Russia Will Spend $235 Million on Internet Blocking in 2027 — Double Its Previous Budget

Russia's automated internet censorship infrastructure — officially the "Automated System for Ensuring the Security of the Internet," or ASBI — runs on specialized hardware called TSPU devices, which internet service providers are legally required to install. These devices filter network traffic at the network level, allowing the state to throttle or block websites, apps, and VPN protocols.

The original 2027 budget for ASBI was 9.87 billion rubles, approximately $115 million. According to budget drafts uncovered by Verstka and corroborated by The Moscow Times, that figure has been revised to 19.87 billion rubles — nearly double. Overall funding for Roskomnadzor, the federal internet regulator, will grow by 60% in 2027. Across the next three years, total censorship spending is projected to reach 60 billion rubles.

The target that spending is meant to achieve is specific: a 92% efficiency rate in blocking VPNs by 2030, with the filtering system's throughput expanded 2.5 times to handle 954 terabits per second of data. That's not a vague commitment to better filtering — it's a performance target with a deadline and a budget attached to it.

We've covered Russia's escalating VPN crackdown in detail over recent weeks: bulk IP takedowns, coordinated DDoS attacks against VPN providers, phishing campaigns against their employees, app store removals, and a post-election intensification that hit ten services in a single week. The budget announcement is the strategic backdrop to those operational moves. Russia isn't improvising its VPN suppression. It's building infrastructure for it.

The Financial Deterrents

Alongside hardware upgrades, Russia is exploring two new mechanisms for discouraging VPN use through financial pressure rather than technical blocking.

The first is a fee for users who consume more than 50GB of international traffic on 5G networks. The Ministry of Digital Development is discussing this with telecom operators, according to Kommersant, though operators currently lack the technical capability to separate 5G and LTE international traffic in real time. The intent is clear even if implementation isn't ready: to make routing traffic outside Russia's domestic internet expensive enough to deter the users doing it most — which, in practice, means people who use VPNs consistently.

The second is "Anti-Fraud 3.0," a legislative package that would ban domestic hosting providers from offering services to clients who host VPNs or proxies on Roskomnadzor's registry, for up to a year. Hosters would also be required to identify their clients and verify intended server use before providing services. This closes off a domestic infrastructure route that VPN operators have used to stay accessible inside Russia: if Russian hosting companies can't legally serve VPN operators, those operators lose a class of servers that are harder to block by foreign IP ranges.

From Blocking to Throttling

The technical shift happening inside Russia's filtering approach is as significant as the budget increase. Sergei Shcherbakov, technical director at Stakhanovets, told TechRadar that Russian ISPs have now accumulated enough traffic data to move from outright blocking to targeted throttling: "Operators have accumulated enough statistics to move from total blocks to targeted suffocation of quality."

That shift matters because total blocks are visible and create public complaints. A VPN that's blocked stops working, which users notice immediately and which generates pressure on providers to route around it. A VPN that's been throttled to the point of being unusable still technically works — it's just too slow to function for video, calls, or anything time-sensitive. Users experience it as a bad product rather than a censorship event, which distributes the political cost of suppression across millions of individual frustrations rather than concentrating it into an observable block.

Sarkis Darbinyan of RKS Global and the VPN Guild acknowledged that VPN operators are adapting — upgrading protocols, adopting traffic obfuscation, building alternative apps. But he was direct about the outcome for users: "None of this guarantees that any given public VPN will remain accessible from Russia. For the end user, the result is a deteriorating VPN experience and an ever-shrinking number of services that actually work."

What $235 Million Buys in Practice

About 57 million Russians — around 40% of the population — use VPNs despite existing blocking, advertising bans, criminal penalties for VPN use, and app store removals. That figure is what $235 million in 2027 is trying to reduce.

The strategy is layered: build infrastructure that blocks at scale, make the unblocked services too slow to use, charge people financially for the traffic patterns that indicate VPN use, shut off the domestic hosting that keeps some services accessible, and make it legally risky for any Russian company to facilitate VPN operation. No single measure closes the gap. The cumulative effect, over years, with increasing budgets and improving technical capability, is intended to make VPN use progressively harder, more expensive, and more legally exposed — until the 40% becomes something smaller.

Russia isn't the first government to try this, and the outcomes in comparable situations suggest that determined users find ways to continue. But "determined users find ways to continue" is a different reality from "anyone who wants to can access independent information without significant technical effort." The gap between those two is what $235 million is designed to widen.