9 August 2026
Why your VPN stopped working in Russia
A VPN that worked for years stops connecting, and changing servers does nothing. That combination is diagnostic: the method being used against it changed. Knowing what changed decides which alternatives are worth your money and which are not.
From lists to protocols
Early filtering in Russia ran on registries. A resource went onto a blocklist, operators were obliged to block it, and the practical countermeasure was to route around the blocked address. VPNs did that beautifully, because the VPN server was not the thing on the list.
That has been steadily replaced by filtering that works on traffic itself. Under the 2019 legislation usually described as the sovereign internet law, equipment known as TSPU was installed at operator level, inline with subscriber traffic rather than sitting at the network's edges. It can inspect, throttle and drop based on what traffic is, not merely where it is going.
Once that hardware is in place, a VPN protocol with a recognisable handshake stops being a list of addresses and becomes a category. Blocking WireGuard means blocking the pattern, everywhere, in a single action. Adding servers is no longer a countermeasure, and this is the part people find hardest to accept: your provider cannot fix this by giving you a new address. There is no address that helps.
The throttling of Twitter in 2021 was the first public demonstration that this equipment could degrade one specific service without blocking it outright, and researchers documented it closely at the time. Point the same capability at VPN protocols and you get what most people are hitting now.
Why some VPNs still connect
Because "VPN" is not one thing. What gets blocked is a signature, and providers differ in what they actually put on the wire.
A provider offering plain WireGuard or OpenVPN has nothing to hide behind, since both are straightforward to identify. A provider carrying the tunnel inside something that resembles ordinary HTTPS poses a much nastier problem, because blocking that pattern in general would take down a large slice of the normal internet at the same time.
That is the whole game, really. Censors can block anything they can identify precisely, and are held back by collateral damage when they cannot. Obfuscation is not a claim to be unbreakable. It is an attempt to make blocking you cost more than it is worth.
It also explains the thing people notice most: filtering that varies by region and tightens around events. Aggressive filtering has costs, in false positives and complaints and broken services, so it gets turned up and down. If a connection works this week and fails the next, usually nothing about your connection changed. The threshold did.
Working out which wall you hit
If you are troubleshooting rather than shopping, go in this order.
Start with your own app, because the fix is sometimes already installed. If your provider offers an obfuscated or stealth mode, switch it on before writing the service off. Plenty of providers ship one and leave it disabled by default because it is slower.
Then rule out DNS. A client that resolves its server's hostname before the tunnel exists can be broken by an intercepted answer, well before any question of protocol blocking comes up. From the outside this looks identical to the real thing.
Next, check whether you can reach the provider at all. Provider websites get blocked separately from their services, and losing access to the site means losing updates and new clients, which is the bigger problem of the two.
Finally, take stock of what you already have locally. VPN applications have been pulled from Russian app stores repeatedly. An installer already on your disk is worth considerably more than one you would need to fetch under pressure.
Paying for it is the other half
Less technical, but it stops more people than protocol blocking does. Russian cards fail regularly with foreign payment processors, and a subscription you cannot renew is not a service you have.
Cryptocurrency is the usual way around that. Monero specifically does not tie the payment back to you the way a card does, which matters if you would rather the purchase not be linked to your name. Some providers take it without an email address either, so the account is a number rather than a person.
Whether any of that matters depends on a threat model only you can assess. I am not going to tell you it does. You should know the option exists.
What nobody can promise you
No transport stays unblocked forever. Anyone claiming a permanent answer is not being straight with you, because this is an adversarial system with well-resourced people on the other side of it, and the state of the art moves both ways.
What you can reasonably expect from a provider: more than one transport, automatic fallback when one dies, updates shipped when something breaks, and enough honesty about where the servers physically are that you can judge the latency yourself before paying.
On the legal position, briefly. Using a VPN is not itself a criminal offence for an individual in Russia, though services that do not comply with local blocking requirements are themselves blocked, and the rules around circumvention tools have been tightening for some time. We are a UK company. I can tell you how the technology behaves. I cannot advise you on your own situation, and it would be irresponsible to try.
Pangea tries five obfuscated transports in order, keeps the first that holds, and takes Monero with no email address or name on the account. The VPN for Russia page has the rest, and five days are free with no card if you want to see how it performs where you are.