Russia targets 60 million VPN users with soaring fees and surveillance

Russian officials are putting together plans that would make it too expensive for most people to use virtual private networks, according to Ukrainian intelligence reports. The government wants to charge mobile phone users around 2 dollars for every gigabyte of international internet traffic.Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service says the real purpose behind this pricing scheme is to make VPN use too costly for regular people.Since VPNs route traffic through servers in other countries, almost all VPN activity would count as international and trigger the higher fees. Phone companies have asked to wait until at least Sept. 1 before rolling out these charges.The plan is also going after small internet providers in Russia. Right now, a license costs about $134. That’s pretty low. But under the new rules, it would jump to around $66,000 for a basic license and more than $1.3 million for a general one.They also want to cut the number of license types from 17 down to just three.Ukrainian intelligence analysts predict most small providers won’t survive this. Over 90% of the country’s 4,200 operators could shut down or get bought out. That 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 speeding up the rollout of SORM. This system will give Russia’s FSB direct access to online activity.This increasingly authoritarian environment in Russia has also affected Putin’s approval rating, as Cryptopolitan reported.Over 60 million Russians depend on VPNsTelegram was blocked on April 10, with officials saying it’s used by criminals. At the same time, they’ve been promoting MAX, a government-approved messaging app. But the 65 million Russian users of Telegram chose VPN as an alternative.The number of blocked websites in Russia now sits at 4.7 million. Major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X have been blocked since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Alexei Kozlyuk from the VPN Guild association said roughly 60 million Russians know how to use VPNs.A 2025 survey by the Institute of Social Marketing found that 46 percent of people questioned had used a VPN at least once. Some estimates put Russia second in the world for VPN usage, with about 37.6 percent of internet users depending on them.“If you live with a VPN switched on, 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 useBanks and tech companies are now helping track VPN users, according to research from RKS Global, a group that works on internet freedom issues.The group looked at 30 popular Russian apps, including ones from T-Bank, Sberbank, Yandex, and VKontakte. They found that 22 of these apps check whether someone is using a VPN or has one on their phone. Most 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 be spying,” RKS Global said in their report.Mazay Banzaev, who started an open-source VPN company called Amnezia, pointed out something troubling. “It’s one thing if Russian IT companies were to ‘catch’ users the moment they visit a site with a VPN enabled,” he told The Guardian. “It is quite another when even a closed application continues scanning the phone for VPN usage.”There’s a middle ground between leaving money in the bank and rolling the dice in crypto. Start with this free video on decentralized finance.