Russia Plans to Block Over 90% of VPNs by 2030

Russia’s communications regulator wants 92% of VPN traffic blocked inside its borders by 2030, and the funding is already locked in.

The plan surfaced in a Roskomnadzor subsidy document spotted by independent Russian journalist Maria Kolomychenko.

It sets a hard 2030 target for the “average effectiveness of restricting access to VPN circumvention tools by signatures” at 92%, with roughly 20 billion rubles allocated in 2026 and another 20 billion combined for 2027 and 2028.

The money flows to the Main Radio Frequency Center, the agency that runs the TSPU traffic filtering boxes Roskomnadzor uses to throttle and block anything it dislikes on the Russian internet, including YouTube and Telegram.

What the 92% VPN Block Target Actually Means

Nobody outside the Kremlin knows exactly how that 92% gets measured. It could mean apps pulled from stores, traffic volume choked off, or the share of Russian users who can’t establish a tunnel at all.

Kolomychenko pointed out the dry comedy of it on her Telegram channel:

“It’s not entirely clear what these 92% mean. Maybe the percentage of VPN apps in stores, or the share of Russian users who don’t use VPNs. The only question is how to count these percentages, but I think the officials who sometimes talk about a 30% degradation of Telegram will figure it out.”

Hundreds of VPN providers, including ExpressVPN and CyberGhost, have already vanished from Russian app stores. Apple has pulled apps on demand, and in February 2026 a Moscow court fined Google 22.8 million rubles for promoting VPNs on Google Play.

Why This Matters Beyond Russia

This is the first official paper trail showing Roskomnadzor has a state-mandated KPI for killing VPNs, with billions of rubles attached. It also confirms the playbook other censorship-heavy regimes are watching closely.

I keep saying it and the receipts keep arriving: when a government writes “92% VPN blocking” into a budget line item, privacy stops being a setting and becomes a fight.

Final Thoughts from Troy

Roskomnadzor putting a 92% VPN-blocking KPI into a funded budget line is the loudest signal yet that the Kremlin treats privacy tools as enemy infrastructure, and the same TSPU gear already throttling Telegram and YouTube is the weapon it plans to scale through 2030.

Russia is the worst offender but it’s far from alone. France has already ordered VPNs to block pirate sites and the UK is pushing age verification onto VPN apps themselves.

When governments start writing “block the bypass” into law, the right move is to learn how VPN blocks actually work before your provider becomes the next one pulled from the store.

For more details on this story, refer to the article from Cybernews and the report from CBC News.

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