Telegram CEO urges Russians to 'stock up' on VPNs as the platform gets an anti-censorship boost

• Telegram has upgraded its anti-censorship protocol amid Russia's blocks
• Telegram's CEO still urges people in Russia to "stock up on several VPNs"
• Durov also suggests avoiding using Russian apps while connected to a VPN

Telegram's CEO is urging people in Russia to "stock up on several VPNs" as the messaging platform deploys new technology to combat the government-imposed ban.

On Saturday, Pavel Durov announced an upgrade to the app's anti-censorship protocol designed to keep users online despite interference.

The update follows reports that Telegram connectivity in Russia plummeted to just 5% on Friday, according to data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and cited by Novaya Gazeta.

While Telegram is hardening its own infrastructure, reliable VPN services remain a necessity to mask user IP addresses and bypass the restrictions.

Durov also suggests avoiding Russian apps while connected to a VPN. This advice comes amid reports that the Kremlin is successfully to detecting and blocking active VPN connections.

The fight for Telegram

Following months of intermittent disruptions, Russian authorities moved to fully block the nation’s most popular messaging service in March.

Data from OONI reveals a rapid deterioration in service quality over the last 30 days, culminating in a record 95% failure rate on Friday morning. This is a sharp escalation from the 79% failure rate recorded just 24 hours earlier.

The surge in blocking triggered an immediate response from Telegram’s engineering team, which deployed the upgraded anti-censorship protocol within a day of the blackout. In his announcement, Durov urged all Russian users to update their apps immediately to maintain a stable connection.

While Moscow claims the restrictions are necessary to combat criminal activity and protect personal data, Durov argues the ban is a purely political maneuver. He contends that the government is trying to force citizens onto "MAX," a state-controlled messaging alternative.

This view is shared by several prominent digital rights organizations. Sarkis Darbinyan, an expert at RKS Global, told TechRadar earlier this month that the crackdown is a calculated attempt to push the population into the state-sanctioned digital ecosystem "by any means necessary."

Telegram is currently the last major holdout in the country; WhatsApp, Signal, and Discord are already blocked, alongside Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Are VPNs still a viable option?

As Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) become a lifeline for those in Russia, authorities are escalating their efforts to make these tools harder to use.

Following the initial Telegram ban, government official Andrey Svintsov claimed that the media regulator, Roskomnadzor, now has the technical capability to selectively restrict VPN traffic, suggesting that circumvention tools would soon become ineffective.

However, these claims have not yet matched reality. Millions of users continue to bypass restrictions using VPN protocols that disguise encrypted traffic as standard web browsing.

In a recent update, Pavel Durov confirmed that over 50 million Russians still use Telegram daily via VPNs.

However, the Kremlin seems determined to reverse this. Last week, Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadaev launched a plan to "reduce VPN usage," introducing new blocking mandates for companies alongside fines and fees for individual VPN users.

While some censorship-resistant VPNs, including Amnezia VPN, Windscribe, and NymVPN, have told TechRadar that their products are still working in the country, the situation is rapidly changing.

Because of that, Durov's advice to "stock up" on multiple services is a practical necessity. This means that if an app becomes unavailable, you can quickly hop to other alternatives.

Both Windscribe and Amenzia VPN offer secure free apps, which are specifically designed to defeat Russia's blocking. Proton VPN Free and PrivadoVPN Free are then the top recommendations in our best free VPN guide.

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