Docs detail Russia's efforts to circumvent its own internet censorship, including 236 procurement contracts for VPN tech worth $9.8M since the Ukraine invasion
Context & Ripple Effects
Russia has spent years trying to wall off its internet: back in 2019 it [[a:940024|ordered ten major VPN providers, including NordVPN and ExpressVPN, to block sites on the country's blacklist]]. After the Ukraine invasion, demand for workarounds exploded — Apptopia counted top-ten VPN downloads jumping from 15K to 475K per day in March — and Washington responded by boosting funding to nthLink, Psiphon, and Lantern by roughly 50% to serve the surge of Russian users.
First-order effects
- Russian state agencies now hold working circumvention capability in-house: 236 contracts worth $9.8M mean the same VPN technology banned or constrained for citizens is being procured by the government itself.
- Commercial VPN providers face a split market in Russia — consumer use is surging while the state becomes a buyer, pressuring them over who they sell to and how access is controlled.
Second-order effects
- The US-funded VPN operators riding the Russian user surge now compete not just with censors but with a state that can deploy identical tooling, sharpening the cat-and-mouse between blocking and evasion.
- A domestic procurement market for censorship-circumvention tech gives Russian vendors a revenue base insulated from Western app-store pressure, mirroring how the state substituted local supply elsewhere after sanctions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, internet control becomes a two-sided state function — building the wall while buying ladders — normalizing government use of evasion tech as an instrument of policy rather than a citizen workaround.
- Other states running heavy censorship have a documented template to follow: procure the bypass tools officially instead of leaving circumvention solely to adversaries and their funded proxies.
The trend: State internet censorship is hardening into an arms race in which governments simultaneously restrict public VPNs and quietly procure the same technology for their own use.