Russia tells ten major VPN providers including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, Kaspersky, Hola, and OpenVPN, to block sites on the country's blacklist
For the past several years, Russia has continued with its mission to restrict access to content the state finds objectionable.
Context & Ripple Effects
This order is the enforcement phase of a policy Russia set in motion when Putin signed laws banning VPNs from November 2017 — the ban made non-compliant services illegal, and this directive tells ten major providers exactly what compliance means: block sites on the federal blacklist or lose access to Russian users.
The longer arc matters here. Documents later showed Moscow running 236 procurement contracts worth $9.8M for VPN tech since the Ukraine invasion, meaning the state both suppresses consumer VPNs and operates them itself. And by 2026 the crackdown's costs surface directly: attempts to limit VPN use were linked to a widespread banking outage, while ordinary Russians resort to multiple phones and VPNs to get around restrictions.
First-order effects
- NordVPN, ExpressVPN, TorGuard, IPVanish, Kaspersky, Hola, OpenVPN and the other named providers each face a binary choice: filter traffic for Roskomnadzor or be blocked in Russia, turning a privacy product into a censorship endpoint if they comply.
- Russian subscribers of these services immediately see either filtered connections or dead services, depending on each provider's decision.
Second-order effects
- Providers that refuse compliance exit the Russian market rather than compromise their core no-logging promise, ceding the consumer VPN market to domestic or state-tolerated alternatives.
- The state's own VPN procurement shows the suppression creates demand it then exploits: government agencies buy circumvention capability while citizens are denied the same tool.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, censorship stops being a perimeter defense and becomes an obligation pushed onto foreign intermediaries — every global service operating in Russia gets conscripted into enforcement, with exit as the only alternative.
- The 2026 evidence suggests the strategy carries systemic fragility: tightening control over shared network infrastructure produces collateral failures like banking outages, pushing evasion into low-tech workarounds such as juggling multiple phones.
The trend: States are shifting from merely banning circumvention tools to conscripting the tools' own operators into censorship infrastructure, accepting collateral damage to national services as the cost of control.