Russia wants to strengthen its censorship infrastructure and plans to spend around $650 million over the next five years to update its VPN blocking system.
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This is the strategy outlined in the federal project “Cybersecurity Infrastructure,” as Forbes reports. The Russian censorship body, Roskomnadzor, aims to create a more effective filtering system to block VPN services in particular.
The Kremlin has long been cracking down on VPN use across the country . That’s because a VPN (virtual private network) is security software that encrypts internet connections and “hides” users’ IP addresses, providing access to geo-restricted content — exactly what Russian authorities are trying to prevent.
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For countries like Russia, China, Myanmar, and Iran – countries notorious for imposing strict internet restrictions – blocking VPN use has been a long-standing goal. Over time, this has created an endless game of chase between authorities and VPN providers to find a way to circumvent VPN censorship.
Technologies like VPN obfuscation and IP switching are particularly useful for bypassing content restrictions, with companies like Proton VPN continuing to invest in new anti-censorship tools. Now, the Kremlin seems ready to invest big money to reverse this trend.
Currently, Russia’s Technical Approach to Threat Prevention (TSPU in Russian) filters all Internet traffic to block or slow down certain resources. However, its implementation of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) has technical limitations. For example, it “does not have sufficient computing power to block VPN protocols and speed up YouTube at the same time.”
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This is where the new strategy comes in. Between 2025 and 2030, Roskomnadzor plans to modernize the current TSPU and install new ones. Censors expect this to increase the effectiveness of VPN blocking by 96%.
Source: techradar
