Тег: Internet

VPN in Russia 2026: a guide for those who do not want to live in a digital GULAG

The current internet situation in Russia resembles a joke: “We have freedom of speech, but no freedom after speech.” Only now, it’s no longer a joke, but daily reality. Roskomnadzor has blocked 800+ VPN services, TSPU has learned to recognize protocols in seconds, and since March 2026, “white lists” have even begun to be tested in Moscow—meaning only what is approved from above is allowed. Welcome to the sovereign internet! But we aren’t the type to give up, are we? So let’s break down what actually works.

Why are options like NordVPN and ExpressVPN no longer viable? In short: mass commercial VPNs are dead in Russia. OpenVPN is detected in seconds by the first byte of the packet. WireGuard is detected by its UDP structure. L2TP, PPTP, and SOCKS5 have been blocked since December 2025. Classic Shadowsocks is identified via entropy analysis. What works? Next-generation protocols: VLESS + Reality (mimics regular HTTPS to a legitimate site), AmneziaWG (a modified WireGuard with mimicry), Hysteria2 (based on QUIC), and xHTTP (fragments traffic to bypass TCP Freezing). But which VPN provider should we choose then?

1) Mullvad (Sweden) – the absolute gold standard of privacy. It doesn’t require an email—it generates a random account number. It accepts cash in an envelope (yes, literally put euros in an envelope and send it to Sweden), Monero, and Bitcoin. In 2023, Swedish police conducted a search at the request of Germany—and didn’t find a single byte of user data. This is the best proof of a “no-logs” policy imaginable. Of course, there is a downside: Roskomnadzor deliberately blocks Mullvad IP addresses, so you have to cycle through servers. The app has been removed from the Russian App Store.

2) IVPN (Gibraltar) – Mullvad’s closest competitor in terms of paranoia (in a good way). Also no email, just a random Account ID. Cash, Monero (they have their own Full Node—no third-party payment gateways), and Bitcoin. A security audit by Cure53 has been conducted. V2Ray obfuscation (VMESS/QUIC and VMESS/TCP) is built into all clients. Exemplary split tunneling—both direct and inverted. Ideal for those who need to access Gosuslugi and read blocked media simultaneously.

3) Proton VPN (Switzerland) – Stealth protocol, four Securitum audits, and a history of rejecting all legal requests for data. There is a free plan with unlimited traffic. However: it requires an email (you can use an anonymous ProtonMail registered via TOR), it doesn’t accept Monero directly, and Roskomnadzor actively tries to block it. Lifehack: manually loading WireGuard configs often works when the app cannot connect.

Note that as of May 2026, the Ministry of Digital Development has required large platforms to block access via VPN. The solution: split tunneling—route banks and government services outside the tunnel, and everything else through the VPN. There is also an advanced scheme against “white lists”: Client → Russian VPS (on the white list) → foreign server. TSPU sees domestic traffic and leaves it alone.

Why will you never be punished for the mere fact of using a VPN?! This is a favorite scare tactic of propagandists, but it collapses against reality. First, TSPU physically cannot distinguish VPN traffic from regular HTTPS with 100% accuracy—that’s exactly how VLESS and Reality are built. Fining people for “suspicious traffic”? How many people and on what grounds would they even have to sue. Second, VPNs are the backbone of legal business. Every bank, every corporation, every remote worker uses a VPN daily. And third: introducing liability for the “fact of using a VPN” would immediately lead to millions of people connecting via other people’s Wi-Fi networks. We would end up with millions of criminal cases against 80-year-old grandmothers whose routers “used a VPN.” Imagine the headlines: “Pensioner from Saratov fined for bypassing blocks.” No government can afford such a level of absurdity—it would be political suicide. Therefore, the state’s strategy is different: not to punish users, but to make VPNs as inconvenient as possible. Our task is to stay one step ahead. After all, freedom is not something given, but something taken!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Online bullying

I was asked to comment on the case of Zalina Marshenkulova.

I will briefly outline the facts. Till Lindemann filmed a music video that apparently contains (I haven’t watched it) sex scenes. Several actresses turned out to be Russian; they were deanonymized, their contacts were posted on 2ch (I don’t read it), and calls for violence were made right there. Zalina asked for the contacts to be removed, after which 2ch began calling for violence against her as well.

