The KGB in Your Pocket

It goes without saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed virtually every aspect of Russian life. In June 2026, Moscow experienced its largest aerial attack since World War II, which targeted fuel depots and forced Russian citizens to wait for days in mile-long lines to fill up their gas tanks. While Putin’s authoritarian government is careful to avoid the word “war” on the battlefront and in the media, it is clear that this reality has extended past Ukrainian soil to affect both the physical and digital lives of average citizens.

I am one of these average Russian citizens, a bilingual journalist who often works with Western clients. Since 2022, however, I have taken on a new role—that of my family’s systems manager, installing working VPNs and proxies to help them outmaneuver government surveillance and restrictions on communication. Once reserved for dissidents, these constraints have now become the norm for the entire online Russian population.

Less than a month after invading Ukraine, the Russian government classified Meta as an extremist organization and officially banned its social media platforms, which include Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. In the case of Telegram, despite its 95.7 million monthly users in Russia (more than two-thirds of the entire population), the government successfully re-enacted in April 2026 its 2018 attempt to block access for its citizens.

Nearly 64 million people in Russia still use Instagram, almost exactly the same number as before the ban, and Telegram continues to be the primary messaging platform for the urban population. But what is different now is that access to these platforms requires a VPN—ideally at least four different VPN options to ensure unhindered usage—and, for Telegram specifically, a battery-killing and computer-crashing system of proxies.

At parties (which are less frequent these days), we debate which VPNs work best, share proxy lists, and discuss which apps and services are most reliable for calls within Russia and abroad. Recently, we have turned to snickering at the government’s newest scheme—the messenger MAX, a carbon copy of Telegram’s interface, but with the added feature of government spyware.