Moscow and St. Petersburg courts have begun fining internet providers for allowing users to bypass YouTube blocks. At the same time, mass mobile internet shutdowns — officially justified by drone threats — have become a regular feature of Russian daily life.
In a significant escalation, magistrates' courts in Moscow and St. Petersburg started issuing convictions against internet service providers for allowing users to reach YouTube through circumvention tools. This marks a shift from Russia's previous approach of blocking content directly — now the liability is being pushed onto the providers themselves.
The pressure follows Government Decree No. 1667, passed in October 2025, which granted Roskomnadzor — Russia's internet regulator — the power to block content directly without requiring ISP cooperation. With this legal foundation in place, authorities are now using the courts to enforce compliance on providers who don't actively prevent bypass traffic.
What this means in practice: providers now have a financial incentive to implement deeper filtering, not just the blocks they were already operating. The result is increased pressure on the same DPI infrastructure that has been struggling to keep up with Xray and other obfuscated protocols.
Mass mobile internet shutdowns have become a predictable feature of Russian daily life. The official justification is the threat of Ukrainian drone attacks — authorities claim that disabling mobile networks prevents drones from receiving navigation signals. Whether or not this is technically accurate, the effect on ordinary users is the same: hours or days without mobile data.
What makes this particularly significant is that the shutdowns are now selective. Banks and government services that have installed the FSB's SORM surveillance equipment are placed on a "whitelist" — their apps continue to function during shutdowns. Banks that refused to comply were excluded from this whitelist, creating a direct financial incentive to install surveillance infrastructure.
The practical result: during a shutdown, you can potentially still access your bank — if your bank cooperated with the FSB. Everything else, including VPN traffic, may be cut entirely.
Alongside the court actions and shutdowns, Apple has continued removing VPN applications from the Russian App Store on a near-monthly basis in response to Roskomnadzor demands. As of June 2026, the App Censorship project has recorded 761 apps removed from the "Utilities" category alone — a category that consists primarily of VPN clients and privacy tools.
This creates a practical problem: even if a user has a working server setup, updating or reinstalling the client app after a device wipe or upgrade becomes difficult through official channels. The workaround is using non-Russian Apple IDs or Android clients through alternative sources — both of which require advance planning.
Despite the escalation, self-hosted Xray Reality configurations continue to function for most users most of the time. The key distinction is between shared commercial VPN infrastructure — which is being targeted by IP blocklists and app removals — and individually configured servers with unique IP addresses that haven't been fingerprinted.
Protocols that disguise themselves as standard HTTPS traffic (Xray Reality, AmneziaWG) remain significantly harder to block than WireGuard or OpenVPN. As one security researcher put it: blocking Reality requires blocking what looks like Microsoft or Apple traffic, which Russia's ISPs are not willing to do at scale.
The mobile shutdown scenario remains the one case where no protocol helps — but fixed-line connections have not been subject to the same shutdowns.
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