Russia's Ministry of Digital Development (Mintsifry) sent guidelines to over 20 major internet companies — including Sber, Yandex, VK, Wildberries, Ozon, Avito, and X5 — requiring them to detect and restrict access for VPN users by April 15. However, the ministry's own document contains a striking admission: detecting VPN on Apple devices faces "significant limitations" due to iOS security architecture.
Unlike Android, which exposes system network parameters through ConnectivityManager and NetworkCapabilities APIs, iOS isolates applications from each other and prevents them from gathering information about system-level network settings. This makes it fundamentally harder for apps to determine whether a user is routing traffic through a VPN.
The ministry's guidelines also enumerate scenarios where VPN detection is difficult or impossible: VPNs running on home routers, VPNs inside virtual machines and containers, proxy servers using residential IPs, split tunneling configurations, CDN services that obscure true geolocation, and newly launched VPN services that appear faster than databases are updated.
For businesses, the compliance burden is enormous. Aleksei Rayevsky, CEO of Zecurion, estimated building such a system could cost companies "tens of millions of rubles per month" — requiring dedicated development teams and significant computational resources. Evgeny Tsarev of RTM Group added that advanced scoring models are needed, but even then distinguishing corporate VPN from circumvention VPN is nearly impossible during normal usage.
Corporate VPN usage is expected to be whitelisted: historical usage patterns — for example, a device connecting via VPN during working hours but not outside them — may exempt it from blocking. The ministry itself recommended against continuous monitoring, noting it would "negatively affect data consumption and battery life."
Companies failing to comply risk losing IT accreditation, being removed from the list of pre-installed apps on Russian devices, and exclusion from the whitelist of essential services exempt from internet restrictions.
Why this matters for VPN users: Russia's struggle to enforce VPN detection at the app level — especially on iPhone — shows how technically difficult it is to control encrypted traffic. Nevertheless, pressure on major platforms continues to grow. ASMO VPN uses advanced obfuscation protocols that make traffic indistinguishable from regular HTTPS, maintaining reliable access even as detection systems become more aggressive.