Moscow is preparing to nearly double its investment in the technology that filters and blocks internet traffic across the country, while simultaneously exploring new ways to make circumventing that censorship more expensive and more difficult. The plans, reported by TechRadar, signal that Russia's approach to controlling what its citizens can see and access online is entering a more aggressive and more technically sophisticated phase.
At the center of this push is ASBI, an automated filtering system that works through equipment known as TSPU, installed directly at internet service providers across the country. The Russian government intends to spend 19.87 billion roubles on the system in 2027 alone, roughly double what was previously budgeted, with cumulative spending through 2029 expected to approach 60 billion roubles. For ordinary users, this means the infrastructure used to detect and degrade VPN connections is becoming faster, more precise, and harder to evade, which is pushing many to scrutinize the privacy tools they rely on, including transparency measures such as the BuyBestVPN no-logs policy, as a baseline expectation rather than a bonus feature. BuyBestVPN no-logs policy
The ambition behind this spending is explicit: Russian authorities want VPN blocking efficiency to reach 92 percent by 2030, alongside a 2.5-fold increase in ASBI's processing capacity, up to 954 terabits per second. That is a substantial leap from simple IP address blocking, which users could often bypass by switching server locations. Modern systems increasingly rely on deep packet inspection, a technique that examines the structure and behavior of data packets rather than just their origin, allowing censors to identify and throttle VPN traffic even when it is encrypted.
Why Traffic Analysis Matters More Than Blacklists
Deep packet inspection represents a meaningful shift from earlier, cruder censorship methods. Rather than maintaining lists of banned addresses, it analyzes patterns in encrypted traffic itself, looking for the telltale signatures of VPN protocols such as OpenVPN or WireGuard. This is why the VPN industry has responded by developing obfuscation techniques that disguise VPN traffic as ordinary web browsing, and by rotating protocols more frequently. It is an arms race with no fixed endpoint: as detection improves, evasion techniques must evolve in turn, and the reliability of any given public VPN service in a heavily filtered market tends to degrade over time.
Economic Pressure as a Censorship Tool
Beyond technical filtering, Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is weighing a plan to charge separately for international 5G traffic exceeding 50 gigabytes a month, a threshold that would disproportionately affect VPN users who route data through servers abroad. The measure has not been finalized, partly because telecom operators currently lack the real-time capability to distinguish international traffic on 5G networks from that on LTE. Still, the proposal illustrates a broader strategy: where outright technical blocking proves difficult or costly, financial friction can serve a similar purpose, discouraging routine VPN use through billing rather than bans.
Narrowing the Space for Server Providers
The Anti-Fraud 3.0 bill, currently in public comment, would bar Russian hosting companies from leasing servers to VPN and proxy operators subject to Roskomnadzor registration requirements. It would also compel providers to verify customer identity and the stated purpose of server use, extending state oversight further into the infrastructure layer of the internet rather than just its traffic. Combined with rising ASBI capacity, this points toward a censorship model that attacks circumvention tools from multiple directions at once: the network, the wallet, and the supply chain of server infrastructure itself. For users and privacy advocates alike, the trajectory suggests that reliable, unrestricted VPN access in Russia will keep becoming scarcer, even as demand for it persists.