Russian programmers play a ‘cat and mouse’ game to outsmart censors
Many programmers are preparing for tougher blocks on VPNs in Russia; meanwhile, Russian Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, is making eorts to block certain VPN services, and these eorts will continue in order to reduce the possibility to circumvent block
hen Antony Rudkovsky was about 15, he began to teach himself how to build virtual private networks (VPNs) to access Internet content unavailable in Russia.
At rst, the young programmer just wanted to listen to music on the Spotify streaming app in his bedroom in Nizhny Novgorod, a city roughly 430 km east of Moscow.
Three years later, Mr. Rudkovsky, now 18, snagged $1,200 – the biggest share of the prize money – at a competition last month organised by a civil society group to design a VPN to evade Russia’s censors.
He is part of a growing ecosystem of freelance programmers and VPN companies involved in what some of them describe as a “cat-andmouse” game with authorities to bypass controls on what Russians can access online. “I am not a very political person by nature, but I don’t think that violating basic human freedoms – the freedom to express oneself and get information – is the right thing,” Mr. Rudkovsky said in an interview. “People will get further and further from reality.”
Reuters spoke to six programmers who are preparing for tougher blocks on VPNs in Russia, some of
Wthem employing techniques learnt from Chinese hackers’ eorts to evade the even more stringent ‘Great Firewall’ there.
Many of the programmers now work from abroad due to safety concerns: coordinating in group chats, at virtual hackathons and on collaborative web development platforms.
Russian Internet regulator Roskomnadzor has been putting opposition media websites on blacklists and has banned several foreign social media platforms in a crackdown it casts as part of an information war unleashed by the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin accuses some Western news and social media sites of spreading negative propaganda about Russia to stoke discord in the country and ultimately overthrow the government.
Demand for such services in Russia skyrocketed after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine sent millions searching for independent information. An estimated 33.5 million people downloaded a VPN in Russia in 2022, up from 12.6 million the year before, according to a global index maintained by Atlas VPN, a service provider.
‘Traditional values’
Some programmers are gearing up for what they expect to be an era of tighter controls after President Vladimir Putin secured a mandate until at least 2030 with a landslide win at elections last month.
Pro-Kremlin lawmakers want to restrict Internet access further as part of a broader ght to protect what Mr. Putin refers to as Russia’s “traditional values” — based on family, nation and Orthodox Christian faith. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked about the government’s stance on the use of VPNs, said he was not aware of any planned sanctions. “Roskomnadzor is making eorts to block certain VPN services, and these eorts will continue in order to reduce the possibility to circumvent blocks,” he said.
Roskomnadzor currently blocks about 150 popular VPNs, Evgeniy Zaitsev, its head of department for control and supervision of electronic communications, was quoted by state media as saying at an Internet safety forum in Moscow this week. It has long said it wants to eliminate
VPN services altogether.
There are signs that the crackdown is gaining strength.
Last month, Russia banned the advertising of VPNs used explicitly to access “blocked or illegal content,” and Roskomnadzor has so far blocked roughly 700 webpages that spread such “propaganda”, Mr. Zaitsev said.
One Russian VPN provider as well as a civil society organisation that helps rights groups access VPNs said their clients were reporting problems with services that worked ne a year ago. Many Russians use VPNs to access banned U.S. social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram.
While nearly all Russianlanguage independent media are blocked, Western news sites are not. Irina Borogan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) who co-authored a book on Russian digital censorship, said that so few Russians speak other European languages that there isn’t a need to restrict such content.
The vast majority of people who speak just Russian and don’t have a VPN can only access Kremlincontrolled news, Ms. Borogan said.
Several programmers are building on anti-censorship tools developed in China and the United States to stay ahead of Roskomnadzor.
One developer, who asked to be referred to only by his rst name, Evgeniy, has developed a simplied version of a well-known Chinese circumvention tool, ◣ray. His “easy-xray” application diverts web tra©c to a rented server abroad via a complex process that he says masks user tra©c from Roskomnadzor.
“We tested easy-xray on two servers and saw no big problems during Russian blocking,” said Evgeniy. The service is not commercially available yet.
Risks for Russia
Six experts say Moscow’s eorts to ban all VPNs would risk harming other functionalities of the Internet — at least temporarily — such as government websites for tax payments or online banking services.
“When you try to ban something or block IP addresses, it means you can disrupt the whole system,” said Borogan of the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Russia maintains strong connections to the global economy, despite current Western sanctions, making it potentially risky to disrupt critical online services. Aggressive blocking could also lead to more Internet blackouts, of which there have been several in Russia in recent months, said Andrew Sullivan, president of the Internet Society, an American advocacy group.