Russian officials are developing plans that would make it too expensive for most people to use VPNs, according to Ukrainian intelligence reports. The government wants to charge mobile phone users a fee of about $2 for every gigabyte of international Internet traffic.
The Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service says the real goal behind this pricing scheme is to make VPN use too expensive for ordinary people.
Because VPNs route traffic through servers in other countries, almost all VPN activity will be counted as international and result in higher fees. Phone companies have asked to wait until at least September 1 before rolling out these fees.
The plan also targets small ISPs in Russia. Currently, the cost of a license is around $134. This is very low. But under the new rules, the amount will jump to about $66,000 for a basic license and more than $1.3 million for a general license.
They also want to reduce the number of license types from 17 to just three.
Ukrainian intelligence analysts He predicts Most small providers will not survive this. More than 90% of the country’s 4,200 operators could close or be bought out. This would leave Internet access mostly in the hands of a few large companies with close ties to the government.
Another part of the plan is to accelerate the rollout of SORM. This system will give Russia’s Federal Security Service direct access to online activity.
This increasingly authoritarian environment in Russia did as well It affected Putin’s popularityCryptopolitan reported.
More than 60 million Russians rely on VPNs
Telegram was Forbidden on April 10, where officials said it was being used by criminals. At the same time, they were promoting MAX, a government-approved messaging app. But Telegram’s 65 million Russian users chose a VPN as an alternative.
The number of blocked websites in Russia now stands at 4.7 million. Major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X have been blocked since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Nearly 60 million Russians know how to use VPNs, said Alexei Kozlyuk of the VPN Guild.
A 2025 Social Marketing Institute survey found that 46 percent of people asked had used a VPN at least once. Some estimates place Russia second in the world in terms of VPN use, with around 37.6% of internet users relying on them.
“If you live with a VPN running, you can access corners of the Internet that are best avoided,” warned Sergei Boyarsky, who heads the State Duma’s Information Policy Committee.
Apps scan phones for VPN use
Banks and technology companies are now helping track VPN users, according to research by RKS Global, a group that works on internet freedom issues.
The group looked at 30 popular Russian apps, including apps from T-Bank, Sberbank, Yandex and VKontakte. They found that 22 of these apps check if someone is using a VPN or has one on their phone. Most of them keep this information on their servers, where security services can see it.
“Any Android app released by Russian companies for the Russian market may now amount to espionage,” RKS Global said in its report. a report.
Mazai Banzaev, who created an open source VPN company called Amnezia, pointed out something worrying. “It’s one thing if Russian IT companies can ‘catch’ users the moment they visit a VPN-enabled site,” he told The Guardian. “It’s completely different even when the closed app continues to scan the phone for VPN use.”
