than half of Russia’s regions — from border areas to places far from the front — often lasting days or weeks. During these outages, users are pushed onto narrow “whitelists” of allowed resources: Gosuslugi (the government’s online portal for public services), state banks, Yandex, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, a few marketplaces, and loyal media. Everything else simply disappears. In some regions, officials openly admit that mobile internet may not return “until the end of the special military operation.”
The Kremlin is also building its own communications stack on top of this infrastructure. After blocking or throttling WhatsApp and Telegram in 2025, authorities rolled out Max, a national messenger tightly integrated with state systems. Teachers, civil servants, and students are being pushed to adopt it, with installation increasingly treated as a condition for keeping one’s job or place in school.
Putin’s system thrives in this gray zone. It does not need total obedience; it only needs people to live cautiously. That is why the Kremlin rarely arrests someone just for using a VPN. Instead, it prefers to make them feel watched, guilty, and uncertain. As long as citizens police themselves, repression works without force.
Under this pressure, the internet Russia built in the 2000s — lively, argumentative, and creative — is fading. Start-ups and IT professionals have left for Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Berlin. The best engineers now design censorship filters instead of software. Even those who stay see the absurdity of it all: the same officials preaching “sovereign internet” check their own blocked Instagram accounts through VPNs.
Russia’s internet will not collapse overnight into a Chinese-style firewall. It will erode slowly, one restriction, one shutdown, and one moment of hesitation at a time. And that, for the Kremlin, may be victory enough.
Dr. Anda Bologa is a senior researcher in the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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