Russian Government Have forbidden more 10,000 web pages for content on the war in Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-blown invasion in February 2022. Blacklist include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and independent news agencies. Over the past year, Russians living in the country have turned to censorship-surpassing tools such as VPN through information blockade.
But as dozens of virtual private networks are blocked, leaving users struggling to maintain access to free information, local activists and developers are coming up with new solutions. One of them is Amnezia VPN, a free, open source VPN client.
“We don’t even advertise and promote it, but hundreds of new users still come in every day,” said Mazay Banzaev, founder of Amnezia VPN.
Unlike commercial VPNs that route users through corporate servers, which can be intercepted, Amnezia VPN makes it simple for users to purchase and set up their own servers. This allows them to choose their own IP addresses and use protocols that are harder to block.
“More than half of commercial VPNs in Russia have been blocked because blocking them is too easy: They block them not by protocol but by IP address,” says Banzaev. “[Amnezia] offers a higher degree of flexibility than a typical commercial VPN.”
Amnezia VPN is similar to Outline, a free and open source tool developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. Amnezia was created in 2020 in a hackathon supported by Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. Even then, “it’s clear that things are moving toward stricter censorship,” Banzaev said.
Russian authorities have been trying to control tools like VPNs and anonymous proxy servers for years, including by introduce a law regulating these tools in 2017. However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has stepped up its efforts to control information.
Just days after Russian troops entered Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Vladimir Putin signed a law criminalizing the distribution of “fake” information about the war, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison. Most independent news outlets are now blocked, with editors and journalists jailed, leaving the Russians with state propaganda.
This has made VPNs and other circumvention tools even more important, says Stanislav Shakirov, co-founder of Roskomsvoboda and founder of technology development organization Privacy Accelerator. “If internet users in Russia stop receiving information that is not state information, then we will have no hope of any process leading to a change in the current regime,” he said.
Of course, the Kremlin is not giving up its crackdown. In September 2022, Roskomnadzor, the government agency responsible for internet censorship, announced it will block six popular VPN services, including ExpressVPN and NordVPN. Followed by March 2023 by Notification that VPNs that refuse to provide data to domestic intelligence agencies will be blocked in Russia, as well as propose to restrict anonymous tools such as virtual phone numbers. Messaging app Telegram, saw a popularity rose sharply in Russia after the invasion, was provide virtual phone number as of December 2022.