I’ll start by saying that calls to remove anything from 2ch are pointless. The main point of this garbage heap is that things are posted there anonymously and without censorship. If 2ch were to introduce systemic censorship, people would simply move their trolling to a less stifling platform. If the owners of such platforms are persecuted, people will start writing on the blockchain of some Steam or Voice.

I recommend everyone reread the chapter from Mechanics of Freedom published the day before yesterday about the public good. When someone writes a post on 2ch, it is a private good: the author receives all the benefits from the publication that interest them, and the opinion of others either doesn’t interest them at all or is one of the benefits for them. When someone tries to systematically fight certain types of publications on 2ch or deanonymize their authors, it is a public good. Such activity can bring small benefits to a large group of people, but the person who puts in the primary effort spends disproportionately more than the benefit they personally receive. Others spend nothing, except for the money to buy popcorn.

Public goods always suffer from underproduction. I have encountered a similar problem in my own chat. I positioned it as a place where one could chat with me on random topics or clarify something regarding the channel’s publications. No ideological filtering was intended; the only request to the public was to remain friendly. It’s unknown what the majority of the public wanted, but the targeted efforts of a small group were enough to turn the chat into a rather unpleasant place for me. I barely suppressed the urge to delete the chat, transferred the creator rights to another person, and since I cannot maintain friendliness toward its participants right now, I simply archived it. Mockery, stupid repetitive copypastas, attempts to fish for more personal information for deanonymization or to demonstrate my incompetence—all these are things that bring me no joy and are extremely costly to fight, so it’s easier for me to abandon the chat entirely than to try to ensure a pleasant atmosphere there.

But as soon as someone tries to bring something from the internet into real life, the situation reverses. An attempt to harass a person in real life over some nonsense attributed to them on the internet is the production of a public evil. All the costs fall on the perpetrator, while the internet just laughs, especially if the perpetrator fails in a funny way. It doesn’t even matter if they succeed in humiliating the target of the harassment in a funny way or fail miserably in a funny way. The attacker gains no significant benefit. For the defending party, self-defense is a private good from the production of which they receive all the benefits, and therefore they are fully motivated to invest in it.

It is thanks to this system of economic incentives that we have the internet as a space of relative freedom, including for stupid aggressive jokes—and offline as a space of relative safety, where one can actually get hit for stupid aggressive jokes. Responsibility for aggression online and impunity for aggression offline are not perceived as the norm. And the only thing we can do to ensure there is less stupid aggression on the internet is to work on the general softening of manners.

An example of stupid aggression from the internet

As is known, there are no monopolies in a free market

But how then should we view Google, Facebook, and YouTube, which are monopolists in their respective spheres: search engines, social networks, and video platforms? Yes, there are Russian analogues like VK or Yandex, but that is all local, and overall, the world still uses these three monopolists, and their imminent decline is not yet expected.

Howard Roark

Indeed, there are tools that have a massive network effect; in other words, the more people who use them, the more beneficial it is for them to use them. This applies to money, language, as well as other communication tools such as social networks.

Many entrepreneurs try to guess exactly which offer will be so in demand by users that they will be willing to pay for it. Some guess better than others. The creators of Facebook guessed that some people are willing to pay to show their own content to a crowd, while others will gladly pay for information on user preferences. The creators of YouTube guessed that some people are willing to pay to show commercials in other people’s videos, and others — to watch videos without ads. The creators of Google guessed that people would more readily buy targeted advertising rather than the kind that blasts areas indiscriminately.

We do not know which consumer needs people will be willing to pay for tomorrow. Neither do the owners of the internet giants. Today, the YouTube administration assumes that blocking accounts with information unpleasant to advertisers is a good idea, but tomorrow it may turn out that people are more willing to pay for freedom of expression. Today, Facebook is developing the trade of big data, and tomorrow it will find that people pay more for privacy. Today, Google is satisfied with its ad targeting algorithms, and tomorrow it will turn out that an outsider has come up with something better, and for some reason, this startup does not wish to be bought out.

In a free market, there can be the dominance of certain standards, and for us consumers, this is very convenient. And when it starts to feel restrictive, some Durov inevitably appears and whispers: why do you need these social networks, switch from the needle of publicity to an anonymous messenger. Come on, you answer Durov, how can one live without VK? And a year later, it turns out that you even brush your teeth via Telegram. That is how it works; this is creative destruction.

User preferences