Russia's draft budget gives ASBI, the system that filters the Russian internet, about 19.9 billion rubles ($235M) in 2027. The previous plan for that year was roughly half that. From 2027 to 2029 the total comes to almost 60 billion rubles, and the censorship regulator's own budget is up about 1.6x (btw the same budget plan cuts healthcare and education).
Every Russian ISP is legally required to host a TSPU box: deep packet inspection hardware controlled centrally by the regulator, Roskomnadzor, rather than by ISP. The stated goal is to route 98% of all Russian traffic through these boxes.
What they do
• Block websites often for no obvious reason (over 1.2 million and counting).
• Block VPN services (258 as of late 2025, up 31% in a year).
• Throttle whatever they haven't gotten around to blocking yet.
• Run a 2.27-billion-ruble machine-learning layer that tries to recognize VPN traffic by how it behaves, regardless of what it claims to be.
The strategy is shifting too. Instead of blocking your VPN outright, they leave it technically available and make it slow enough that you give up. Plausible deniability, now with packet loss.
What it looks like from the couch
• YouTube has been fully blocked since February 2026.
• WhatsApp is blocked.
• Telegram is throttled, and its daily audience dropped by a third between April and August.
• The state is pushing Max, a messenger backed by the Kremlin.
• Every time you open it, it reports whether you’re on a VPN, your real IP, your carrier, and which blocked services you can reach. Then it refuses to send messages until you turn the VPN off.
• Widely used Russian apps (banks, marketplaces, delivery) now refuse to work if they detect a VPN. So you turn it on to read the news, off to pay rent, and back on to message your mom, all day long. The government now wants these companies to help find VPNs that Roskomnadzor hasn’t caught yet. TSPU watches the network; the apps watch your phone.
• Mobile internet gets shut off "for security." While it's off, only a whitelist of more than 500 approved services works: government portals, local taxi apps, banks, and marketplaces. By the end of July, only about 12% of mobile sessions in some border regions were unrestricted.
The Russian state is spending $235M a year on a machine built to block the internet and kill VPNs. We’re still here.
It will be part two: how regular people actually live inside Russia, and how other VPNs and we keep the lights on. We’ve got a hell of a lot more to tell.