Russia's VPN Crackdown Just Changed Tactics: Now the Sites Themselves Are Blocking You

Since April 15, some of Russia’s biggest online platforms have started refusing service to anyone connecting through a VPN. Not the network. Not the ISP. The app itself now checks, and blocks.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Russia has throttled and blocked VPN traffic at the infrastructure level for years. What changed this spring is that individual services, e-commerce sites, streaming platforms, banks, ride-hailing apps, started doing their own detection and turning users away. It’s a second layer of enforcement stacked on top of the first, and it’s a much harder one to route around.

What actually happened on April 15

The Moscow Times reported that Ozon, Russia’s largest e-commerce platform, and Kinopoisk, a major streaming service, began showing “access denied” messages to visitors detected using a VPN. Similar disruptions hit banking apps and ride-sharing services around the same date. Not every platform joined in: VKontakte, the dominant Russian social network, and Wildberries, a big online retailer, still worked fine with a VPN active when the report was published.

The date isn’t a coincidence. Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development had set April 15 as a deadline for more than 20 major platforms to cut down on VPN usage among their users. Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadayev said in March that his agency’s job was, in his words, to “reduce the use of VPNs.” He tied the push to what he called long, difficult, and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with foreign tech companies over compliance with Russian law. When negotiation fails, apparently, the fallback is to make the workaround stop working.

Why this is a bigger deal than another network block

Network-level VPN blocking is a game of cat and mouse that’s been running in Russia since 2022, when the government cut off access to Western social media and independent Russian news outlets after the invasion of Ukraine. VPN downloads spiked immediately, and providers responded with obfuscated protocols designed to disguise VPN traffic as ordinary HTTPS. For a while, that worked well enough for most people who needed a workaround.

Application-level blocking is a different problem, and a harder one to solve with a protocol tweak. Instead of Deep Packet Inspection trying to spot VPN traffic patterns on the wire, the site itself checks the IP address a user is connecting from, cross-references it against known VPN server ranges, and denies the session regardless of whether the traffic looked like a normal browser request. A VPN connection can sail straight through the network layer and still get stopped at the front door, because the front door is now checking IDs on its own.

For a Russian user or a traveler trying to check a bank balance, order something on Ozon, or stream a show on Kinopoisk, this means a VPN that worked fine yesterday can suddenly produce a wall of text saying access is denied, even though the connection itself never dropped. The obstacle moved from the pipe to the destination, and that’s a much broader front to defend.

Not all VPNs handle this the same way

This is where server quality actually shows up in practice. A VPN with a large, frequently rotated pool of IP addresses, and dedicated servers built to look like ordinary residential or business traffic, is harder for a site’s detection system to flag than a VPN reusing the same small block of data-center IPs across thousands of users. Providers that maintain obfuscated protocols and refresh their server infrastructure regularly have a better track record of staying one step ahead of this kind of application-side blocklisting.

None of this is a guarantee. Detection systems get updated too, and a server address that works today can land on a blocklist tomorrow. But the gap between a VPN that treats obfuscation as a core feature and one that treats it as an afterthought is real, and it’s exactly the gap that decides whether someone can still check a bank balance in Moscow next week. NordVPN and Proton VPN both invest specifically in obfuscated server infrastructure built for exactly this kind of environment, which is why they keep showing up in our testing for restrictive countries. We break down what still works in our guide to VPNs in Russia.

Want to compare all VPNs side by side? Check our full VPN comparison table with scores across 18 criteria.

The app stores are already gone

This latest step didn’t arrive out of nowhere. More than 100 commercial VPN apps were pulled from Russian app stores over the course of 2025, well before this month’s platform-level blocking began. Then, in April 2026, Apple blocked mobile billing in Russia, cutting off one of the last remaining ways Russians could pay for foreign services, VPNs included. Put those two pieces together and the picture is a country where people increasingly can’t discover a VPN through official channels, and increasingly can’t pay for one even if it’s already installed.

That leaves people relying on VPNs they downloaded before the store purges, word-of-mouth installation files, or payment workarounds that are themselves getting harder to pull off. It’s a slow strangulation rather than a single cutoff switch, and application-level blocking on top of it closes off one more of the remaining paths.

Who’s actually behind the push

The Bell, an independent Russian outlet, reported that anonymous sources in the IT and telecoms sector pointed to a special FSB unit as the force behind this recent tightening. That’s the same unit previously accused of involvement in the poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Whether or not that attribution holds up in full, it fits the broader pattern: this isn’t ad hoc corporate policy from Ozon or Kinopoisk acting alone, it’s coordinated pressure from the state, applied through a deadline and backed by an agency with a track record of blunt tactics.

The crackdown also follows months of mobile internet disruptions and imposed slowdowns on WhatsApp and Telegram, which points to a broader campaign rather than an isolated policy tweak aimed specifically at VPNs.

Is using a VPN actually illegal in Russia?

Here’s the part worth being precise about, because it’s easy to blur. The Kremlin stated on April 15 that using a VPN is not punishable under Russian law, and denied knowledge of any plans to penalize VPN users. That’s a distinct question from whether VPN apps themselves get pulled from stores, throttled at the network level, or blocked by individual platforms. Using a VPN, per the Kremlin’s own statement, isn’t illegal. Actually being able to use one that still works is an increasingly separate problem. Our guide to VPN legality by country covers how Russia’s rules compare with the roughly 15 other countries that restrict or ban VPN use outright.

What this means if you’re in Russia or heading there

If you’re a traveler, install and configure your VPN before you land. VPN provider websites are themselves frequently blocked inside Russia, so downloading or setting one up after arrival is unreliable at best. Choose a provider with obfuscated servers specifically, not just any VPN, and test the connection against a banking app or similar service before you actually need it for something that matters.

If you’re a resident already using a VPN daily, expect more of your regular destinations to start throwing up access-denied screens even when the connection itself holds fine. Switching servers within the same provider sometimes clears an application-level block, since it changes the IP address the site sees, though it’s not a fix that holds indefinitely as detection lists keep getting updated on the other end.

None of this means VPNs have stopped mattering in Russia. It means the bar for a VPN that actually keeps working has risen, and providers that treat obfuscation as a one-time checkbox rather than an ongoing engineering effort are going to fall behind first.

Sources: Russian websites begin blocking VPN users as internet controls tighten | As Kremlin cuts off the internet, VPNs become a way of life