Russian programmers play ‘cat and mouse’ game to outsmart censors

When Antony Rudkovsky was about 15, he began to teach himself how to build virtual private networks (VPNs) to access Internet content unavailable in Russia.

At first, the young programmer just wanted to listen to music on the Spotify streaming app in his bedroom in Nizhny Novgorod, a city roughly 270 miles (430 km) east of Moscow.

Three years later, Rudkovsky, now 18, snagged $1,200 – the biggest share of the prize money – at a competition last month organised by a civil society group to design a VPN to evade Russia’s censors.

He’s part of a growing ecosystem of freelance programmers and VPN companies involved in what some of them describe as a “cat-and-mouse” game with authorities to bypass controls on what Russians can access online.

“I’m not a very political person by nature, but I don’t think that violating basic human freedoms – the freedom to express oneself and get information – is the right thing,” Rudkovsky said in an interview from Gdańsk, Poland, where his family moved shortly before the war began. “People will get further and further from reality.”

Reuters spoke to six programmers who are preparing for tougher blocks on VPNs in Russia, some of them employing techniques learnt from Chinese hackers’ efforts to evade the even more stringent ‘Great Firewall’ there.

Many of the programmers now work from abroad due to safety concerns: coordinating in group chats, at virtual hackathons and on collaborative web development platforms. Several would not disclose their location to Reuters, and others asked to be referred to by their first names in order to speak freely.

Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor has been putting opposition media websites on blacklists and has banned several foreign social media platforms in a crackdown it casts as part of an information war unleashed by the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin accuses some Western news and social media sites of spreading negative propaganda about Russia to stoke discord in the country and ultimately overthrow the government.

VPNs create an encrypted “tunnel” through which a device can access the internet – hiding sensitive data, like a person’s location or what they’re viewing online. Demand for such services in Russia skyrocketed after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine sent millions searching for independent information.

An estimated 33.5 million people downloaded a VPN in Russia in 2022, up from 12.6 million the year before, according to a global index, maintained by Atlas VPN, a service provider.

Some programmers are gearing up for what they expect to be an era of tighter controls after President Vladimir Putin secured a mandate until at least 2030 with a landslide win at elections last month. Pro-Kremlin lawmakers want to restrict internet access further as part of a broader fight to protect what Putin refers to as Russia’s “traditional values” – based on family, nation and Orthodox Christian faith.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked about the government’s stance on the use of VPNs, said he was not aware of any planned sanctions. “Roskomnadzor is making efforts to block certain VPN services, and these efforts will continue in order to reduce the possibility to circumvent blocks,” he said.

Roskomnadzor currently blocks about 150 popular VPNs, Evgeniy Zaitsev, its head of department for control and supervision of electronic communications, was quoted by state media as saying at an internet safety forum in Moscow this week. The regulator did not respond to a request for comment for this story. It has long said it wants to eliminate VPN services altogether.

There are signs that the crackdown is gaining strength.

Last month, Russia banned the advertising of VPNs used explicitly to access “blocked or illegal content,” and Roskomnadzor has so far blocked roughly 700 webpages that spread such “propaganda”, Zaitsev said.

One Russian VPN provider as well as a civil society organisation that helps rights groups access VPNs told Reuters their clients were reporting problems with services that worked fine a year ago. Both sources asked to remain anonymous as they still have staff or exposure in Russia.

Many Russians use VPNs to access banned U.S. social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram – both owned by Meta Platforms Inc – to post photos online and keep in touch with friends and family at home and abroad.

Russia branded Meta an “extremist organisation” in 2022 after it temporarily allowed Ukrainian users to post messages in opposition to the invasion, such as “death to the Russian invaders”. Meta has defended its content policies.

While nearly all Russian-language independent media are blocked, Western news sites are not. Irina Borogan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) who co-authored a book on Russian digital censorship, said that so few Russians speak other European languages that there isn’t a need to restrict such content.

The vast majority of people who speak just Russian and don’t have a VPN can only access Kremlin-controlled news, Borogan said. Reuters