Russia's federal communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has set a formal target to eliminate nearly all functional VPN access within the country by 2030 - and the budget to do it is already written into the national spending plan. The initiative represents the most concrete and funded commitment yet to building what Moscow calls RuNet, a sovereign, state-controlled internet severed from the tools that allow Russians to circumvent official censorship.
A Document, a Target, and a Price Tag
The plan came to light not through an official announcement, but through the work of Maria Kolomychenko, an independent Russian journalist who located a Roskomnadzor document published on the regulator's own website. The document outlines the ambition to achieve 92% VPN blocking efficiency by 2030, with 20 billion rubles allocated from the federal budget for each of the years 2026, 2027, and 2028 to fund the effort. That sum - roughly equivalent to several hundred million dollars at current exchange rates - is earmarked for both VPN suppression and the broader infrastructure of RuNet.
What "92% blocking efficiency" actually means remains deliberately undefined. Kolomychenko notes the metric could refer to the share of VPN applications removed from app stores, the proportion of VPN traffic successfully intercepted and blocked, or the percentage of users rendered unable to connect. The ambiguity is not accidental: vague targets are harder to challenge and easier to declare met.
Years of Quiet Removal, Now an Explicit Offensive
The 2030 goal is the formal endpoint of a process that has been underway for years. Roskomnadzor has repeatedly pressured technology companies to remove VPN applications from their platforms inside Russia. Apple has complied with orders to pull VPN apps from its Russian App Store. Hundreds of VPN services - including established international providers like ExpressVPN and CyberGhost - are no longer accessible through standard storefronts in the country. These removals have largely occurred without public announcements; GreatFire, a nonprofit that tracks app censorship globally, has documented the pattern and made it visible.
In February 2026, a Moscow court fined Google 22.8 million rubles - approximately $300,000 - for promoting VPN services through its Play Store. The fine is modest in financial terms for a company of that scale, but its purpose is signaling: distribute tools that help users bypass state filtering, and the state will impose costs. The logic mirrors pressure tactics used in other countries that maintain aggressive internet controls.
What RuNet Means - and Why VPNs Are the Problem
Russia's sovereign internet project, RuNet, is built on the premise that the Russian state should control what information its citizens can access - and that foreign platforms, protocols, and tools should not be able to override that control. VPNs are structurally incompatible with that premise. They encrypt user traffic and route it through servers outside Russian jurisdiction, making it possible to reach blocked content, communicate privately, and evade surveillance infrastructure. For a government investing heavily in filtering technology, every functioning VPN is an open bypass.
Russia is not the first country to pursue this architecture. China's approach - often called the Great Firewall - has developed over more than two decades and involves deep packet inspection, IP blocking, DNS manipulation, and ongoing pressure on both domestic and foreign platforms. Russia has been building analogous capabilities, including the TSPU system, which allows centralized traffic filtering at the network level. The 2030 VPN blocking target is a milestone within that larger technical and political project.
What This Means for Russian Users and Digital Rights
Benjamin Ismail, Director of the App Censorship Project at GreatFire, has described the removal of VPN applications as a "direct threat to digital freedom and privacy." The concern is not abstract. In Russia, VPNs are among the primary tools used by journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to access independent news sources, communicate with contacts abroad, and operate outside the reach of state monitoring. As the blocking infrastructure matures, those options narrow.
The population most affected is not the technically sophisticated - experienced users can often find workarounds - but the majority who rely on consumer applications and mainstream platforms. When those apps disappear from official stores and traffic filtering tightens, the effective information environment contracts for most people, quietly and without a single dramatic moment of censorship they can point to. That gradual contraction is precisely the mechanism that makes this approach effective as a control strategy. By 2030, Russia intends to have engineered that contraction at scale.
