Comments
Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
By _fat_santa 2026-03-1014:547 reply I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
By tananaev 2026-03-1015:25 I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
By sega_sai 2026-03-1015:53 I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
By argulane 2026-03-1116:55 If it's arm based mikrotik then you could run containers with fancier protocol wrappers
I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
By OCTAGRAM 2026-03-117:23 I would say they are trying to block every public VPN, and if some VPN tried to hide behind CloudFlare's backs thinking that they took all CloudFlare sites as hostages, then whole CloudFlare is nuked, and hostages did not save VPN from blocking.
By wildylion 2026-03-1020:51 I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)
Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.
By pixl97 2026-03-1015:36 Iron curtain is coming back up.
By TitaRusell 2026-03-1017:581 reply On a positive note Russia is now the heart of digital piracy. They aren't in a mood to go after piracy groups.
By DANmode 2026-03-1018:10 Now? lol
Nationalistic flamewar is not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of nation. Personal attacks aren't allowed either. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.
I'm sure you have good reason to feel the way you do, but please, no more of this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in other places as well, and we've already warned you once. If you'd please review the guidelines and stick to them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
By yeahrightdan 2026-03-119:21 [flagged]
I feel your take will be taken down soon as it’s not the place for such discussion.
Just food for thought: what makes you to feel so entitled to judge people place of living? You know how we are not choosing where to be born and our mobility is restricted a lot of times? Is your separation for man and women comes from religion or other bias to categorize them?
Russia is our enemy. Simple as that. It's bizarre to allow those people in the west (everybody suddenly is a refugee which is fake) .
By wildylion 2026-03-1021:00 This is the literal job of state security. Besides, most of those $#@$###s get in not by pretending they've been persecuted, but simply because they already have deep cover and hold passports of other countries.
And I sincerely hope that you will never have to know what it's like to flee your own country, first hand. Peace.
By johnisgood 2026-03-1021:151 reply The Russian government or the Russian people?
By iberator 2026-03-117:39 Russian people who didn't fight against the state with following persecution have no right to be refugees imo
Maybe except gay people etc
By tryauuum 2026-03-1022:15 Maybe you should redirect your hate towards the thing you can influence -- your own government who supposedly "lets too many fake refugees in".
By netsharc 2026-03-1020:31 Oh look at you, how easy for you to demand of others that they put themselves in danger before you deem them worthy of protection. "You must have proof you've been arrested by Putin's police before we let you in here!". So they must risk the chance of immediate imprisonment in a freezing Siberian dungeon before you open your generous doors...
And graduates working for the Belarussian state, why is that acceptable and not considered as "conspiring with the war criminals" in your eyes? What other barriers are there that you have in your mind we don't know about, for someone who's worked as expected, and fled the country afterwards?
By gridder 2026-03-1022:09 Survivorship bias
By wildylion 2026-03-1020:56 Fuck you. I have many people here (many of them queer) who had to leave everything and become forced emigres or asylum seekers.
Have a bit of compassion, would ya?
My childhood crush is in Ukraine (I mean, he's Ukrainian), my dear friend (Ukrainian) had to leave everything and seek refuge in NL. My friends (Russian) are under a constant threat of getting imprisoned for 10+ years because they still help support queer and trans people in Russia.
Compared to them I feel very privileged, because I was able to GTFO on my own. But if you think that all Russian citizens must be deported, you're either a troll or a madman. Besides, this is exactly what, for example, Stalin did to Chechens, or think about what the USA did to the Japanese.
Did it help someone? No. Did it ruin millions of lives? You fucking guess.
upd: made it all clearer, and sorry for all the profanity
>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.
The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).
The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).
By OCTAGRAM 2026-03-117:49 > unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government
Government did much to turn them away. And with regards to Makh messanger. Patriotic tech talents are supposed to be interested in Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. Does Makh messenger work on something Russian? No, Makh does not work on anything Russian. So what makes Makh Russian? We don't get it. It's some another Russia that we don't belong to. Our Russia is Elbrus 2000 PC and Aurora mobile OS. And software from Astra group. People behind Elbrus 2000 support orthodoxal christianity, and people behind Astra group are for great Soviet past. They call one of Astra Linux releases "Leningrad". The proper name of what is currently known as "Saint-Petersburg."
Makh is from some commercial group that does not care about our values. Virtually openly violates traditional values. They are from VK group, and VK hosts VKFest, an open air for youth with rotten words, furnication songs, all that stuff.
Our Russia and their Russia don't mix like water and oil.
For military there is another communication network called Свод (Svod, Arch). It was 4 years late to the party, but at least goes in now.
That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.
Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.
By nasretdinov 2026-03-1019:05 I think VK is being blocked in some Western countries because it allowed pirated content, not because Russia blocked it :)
By betaby 2026-03-1015:27 VK loads just fine from Canada. Rogers and Bell mobile phones to be more specific.
By Modified3019 2026-03-1015:34 > It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.
Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.
Perhaps they could use an encryption program that uses the sanctioned app as the transport layer. Like how people used to use PGP with email.
That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.
I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use ~sten~ steganography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."
By itintheory 2026-03-1017:49 > stenography
I think you mean steganography[0]. Stenography is shorthand, used for transcription.
By wildylion 2026-03-1021:01 That'll eventually get detected and put a massive target on the back of anybody dumb enough to use it. Sorry to burst your bubble.
By adgjlsfhk1 2026-03-1015:47 oh cool, I didn't know hbo had a Russian messaging service
By moralestapia 2026-03-1015:293 reply What do they use, instead?
It's not like they don't want any videos online.
By OCTAGRAM 2026-03-116:55 + Dzen Video
YouTube is easily accelerated via DPI bypass. It used to work with CloudFlare too, but not anymore, so CloudFlare is banned more hard than YouTube. With DPI bypass YouTube is very fast.
By the_mitsuhiko 2026-03-1015:38 Rutube, VK.
By flexagoon 2026-03-1015:48 > What do they use, instead?
a VPN
By OCTAGRAM 2026-03-117:16 Far not everybody cares to use them
By sourcegrift 2026-03-1015:04 > youtube is slow
Maybe they're using Windows Phones?
By neurotixz 2026-03-1014:04 Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...
In a nutshell:
Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
By ivankra 2026-03-1015:18 VPNs are widespread in Russia, so they probably misattribute a good chunk of the traffic.
"By 2025, about 41% of Russian internet users were relying on VPNs — one of the highest adoption rates in the world." [1]
[1] https://cepa.org/article/blocked-and-bypassed-russians-evade...
