Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
I would say they are trying to block every public VPN, and if some VPN tried to hide behind CloudFlare's backs thinking that they took all CloudFlare sites as hostages, then whole CloudFlare is nuked, and hostages did not save VPN from blocking.
I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)
Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.
>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.
The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).
The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).
> unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government
Government did much to turn them away. And with regards to Makh messanger. Patriotic tech talents are supposed to be interested in Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. Does Makh messenger work on something Russian? No, Makh does not work on anything Russian. So what makes Makh Russian? We don't get it. It's some another Russia that we don't belong to. Our Russia is Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. And software from Astra group. People behind Elbrus 2000 support orthodoxal christianity, and people behind Astra group are for great Soviet past. They call one of Astra Linux releases "Leningrad". The proper name of what is currently known as "Saint-Petersburg."
Makh is from some commercial group that does not care about our values. Virtually openly violates traditional values. They are from VK group, and VK hosts VKFest, an open air for youth with rotten words, furnication songs, all that stuff.
Our Russia and their Russia don't mix like water and oil.
For military there is another communication network called Свод (Svod, Arch). It was 4 years late to the party, but at least goes in now.
> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
YouTube is easily accelerated via DPI bypass. It used to work with CloudFlare too, but not anymore, so CloudFlare is banned more hard than YouTube. With DPI bypass YouTube is very fast.
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region
In addition to the obvious growth in popularity of VPNs, there are two other subtle points:
1. Many Russian IP addresses are now registered to foreign offshore companies to avoid confiscation in the next package of EU sanctions. Being Russian, they were registered through RIPE, which created a risk. The same IP which was Russian a year ago, now can be listed as Madlovian or Magnolian remaining physically in Russia.
2. Cloudflare is a biased internet: the most traffic-heavy sites using Cloudflare are porn sites. That is, we can only draw conclusions here about changes in the structure of porn content consumption in Russia. High-traffic western websites censored in Russia - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ... - are not on Cloudflare anyway and their blockade does not contribute to this chart.
It's more complicated than that, the entire former soviet union area was (and is) a huge cybercrime outsourcing market. There are tons of little groups specializing on certain things and selling their services to others. Most notorious "Russian" or "Ukrainian" groups are just visible parts of transnational networks, and depend on the services of others in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Baltics etc. In 2022 the supply chain got partially severed for ransomware and CC fraud in particular, however the black market still functions despite the war.
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making.
It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).
It is different. It’s just not a sensitive issue - you cannot win elections having fixing this as central part of your platform. In authoritarian states you cannot win elections, period.
If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]
I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.
Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.
The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.
I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.
> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.
It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.
Some people just say nothing (due to consequenses), some are very imperialist (rural areas have extremely high occurance). Rarer case, openly against government.
Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
If it's arm based mikrotik then you could run containers with fancier protocol wrappers
I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
I would say they are trying to block every public VPN, and if some VPN tried to hide behind CloudFlare's backs thinking that they took all CloudFlare sites as hostages, then whole CloudFlare is nuked, and hostages did not save VPN from blocking.
I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)
Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.
Iron curtain is coming back up.
On a positive note Russia is now the heart of digital piracy. They aren't in a mood to go after piracy groups.
Now? lol
>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.
The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).
The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).
> unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government
Government did much to turn them away. And with regards to Makh messanger. Patriotic tech talents are supposed to be interested in Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. Does Makh messenger work on something Russian? No, Makh does not work on anything Russian. So what makes Makh Russian? We don't get it. It's some another Russia that we don't belong to. Our Russia is Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. And software from Astra group. People behind Elbrus 2000 support orthodoxal christianity, and people behind Astra group are for great Soviet past. They call one of Astra Linux releases "Leningrad". The proper name of what is currently known as "Saint-Petersburg."
Makh is from some commercial group that does not care about our values. Virtually openly violates traditional values. They are from VK group, and VK hosts VKFest, an open air for youth with rotten words, furnication songs, all that stuff.
Our Russia and their Russia don't mix like water and oil.
For military there is another communication network called Свод (Svod, Arch). It was 4 years late to the party, but at least goes in now.
That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.
Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.
I think VK is being blocked in some Western countries because it allowed pirated content, not because Russia blocked it :)
VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.
> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.
Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.
That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
> stenography
I think you mean steganography[0]. Stenography is shorthand, used for transcription.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
That'll eventually get detected and put a massive target on the back of anybody dumb enough to use it. Sorry to burst your bubble.
oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service
VPNs didn't help?
Far not everybody cares to use them
What do they use, instead?
It's not like they don't want any videos online.
