Russia Escalated From Blocking VPNs to DDoSing Them

Key Takeaways

• Human Rights Watch published a report on September 24 documenting Russia's escalating crackdown on VPN services, which has moved from individual URL blocks to bulk IP takedowns, coordinated DDoS attacks, phishing campaigns against VPN employees, app store removals, and payment system restrictions.
• In June, Russian authorities carried out a coordinated attack on Amnezia VPN — one of Russia's most popular VPN services — blocking its IP addresses in bulk, targeting staff with phishing emails, and running DDoS attacks simultaneously; it took Amnezia one and a half months to fully restore service.
• Apple removed 1,213 apps from its Russian App Store in 2025 in response to government requests — nearly 60% of all such removals globally — including several popular VPNs in March 2026 following demands from Roskomnadzor.
• In April, Russia's Ministry of Digital Development instructed more than 20 of the largest Russian internet companies to detect and deny access to services when VPN connections are identified, with at least 30 major Russian apps found to be gathering VPN-related user data accordingly.
• Despite all of this, approximately 40% of Russia's population — around 57 million people — are estimated to use VPNs.

According to Human Rights Watch's September 24th report, Russia's approach to suppressing VPN use has shifted from granular website-level blocking to something considerably more aggressive. Where previous enforcement targeted individual URLs or IP addresses, the new tactic blocks entire subnets — large blocks of IP addresses allocated to VPN providers by their hosting companies. A representative of one affected VPN service told HRW that bulk blocking of this kind is significantly more costly and time-consuming to recover from than earlier, more targeted methods.

The clearest example is the June 2026 attack on Amnezia VPN. According to HRW, Russian authorities blocked the service's IP addresses in bulk, simultaneously launched DDoS attacks to overwhelm its infrastructure, and targeted Amnezia employees with phishing emails in an attempt to extract sensitive data. The combination of tactics — network-level disruption, technical attack, and attempted credential theft — is not the profile of a regulatory enforcement action. It's the profile of a coordinated campaign to disable a specific service.

Amnezia took one and a half months to fully restore operations. By August 4, twenty VPN providers had faced service disruptions from similar bulk blocking.

What Russia Told the Tech Industry to Do

Alongside direct attacks on VPN infrastructure, Russia has been pressuring the broader technology ecosystem to participate in enforcement. In April, the Ministry of Digital Development instructed more than twenty of the largest Russian internet companies — collectively serving the vast majority of the country's internet users — to gather data on clients' VPN use and deny access to services when VPN connections are detected. 

Apple and Google have both faced sustained pressure to remove VPN apps from their stores. Apple's own transparency report shows it removed 1,213 apps from its Russian App Store in 2025 in response to government requests — nearly 60% of all such government-mandated removals globally. In March 2026, Apple removed several popular VPNs including Streisand, V2Box, and v2RayTun following a Roskomnadzor demand citing a Russian law on information that HRW says is "widely used to restrict privacy, freedom of expression, and access to information online." 

When HRW asked Apple about its policy, Apple responded that it is "required to follow the law everywhere we operate" and that non-compliance could mean it can "no longer operate the App Store" in Russia.

Google has faced similar demands and was fined 22.8 million rubles in February for failure to remove VPN apps as ordered.

Cutting the Payment Rail

In March 2026, Russia's Ministry of Digital Development ordered the four largest mobile service providers to stop processing payments to Apple account holders using mobile phone billing — a popular method for paying for VPN subscriptions. The measure targets the payment infrastructure rather than the VPNs directly, making it harder for users to maintain subscriptions even when the VPNs themselves remain accessible.

This approach — blocking the financial layer rather than the technical one — is consistent with how authoritarian governments increasingly approach censorship circumvention. When blocking individual services proves insufficient, the next step is to make them harder to pay for, harder to download, and harder to talk about: Russia banned advertising VPNs in 2025, introduced fines for intentionally searching for "extremist" content via VPNs, and classified VPN use as an aggravating circumstance for certain criminal offenses.

What 57 Million People Are Still Doing Anyway

Despite all of this — 469 VPNs blocked under the 2017 law, bulk infrastructure attacks, app store removals, payment restrictions, advertising bans, and criminal penalties — approximately 40% of Russia's population continues to use VPNs. That's around 57 million people. VPN downloads have grown consistently even as enforcement has escalated.

HRW's concern is that escalating attacks push users toward riskier choices. Constantly switching VPN providers — as bulk blocking forces users to do — increases the chance of ending up with a service that stores logs, shares data with Russian authorities, or simply doesn't protect privacy adequately. The pressure campaign achieves something even without fully suppressing VPN use: it degrades the quality and reliability of the privacy tools that remain, and makes people less certain they can trust what they're using.

VPNs that don't collect user logs and don't transfer data to state authorities remain effective for maintaining privacy even against Russia's surveillance infrastructure, HRW said. The report calls on foreign technology companies to resist government pressure to take down VPN apps, and on governments and foundations working on internet freedom to continue supporting the tools that enable Russians to access uncensored information.