Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Russia vs. VPN saga
I haven't seen the recent events in Russia regarding the internet mentioned here at all recently. Fine, I'll do it myself. Don't expect the depth and wit of our more regular posters, though, because I'm lazy and don't want to expand my writing with AI.
Russia has been exercising in access restrictions since the middle of 2025, implementing DPI to block Russian users from accessing Instagram, Discord and a number of other platforms. Youtube had been gradually "slowed down", and truthfully I can't pinpoint the exact moment when (if) it became totally inaccessible with vanilla connections, because by the end of 2025 most Russians with basic internet literacy had probably known what "DPI bypass" was, myself and all my acquaintances included.
For the past year or so, the Russian government has been rearing its head towards messaging sovereignty. There were three main messaging and content publishing platforms in use in Russia in the middle-end of 2025. Telegram, the most infamously resistant to submitting under the aegis of Russia's security agencies, was probably the most prolific and might still be. Whatsapp, to my knowledge, was mostly used by boomers and the local equivalent of HOAs. Vkontakte or VK, the local Facebook, had been declining as a content platform. Content makers' opinions had been that the algorithms of VK are outdated and/or hostile to anything but the most soulless and optimized content management.
"That won't do", Russia said, and started cooking up its own in-house national messaging platform, MAX. (Technically pronounced Makh.)
Efforts to migrate the userbase to the shiny new government platform had been crude and had not went well. Russia must have learned what "network effect" was that year for the first time. It did not help that the new app, even setting aside the concerns of most certainly leaking everything you say to FSB's ear (unlike Telegram which merely might be doing it), has not ameliorated the concerns of leaking your credentials to Western criminals.
More recently, Russia started to flirt with whitelists, beginning with the phone internet. (Likely due to it covering more everyday users and fewer business cases.)
Fun fact: many Russian war bloggers and soldiers use Telegram for their own propaganda, donation gathering and communications. They did not like it when Russia started making actual noises towards shutting Telegram down. I had witnesses those bloggers that positioned themselves as chill, level-headed analysts always ready to prove why Russia is doing everything correctly and how it's going to be fine (for patriots, anyway) being utterly baffled by the level of block-headedness exhibited by the Ministry of Digital Communications. Some are less "baffled" and more "toeing the line of death threats to the politicians involved".
(It could have been a 4D chess plan to unite the Russian party line supporters and the Russian opposition, because I certainly had never been in more agreement with those guys.)
By the start of 2026, most Russians with basic internet literacy probably knew what VPN was, and an annual subscription to one was the best 50 bucks I ever spent. Someone must have explained what VPN was in plain Russian to the Ministry of Digital Communications, too, because they started trying to fuck with those, too. So far, the most they've accomplished was hitting the entire remote payment system with friendly fire.
Some of my friends are anxiously awaiting the advent of the Cheburnet. I'm amusedly awaiting the 2026 Duma elections. I wonder how much more shit and crud the system can dump into itself. Trump's recent escapades have been a suitable backlight.
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