 March 30, 2022
 Since the start of war in Ukraine on February 24, Russian authorities have tried to turn their country's internet into an island, severing its ties with the global internet. Almost 400 news websites, 138 finance sites, 93 antiwar sites, and three social media platforms have been blocked, according to Top10VPN.com.
As the number of blocked sites grew, huge numbers of Russians turned to VPN companies—which connect users in one country's censored internet to a server in another country, where there are less restrictions—as bridges out of Moscow's shrinking internet. After Russia invaded Ukraine, VPN companies say the number of Russian users has spiked. The VPN company Windscribe told WIRED that almost a million people from Russia had signed up since the war started, 20 times the usual rate. Another provider called Psiphon said its number of daily active users in Russia jumped to more than 1.1 million immediately after Instagram was blocked, before settling at 650,000.
But VPN companies have not escaped Russian censorship. "[The internet regulator] Roskomnadzor is reacting very nervously to the rapid growth of the VPN market," says Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a Russian digital rights group. Roskomnadzor made more than 12,800 requests for Google to remove URLs under the country's 2017 "VPN law" between March 13 and March 25, according to the Lumen database, an archive that documents legal requests for the removal of online content. The database does not detail what the URLs are, and Google did not reply to WIRED's request for comment.
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