+ Dzen Video
YouTube is easily accelerated via DPI bypass. It used to work with CloudFlare too, but not anymore, so CloudFlare is banned more hard than YouTube. With DPI bypass YouTube is very fast.
Rutube, VK.
> What do they use, instead?
a VPN
> youtube is slow
Maybe they're using Windows Phones?
Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...
In a nutshell:
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.
"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]
[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
I changed the URI to show the US data and was surprise by the fact Virginia surpassed California [1], so I looked into Virginia [2] and realized, mostly are automated bots from AWS and other US-East based region
1. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us?dateRange=52w 2. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/6254928?dateRange=52w
In addition to the obvious growth in popularity of VPNs, there are two other subtle points:
1. Many Russian IP addresses are now registered to foreign offshore companies to avoid confiscation in the next package of EU sanctions. Being Russian, they were registered through RIPE, which created a risk. The same IP which was Russian a year ago, now can be listed as Madlovian or Magnolian remaining physically in Russia.
2. Cloudflare is a biased internet: the most traffic-heavy sites using Cloudflare are porn sites. That is, we can only draw conclusions here about changes in the structure of porn content consumption in Russia. High-traffic western websites censored in Russia - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, ... - are not on Cloudflare anyway and their blockade does not contribute to this chart.
Discord is on CloudFlare
So discord is porn /s
> Traffic shifts seen in some networks/locations due to phased integration of new IP geolocation provider
There's an event marker with a possible reason for it - which does make one wonder how bad the accuracy of the geolocation data is/was
Maybe its just me, but it feels like there has been a lot less ransomware attacks since the Ukraine/Russia war started as well.
a solid number of propaganda ("marketing") and malware gangs operated out of Ukraine, or other parts of Eastern Europe.
the war definitely changed those flows and targets; e.g. they now flood reddit with pro-Ukranian posts.
most of Russian agit-prop now flows out of "marketing" contractors in India, Pakistan, or Nigeria.
It's more complicated than that, the entire former soviet union area was (and is) a huge cybercrime outsourcing market. There are tons of little groups specializing on certain things and selling their services to others. Most notorious "Russian" or "Ukrainian" groups are just visible parts of transnational networks, and depend on the services of others in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Baltics etc. In 2022 the supply chain got partially severed for ransomware and CC fraud in particular, however the black market still functions despite the war.
Russia testing whitelisted only Internet today
https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/2031296657229242577?s=20
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
Can we conclude that this means the Great Firewall of russia is working and ~60% of population does not care?
Update: no. Russian people who care use VPN and thus are not counted as russian traffic.
Well, they are concerned, however citizens of authoritarian states have no agency in decision-making. It works to the extent where mobile internet is mostly not working in places like Moscow (traffic to a few white-listed sites is allowed). A lot of services based on mobile connectivity are nearly impossible there for this reason (and geolocation has 4-digits before decimal point precision in km).
The blocking of cloudflare in Spain shows that citizens of “democratic” states have no agency either.
It is different. It’s just not a sensitive issue - you cannot win elections having fixing this as central part of your platform. In authoritarian states you cannot win elections, period.
It is always "different". Are you older than 18 years ? Are you "allowed" to use a computer ? Or is this "different" ?
What leads you to think they don’t care?
If you talk or write with Russians, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff. Even though telegram was banned, the majority of all Russian channels are pro-government.[0]
[0] https://cedarus.io/research/what-do-russians-read
I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.
Russia has very effective media in using the firehose of falsehood (Trump and his media groups follow the same pattern). You fill the field with so many lies that Bullshit Asymmetry makes it near impossible to figure out the truth.
The entire point is making everyone so tired all the time and feel like they can't make any progress. Then the government as less work of finding the few places where people congregate and stop them from meeting there.
Yes, my point is "censorship and bots do work" does not equal "people don't care". People online often imagine themselves to be pretty informed about some other country, especially if they communicate with people from that country. This is delusional, I can't claim I know much about "average reality of living in Brazil" even though I communicate with people from there, follow some media, have traveled across it on a motorcycle, and was a guest to some friends there. This is even less true for current Russia.
I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.
> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.
Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.
It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.
A guy in russia makes interviews of people on the street.
https://youtube.com/@1420channel?si=_IlEAa4V1rilJOMb
Some people just say nothing (due to consequenses), some are very imperialist (rural areas have extremely high occurance). Rarer case, openly against government.
It doesn't matter what people think it only matters how people act. The Russian ability to suffer in silence is legendary.
People who do care use a VPN and don't get counted as Russian traffic
Ahhh so that completely invalidates my hypothesis. I stand corrected.