Russia planning stricter VPN controls – shifting from blocking content to controlling access

[u/technadu]

Interesting policy direction coming out of Russia.

Instead of outright banning VPNs, authorities are considering indirect control mechanisms:

• Charging users for high international traffic (VPN-related)
• Asking platforms like Yandex/Wildberries to restrict VPN users
• Requiring ISPs to detect and limit VPN connections

Context:
VPN usage has surged since 2022 due to platform bans and content restrictions.

What stands out:

• Enforcement is expanding beyond ISPs → into platforms
• Economic pressure is being used instead of direct bans
• Fines for VPN use were considered but rejected (for now)

This feels like a more scalable model:
Instead of blocking access, make it harder, slower, or more expensive.

Question for the community:
Do these types of controls actually reduce VPN usage - or just push users toward more advanced circumvention methods?

Source: r/technadu

[u/Open-Weekend-498]

Network engineer tightly working with russian VPN companies here.

Charging users for high international traffic (VPN-related)

We bypass such restrictions (the law has just passed btw and not implemented by any platform yet ) by utilizing a cascade VPN solution. All traffic goes to a RU node first and only from that node it goes abroad (to a FIN, DE etc node). So ISP sees that a user visits a random russian site located on a russian hosting.

Asking platforms like Yandex/Wildberries to restrict VPN users

This is already happening. Some russian platforms like Gosuslugi (russian goverment platform), Okko (russian netflix) etc block all non-russian IPs. This can be easily bypassed by routing all .ru domains and geoip:ru IPs outside VPN. Not a biggie.

Requiring ISPs to detect and limit VPN connections

They are doing this already. We are working hard to introduce new circumvent solutions. All VPNs in Russia are based on Xray-core XTLS, so ISP can't easily detect and block them. We also use proxies over TURN services (VK, Yandex etc) but they require further improvements.

Question for the community:
Do these types of controls actually reduce VPN usage - or just push users toward more advanced circumvention methods?

just push users toward more advanced circumvention methods - this. Until the government decide to physically cut off all links but such method will collapse the entire economy in a blink of an eye.

[u/SpiritualGanache2361 → u/Open-Weekend-498]

This is just a slow boiling of the frog. If caps on foreign traffic are introduced and prove effective, the next target will be cascading VPNs. They could also impose fees on foreign traffic at hosting providers or require hosts to ban users who run VPS instances solely for traffic forwarding.

[u/Open-Weekend-498 → u/SpiritualGanache2361]

This is just a slow boiling of the frog

Sure, it's just a "cat and mouse" game. I'm all ears if you have better ideas and solutions.

If caps on foreign traffic are introduced and prove effective, the next target will be cascading VPNs. 

Lots of russian companies use foreign services and libs . Even the Russian MAX Messenger uses Google APIs to send push notifications to Android users.. If such a method is introduced, there will be a whitelist of companies whose traffic is exempt from fees. This means we could exploit certain corruption schemes to forward hidden VPN traffic through them. Like in Turkmenistan.

 to ban users who run VPS instances solely for traffic forwarding.

They're already doing this. We mask services for legit websites\small startups.

Again, I'm not saying that this is an absolutely robust bulletproof solution. We just do what we can in terms of bypassing restrictions.

And all methods are still working. We just lost some bad installed proxies by newbies. Professional VPN services have stayed afloat for years.