Russia’s renewed push to stop VPNs

Just my opinion, I think they are a little late to be starting this movement. From the day they invaded Ukraine the Russian Youtubers were sharing information both inside and outside of Russia about what both Russian and non-Russian media were saying. I follow a few of them. It's mostly young people that use VPN's and get their news online in Russia and that is precisely who fled. Russia have lost over 1 million men that would otherwise be subject to conscription. Most of those Youtubers have also fled the country and continue to use VPN's to share information in and out of Russia as laws were created to crack down on anyone speaking out against the military operations. The article talks about Russia potentially following the firewall strategy of China but I think a bigger concern would be the families of the Youtubers that fled being harassed or worse which is an ongoing problem in China when their citizens that relocate speak ill of the CCP.

Also just recently Russia changed their laws about evading conscription making it a more serious offense and pretty much guaranteeing those men will not return until the Russian government is entirely replaced.

It seems like whenever VPNs are discussed, on HN and elsewhere, a typical refrain is something like "governments can trivially track VPN users, VPNs do nothing". I think I'm probably overstating the claim a little, because I don't remember exactly what it is, and it varies a little from claimant to claimant. But the idea is that you'd have to be naive to think any VPN will protect you from a state actor, because they can either spot you based on when traffic enters and leaves the VPN, or simply because every VPN company provides data to them on request, if not in real time. I can imagine that a determined agency could fairly easily triangulate enough information to identify an individual VPN user's activity, and I can imagine many of them rolling over when threatened. But, this is at least some evidence that VPNs frustrate governments for the very common use case of large numbers of regular people using them to bypass censorship restrictions.