In a sweeping escalation of Russia's internet crackdown, the country's biggest digital platforms began blocking users with active VPN connections on April 14-15, 2026. Yandex services, VK (including VKontakte and Mail.ru), the marketplaces Wildberries and Ozon, and numerous banking applications all started restricting access — showing messages asking users to disable their VPN before continuing.
The move follows direct pressure from Russia's Ministry of Digital Development (Mintsifry). In late March 2026, at a closed meeting with major platform executives, the Ministry threatened to remove companies from its 'white list' if they failed to comply. The white list grants critical privileges: services on it remain accessible during internet shutdowns, and their employees retain IT-sector benefits including draft deferments and preferential mortgage rates.
Wildberries displayed a clear pop-up: 'You may need to turn off VPN.' Ozon stated that 'access is restricted' and pointed users toward disabling their VPN as the solution. Banks followed the same pattern, with many financial apps simply refusing to load when a VPN was detected.
The Ministry's stated goal, confirmed by Minister Maksut Shadaev in late March, is to reduce overall VPN usage in Russia. The government has been pursuing this for years, but the April 2026 push represents the most aggressive implementation yet: rather than blocking VPN services themselves (which has proven difficult), it is now forcing Russian businesses to do the filtering from the inside.
Simultaneously, Russian telecom operators agreed to freeze the expansion of their European connectivity channels — a move designed to reduce bandwidth available to VPN traffic routed through foreign servers. Separately, legislation is advancing that would prohibit Russian hosting providers from selling computing resources to VPN service operators.
The net effect is a rapidly tightening vice: VPN services face blocking from both the network level and the application level at the same time.
Why this matters for VPN users: The Russian government's new strategy bypasses the technical difficulty of blocking VPN protocols by pressuring apps to reject VPN users directly. This is a significant shift. Users who rely on VPN for access to global services — banking abroad, communication tools, independent media — face a growing choice between keeping their VPN and losing access to Russian platforms, or disabling it and accepting censored internet. ASMO VPN works independently of any Russian platform and is not subject to these compliance requirements, ensuring uninterrupted access without compromise.