Russia wants access to Western services and websites.
The use of VPN services has grown exponentially in Russia. Adobe Stock / AOP
Hundreds of websites and several services originating in Europe and the United States, among others, have been blocked in Russia. This has led the country’s citizens to circumvent restrictions through VPN services that allow a virtual location to be switched.
Seattle Times tells of a 52-year-old Moscow-based business executive Constantinist, which for its part wanted to circumvent the “digital iron curtain” hung over the war in Ukraine. Konstantin did not want to appear in the story under his last name because of his safety.
Konstantin wanted to get to familiar sites to get more information than just what the state in the country looks like. Konstantin’s solution was a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that protects the user’s privacy and opens up access to foreign services by changing the virtual location.
In March, Iltalehti reported how the use of VPN services has grown exponentially in Russia. Analytics firm Apptopia previously estimated to the Washington Post that the number of daily VPN downloads has remained at around 300,000, down from 15,000 in the pre-war period.
VPN services have become a major problem for the Russian state administration, with hundreds of thousands of VPNs being used per day. They make it difficult to block traffic. Indeed, Konstantin described the situation to the Seattle Times as similar to that in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when he himself used shortwave radio to access content outside of Russia.
– We didn’t know what was going on around us then, and it will happen again. Many people in Russia just watch television and swallow what the government feeds them. I want to find out what’s really going on, ”Konstantin told the Seattle Times.
Konstantin says his views have changed as he has gained access to content from other countries. He said he felt sympathy for the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyia to what the Russian press has described as a drug addict, he said.