How Geneva-based VPN startup Proton's ~25 engineers are fighting Russian censorship, a back-and-forth battle since the government blocked Proton in March 2022
The cat-and-mouse experience of Proton, a Swiss company, shows what it's like to be targeted by Russian censors — and what it takes to fight back. Tweets: @satariano , @hatr , @protonvpn , @kenroth , and @privacymatters Tweets: Adam Satariano / @satariano : Proton was among the most-used VPN services in Russia to sidestep harsh new online censorship rules. Then it was blocked. After it came up with a fix, it was blocked again. Then again. Here's the story of their cat-and-mouse game with Russian censors. https://www.nytimes.com/... Hakan / @hatr : Really curious to know how Russia would be able to do this in order to identify Proton VPN https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... @protonvpn : Censorship is ramping up globally and we must all push back if we are to win this fight. We can choose the internet we want by taking privacy seriously today. Thanks @satariano @paulmozur @nytimes https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kenneth Roth / @kenroth : As Putin's censors try to prevent the Russian people from learning about how badly the war in Ukraine is going, a quarter of the population has turned to VPNs to circumvent the censors, so now the censors are attacking the VPNs. https://www.nytimes.com/... @privacymatters : “Dozens of VPN services have been blocked inside Russia, but Proton, perhaps best known for its encrypted email service, seemed to receive extra attention from the authorities. In June, Russia's internet regulator labeled the company a “threat.” ” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Russia's war on circumvention tools predates this story: Tor has been blocked since December 2021, and when the invasion of Ukraine triggered a censorship crackdown, demand exploded — top-ten VPN apps went from roughly 15K to 475K daily downloads in March, with about a quarter of Russia's population turning to VPNs. Proton was among the most-used services for sidestepping the new rules, which is exactly why Roskomnadzor's apparatus — detailed in a leaked trove of nearly 160K regulator documents — made it a priority target.
The result is a two-front war for a company of roughly 25 engineers: at home, Russia blocks and re-blocks the service as fast as Proton ships workarounds; abroad, democracies are adopting their own data mandates, which pushed Proton to pull out of India alongside Surfshark and Nord rather than collect customer data.
First-order effects
- Russian users lose reliable access each time Roskomnadzor blocks Proton, and Proton's ~25 engineers must divert product resources into an ongoing blocking-evasion cycle that began in March 2022 and continued through the regulator labeling Proton a 'threat' in June.
- Dozens of other VPN providers face the same blocking regime simultaneously, so no single provider's fix is durable — every workaround invites the next block.
Second-order effects
- Circumvention tactics converge across services: Tor's volunteer-run bridge distribution via Telegram shows the same playbook Proton needs, pushing VPNs toward distributed, community-relayed entry points rather than fixed server lists that censors can enumerate.
- Trust becomes the differentiator under pressure — with Russia blocking aggressively and India-style data-retention rules spreading, providers like Surfshark, Nord, and Proton compete on refusing jurisdictional demands, validating the industry-standards push flagged back in 2019.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, national firewalls and anti-censorship engineering become a permanent arms race that shapes where privacy companies incorporate and which jurisdictions they serve — Switzerland-based Proton exiting India signals that compliance-with-surveillance is now a market-exit decision, not a negotiation.
- State censorship capacity, documented at scale in the Roskomnadzor leak, is becoming exportable infrastructure, meaning the cat-and-mouse between a handful of engineers and a state regulator becomes a structural feature of the internet rather than an emergency measure.
The trend: Authoritarian states and privacy-tool makers are locked in a permanent blocking-and-workaround arms race that is forcing VPN providers to choose jurisdictions and architectures around censorship resistance.