Virtual private networks (VPNs) are more in use than ever in Russia as a number of social networks and media have been made inaccessible by the authorities. Mobile operator Yota reports that the proportion of its subscribers using VPN services grew 38-fold, reaching 22.8% of the total number of Yota clients, from Jan. 1 to April 3, 2022.
The traffic of VPN services reached its peak in the last week of March, when it was 69 times higher than in the first week of January, said the operator, as reported by news agency TASS.
OpenVPN, WireGuard and Surfshark VPN are among the most popular services.
Windscribe, another VPN service, confirmed the trend, with its traffic from users in Russia increasing by a factor of twenty in the month following Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, the company told Fortune.
Some VPN companies have “made some services free in Russia because Russians have no way to pay,” the US publication notes.
Meanwhile, the authorities had blocked around 20 popular VPN services as of mid-March, according to Alexander Khinshtein, who heads the State Duma’s committee on information policy.
“Blocking VPN services is not an easy task, but it is being executed,” The Moscow Times quoted him as saying.
VPN users are not being prosecuted, however, said Andrey Klishas, Head of the Council of Federation’s Committee on Constitutional Legislation, in an interview with RBC.
“Citizens are not accountable for this according to law, [and] I have no knowledge of any draft bill” that would introduce such restrictions.
However, he added that “it is possible to block the sites where you can download a VPN” based on existing legislation.
