(Adnkronos) – It will be increasingly difficult to access blocked websites in Russia. The government has intensified its battle against VPNs, the tool that allows users to access the web from foreign servers, thus bypassing barriers and controls imposed within the country, whose use has been discouraged by authorities since 2023. The Minister for Digital Development, Maksut Shadaev, announced the start of the crackdown on the use of ‘Virtual Private Networks’ requested by Vladimir Putin. “We are forced to implement the task before us. In this case, the task is to reduce the use of VPNs,” Shadaev declared in an IT professionals’ chat on Max, the messaging service the government created to replace Telegram, explaining that these steps are necessary after “long, difficult, and ultimately failed discussions” with foreign IT companies that were asked to comply with the new rules adopted in Russia, starting with the requirement for their physical presence in the country to operate there. Operators will have to tax users with international traffic exceeding 15 gigabytes starting next May 1st. VPN users will therefore have to pay more for their online activity. Yandex and Wildberries platforms have also been ordered to restrict access to users connected to a VPN. These are “painful compromises,” the minister admitted, emphasizing that “other options would have been significantly worse,” including the prosecution of those who use them. For weeks, Internet outages in Russia have been increasingly frequent and long.
