Following the State Duma elections in Russia, a new wave of VPN blockades began
At least ten Russian VPN services have faced a new wave of blocks following the conclusion of the State Duma elections.
On September 25, one of the largest VPN services—whose name the publication is withholding—informed users of tighter restrictions. According to the service, the blocking intensified at the beginning of the week and peaked on Friday, when some users found they could no longer connect to the VPN. The company noted that it expects further blocking measures and is therefore simultaneously preparing alternative solutions to help users navigate new waves of restrictions more seamlessly. It also emphasized that similar issues are currently being experienced by other VPN services.
Last week, seven providers reported a noticeable increase in blocking or warned customers about service disruptions, according to researchers at Le VPN. One service stated that several of its servers are being blocked every day. Representatives of another VPN project clarified that Roskomnadzor had blocked all of their overseas servers. Another service had the IP addresses of all its servers blocked. According to user complaints and announcements on the VPN services’ own websites, users of Amnezia, Fizz, “Mayak,” Dyadya Vanya, Happ, Blanc, and other platforms experienced disruptions last week.
Numerous complaints about VPN issues also began to appear on social media. In particular, users of one of Russia’s largest VPN projects have complained about the disruptions. One user reported that she has been unable to connect to the service for three days straight, despite using both her home Wi-Fi and mobile data.
Sergey Shcherbakov, CTO of the company “Stakhanovets,” previously stated that the stability in VPN operations this summer was merely a temporary technical pause, not a sign of a change in government policy regarding blocking. According to him, in the spring and early summer, deep traffic analysis systems operated in strict suppression mode, after which engineers moved on to the data collection phase. Their task was not only to establish the fact of VPN use but also to analyze its operation, including ports, the frequency of reconnections, and the use of obfuscation methods.
“Operators have accumulated enough data to shift from blanket blocking to targeted degradation of service quality. Instead of a complete connection outage, we’ll see artificial slowdowns during peak activity, delays when loading pages, and problems transferring large files,” the expert speculated.
Oleksiy Kozlyuk, head of the VPN Guild, stated that the intensification of blocking after the elections was expected. The organization also confirmed changes in the mechanism for blocking IP addresses and entire subnets. According to Kozlyuk, the source of such data may be applications that, since spring, at the request of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, have begun detecting when users have a VPN enabled. He believes that as a result, people will experience more frequent VPN connectivity issues and will be forced to switch between servers.
This is being reported by Russian propaganda media.
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