Russia's VPN Crackdown Intensifies — Even Xray-Based Services Are Getting Hit

Russia has launched what digital rights group RKS Global describes as a new wave of "more aggressive and targeted" VPN restrictions. The crackdown has hit users hard — Reddit is flooded with complaints about VPNs that stopped working, including services built on the Xray protocol that were previously considered resilient to Russian blocking.

But the reason these services are getting blocked tells you exactly what the solution is — and it's not about the protocol.

What's happening

According to Amnezia VPN's founder Mazay Banzaev, IP addresses and subnets are currently being blocked "on a massive scale." Amnezia uses obfuscation technologies including the Xray/VLESS protocol — the same protocol that underlies the most effective censorship circumvention tools available today.

Banzaev also confirmed that Russian authorities are now showing "increased scrutiny of VLESS traffic and the possible use of new methods to restrict it." Separately, Roskomnadzor appears to have found vulnerabilities in Telegram's MTProto proxy mechanism, causing a large number of Telegram proxies to stop working simultaneously.

Why Xray services are getting blocked — and what it means

Here's the critical detail: Amnezia VPN is a shared service. Thousands of users route their traffic through the same pool of servers and IP addresses. When that many people use the same infrastructure, a pattern emerges — and Russia's blocking system works by identifying and blocking IP ranges associated with known VPN providers.

The Xray/VLESS protocol itself is not being blocked at the protocol level. What's being blocked is the shared infrastructure — the IP addresses that thousands of users pile onto simultaneously. This is a fundamentally different problem from protocol detection.

The VPN fee delay — and what it signals

The Russian government recently agreed to delay the enforcement of VPN usage fees until after the September elections. The fee would apply to users who exceed 15GB of international data per month. The delay was framed as a technical issue, but the timing is significant — mass enforcement of VPN fees immediately before elections would be politically sensitive.

The delay doesn't change the direction. Roskomnadzor's goal is a comprehensive, permanent VPN censorship system. The fee mechanism is one part of that — a financial disincentive layered on top of technical blocking.

What still works

Individual users in Russia report that private, dedicated servers continue to work — including those running Xray Reality. The key factors are the same ones that have always mattered: a fresh IP with no shared usage history, traffic that genuinely looks like normal HTTPS, and a server that hasn't been associated with any known VPN provider's infrastructure.

One anonymous Russia-based user told TechRadar they experienced better connections in May than in April after they stopped using Russian apps on the same device — suggesting that app-level VPN detection is also being used to flag users for increased scrutiny.

The pattern is clear. Russia's blocking system is effective against shared infrastructure and it's getting better at it. Against a private dedicated server running traffic that looks like HTTPS — it has nothing to detect. The protocol matters less than the infrastructure it runs on.