Just days after Russian troops marched on Ukraine’s capital Kiev, Vladimir Putin signed legislation criminalizing the spread of “false” information about the war, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Most of the independent media outlets are now blocked, and editors and journalists end up in prison, leaving the Russians with state propaganda.
This has made VPNs and other censorship circumvention tools even more important, says Stanislav Shakirov, co-founder of Roskomsvoboda and founder of the Privacy Accelerator technology development organization. “If Internet users in Russia stop receiving information other than state information,” he says, “we will have no hope that any process will lead to a change in the current regime.”
The Kremlin, of course, is not giving up on its repression. In September 2022, Roskomnadzor, the main government body responsible for Internet censorship, Announced it would block six popular VPN services, including ExpressVPN and NordVPN. This was followed in March 2023 by advertisements that VPNs that refuse to provide data to domestic intelligence agencies would be blocked in Russia, as well as proposals to restrict anonymization tools, such as virtual phone numbers. The Telegram messaging application, which saw a sharp rise in popularity in Russia after the invasion, has been offering virtual phone numbers since December 2022.
Although anti-censorship services like Lantern, Psiphon and Tor still works in RussiaAlthough with some interruptions, the authorities have been largely successful in their fight against VPNs, Shakirov says. “The fate of these massive public VPNs in Russia right now doesn’t look bright with today’s technology stack,” he says.
This has made services like Amnezia even more popular. It’s unclear how many users the service has, as the organization has no way of monitoring the number of users, Banzaev says. However, Amnezia offers a Telegram bot called AmneziaFree, which shares VPN settings that help users access blocked platforms and news; it has almost 100,000 users. The bot is currently struggling with overload and users are complaining about spotty service. Banzaev says that the Amnezia team is working on adding new servers with a limited budget and that they are also working on a new version of the service.
Amnezia is not only used in Russia. The service has been extended to Turkmenistan, Iran, China and other countries where users have had trouble accessing the Internet for free.
The anti-censorship solutions that are now being developed in Russia are not only relevant to Russian citizens. Tools that help bypass censorship are constantly being tested by users in different countries with repressive regimes, Shakirov says. Technology that has been proven to work in one country is then adopted in another. In this way, everything is perfected.
“In China, which is ahead of the world in lockdown protocols, there is a constant game of cat and mouse,” Shakirov says. “In Russia the same story awaits us.”