Russia to double internet censorship budget in 2027, plotting new VPN traffic fee | Daily Reports Online
- Budget doubled: Russia will spend $235m on internet blocking in 2027.
- There are plans to charge users a fee for international 5G internet traffic.
- A new legislative package aims to penalize domestic VPN hosting providers.
Russia has unveiled aggressive plans to double its spending on internet blocking infrastructure in 2027, signalling a massive escalation in its ongoing war against VPNs.
According to recent budget drafts uncovered by Russian independent media, the government intends to allocate nearly 20 billion rubles (approx. $235m) to its automated internet filtering system in 2027. In total, censorship spending is expected to reach an unprecedented 60 billion rubles over the next three years.
For everyday Russian citizens relying on VPN services to bypass state propaganda and access international news, the digital walls are rapidly closing in. Not only is the state upgrading its capacity to block traffic, but it is also exploring new ways to financially penalize users who attempt to tunnel out of the domestic internet.
This development follows a recent wave of disruptions where Russia escalated VPN blocks following State Duma elections in a major censorship crackdown.
A multi-billion ruble censorship machine
The Russian government’s internet censorship relies on the “Automated System for Ensuring the Security of the Internet” (ASBI).
This system controls specialized hardware known as TSPU (technical means of countering threats), which Internet Service Providers are legally required to install.
These devices filter network traffic, allowing the state to throttle or block unauthorized websites and VPN protocols.
Originally, the state planned to spend 9.87 billion rubles (approx $115m) on ASBI in 2027. However, the new budget proposal revealed by Verstka and corroborated by The Moscow Times shows a massive increase to 19.87 billion rubles. Overall funding for the federal censor, Roskomnadzor, will grow by 60% in 2027.
This cash injection is designed to vastly expand the system’s capacity. Roskomnadzor has been tasked with reaching a 92% efficiency rate in blocking VPNs by 2030, increasing ASBI’s throughput by 2.5 times to handle 954 Tbit/s of data.
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Traffic fees and server crackdowns
Alongside hardware upgrades, the Ministry of Digital Development is exploring financial deterrents. Kommersant reports that the government is discussing a new fee for users who consume more than 50GB of international traffic on 5G networks.
While telecom operators currently lack the technical capability to separate 5G and LTE international traffic in real-time, the intent is clear: to penalize users who constantly route their traffic outside the country via VPNs.
Simultaneously, a new legislative package dubbed “Anti-Fraud 3.0” aims to severely punish domestic infrastructure providers.
Under these rules, Russian hosting providers will be banned for a year from offering services to individuals who host VPNs or proxies if those services land on a Roskomnadzor registry.
Hosters will be forced to strictly identify their clients and verify the intended use of their physical and virtual servers.
What this means for VPN users in Russia
The situation for Russian internet users is becoming increasingly hostile.
Over 250 VPN services have already been blocked, echoing earlier campaigns that saw the largest in history, with Russia blocking over 20 popular VPNs in a major internet crackdown.
According to experts, internet providers now have the statistical data needed to precisely throttle VPN performance.
“Operators have accumulated enough statistics to move from total blocks to targeted suffocation of quality,” noted Sergei Shcherbakov, technical director at Stakhanovets, highlighting the shift toward making VPNs unbearably slow rather than just outright banned.
Sarkis Darbinyan, expert at RKS Global and VPN Guild, told TechRadar that VPN operators are not standing still either.
“They are upgrading their protocols, adopting new traffic obfuscation methods, building alternative apps, and using many other guerrilla tactics,” he said.
“None of this, however, guarantees that any given public VPN will remain accessible from Russia. For the end user, the result is a deteriorating VPN experience and an ever-shrinking number of services that actually work.”
For now, Russian citizens continue to play a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, relying on advanced obfuscation protocols to bypass an increasingly well-funded digital iron curtain.
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