Why Sovereign AI Is Strangling Itself with VPN Blocks
In August 2023, OpenVPN and WireGuard suddenly stopped working on mobile networks across Russia—two protocols that underpin nearly all consumer and, by various estimates, about half of corporate VPN traffic. However, wired internet remained mostly operational. There was no official explanation on either day. Two days later, the protocols suddenly resumed functioning. The remaining theory is: teachings, testing a scenario in which Roskomnadzor could disable an entire class of transport protocols with a single move. The test, apparently, was successful. It also touched on something they hadn't intended to test.
Two problems, each rational
To understand what exactly happened in those two days, we need to separate the two state machines that are usually lumped together in public discourse as one, the "tightening of the screws."
The first machine is the sovereign RuNet. The 2019 law created the framework for it: a Public Communications Network Monitoring and Management Center, mandatory installation of threat-mitigation equipment by operators—the aforementioned TSPUs and deep traffic filtering boxes. By 2023, the largest operators' nodes will be equipped with them, and the list of blocked resources, according to expert estimates, is approaching a million records. The machine's purpose is simple: control over information flows and the ability to manage the network in isolation if the external network needs to be shut down. The state wants to keep the switch in its own hands, and from its perspective, this isn't paranoia, but a basic precaution.
The second machine is sovereign AI. The national strategy, approved in 2019, sets an extremely ambitious goal: to make Russia a global leader in the artificial intelligence market by 2030. This goal is supported by a focus on champion companies. Sber, Yandex, VK, MTS, and several industrial giants handle the bulk of computing, cloud computing, and large-scale models: GigaChat and YandexGPT operate in domestic data centers and are considered quasi-national assets. Citizens' data is legally stored within the country, and cross-border transfer is subject to strict procedures. This is also based on a clear calculation: to compete globally, one needs a domestic, full-scale system—data, hardware, and personnel.
Both machines work individually. The problem is that they are powered by the same tank. And this tank is the connection to the outside world.
Point of collision
It is on the VPN that you can see how both machines are grabbing the same wire.
A VPN isn't just one tool, but two in a single technological shell. There's the user VPN: a channel for bypassing blocking, diverting traffic from behind the security system, and accessing restricted areas. For the first machine, this is enemy number one, negating the very idea of a managed network. And then there's the corporate and research VPN: a secure tunnel between data centers, a connection to a foreign cloud, an engineer's access to GitHub, to model repositories on Hugging Face, to scientific archives, to a rented GPU cluster. For the second machine, it's a breathing system. Modern AI development without access to global data, libraries, and computations simply suffocates.
It's difficult to distinguish them at the traffic level, and impossible to block with crude blocking tools: the state cuts off the first VPN, but the blade passes through both.
The pressure escalated. A 2017 law banned the use of VPNs to access blocked content. By 2023, Roskomnadzor gained the authority to block information about circumvention itself: instructions, links, and domains. By the mid-2020s, the regulator increasingly pushed for the removal of VPN apps from stores and marketplaces, and blocking moved from the network level to the platform level, closer to the user. In 2026, operators were ordered to charge international mobile data over 15 GB per month and to block Apple ID top-ups from phone accounts. According to industry publications, both measures specifically target VPN users.
The number of blocked services is growing accordingly. In 2025, Roskomnadzor reported 258 blocked VPN services, a third more than the year before, when there were around 200. Nearly six dozen new blockings this year: these are no longer targeted strikes, but a continuous stream.
And then August 2023 returns. Blocking protocols in mobile networks didn't just affect abstract bypassers. It crippled corporate networks built on the same OpenVPN and WireGuard. Customers from all four major operators complained. Wired access largely survived, but mobile didn't: it appears they were testing the operator-specific filtering configuration. The regulator targeted the first VPN, but hit the second. Two days of outage weren't an accident. They were a demonstration that the machine can't discern and, apparently, isn't particularly keen on it.
Who pays for the wall?
There's a lot of talk about sovereignty. It's more useful to look at who's paying for what: numbers are more revealing than declarations.
According to Forbes, Roskomnadzor is investing 2,3 billion rubles in a machine-learning-based system that will analyze encrypted traffic and detect "mirrors" of blocked websites. At the same time, government agencies are purchasing corporate VPNs for their own use, at a cost of 14,1 billion rubles. They're buying a tool that's prohibited to citizens because it's indispensable for secure departmental communications. So, a VPN isn't bad in itself. It's bad in the wrong hands.
There's also the cost of collateral damage. When Moscow tested the "whitelist"—a mode in which mobile internet only allows access to select services—industry sources estimate that businesses in the capital lost around a billion rubles a day. GPS devices malfunctioned, emails crashed, and online communications were disrupted. That's the cost of one day of partial lockdown in one city; the estimate is rough, but the magnitude is telling.
The most subtle effect lies not in direct losses, but in redistribution. Champion firms will survive the blow: they have their own data centers, compliance departments, direct access to government data resources, and the political clout to participate in writing the rules that others then conform to. But the smaller AI sector—startups, university labs, independent teams—lacks this resilience. For them, a sudden protocol block, a hosting provider being labeled as "unscrupulous" due to third-party clients, or rising bypass costs—all of this isn't just a line item on a report, but a work stoppage.
This creates a paradox that the AI strategy never intended. It proclaims a broad ecosystem and innovation, while network policy creates a vortex where only the strongest survive. An international study of 130 countries finds a correlation—not a rigid one, but a consistent one: overly repressive internet regimes, on average, produce worse online innovation rates than regimes with a reasonable balance of control and freedom. Causality can't be proven here, but correlation is possible. And this correlation points in the opposite direction to the strategy's calculations: the tighter the control, the less innovation.
The engine is on duty near the wall
That same 2,3 billion-ruble system is AI. Machine learning, tasked with analyzing traffic, recognizing VPNs through encryption, and identifying prohibited words and phrases. In other words, the technology that the first machine develops as the engine of economic growth is being deployed at a guard post by the wall. The engine and the door lock are assembled from the same parts; the only difference is where they are attached.
There's no hypocrisy or particular insidiousness in this. It's a property of the tool itself. A model trained to classify data will be equally adept at catching spam and someone who's quoted the wrong source. It sees no difference between these tasks, just as there's no difference between spam and a medical image: every input to the model is just a set of features. It doesn't know what it's doing. The difference between an engine and a censor isn't in the algorithm's design, but in what it's attached to. A state that builds sovereign AI sooner or later discovers that that same AI is the perfect guard for its sovereign wall. The temptation is too great, and the tool too versatile, to resist. Thus, one technology ends up with two jobs, and the second quietly eats away at the first: the denser the censorship network, the narrower the channel from which the engine draws fuel.
Chinese Fork
It's common here to point to China, saying everything is the same there. But what's interesting isn't the similarity, but the order of the moves.
Beijing was building its own control system - researchers call it not a "firewall" but a "Locknet" (Locknet), a network of gateways on three levels. The border blocks external traffic, the platforms within filter content, and users, out of habit, filter themselves. So, China completed this perimeter, essentially the same wall, already having a functioning ecosystem behind it: its own platforms, search engines, and now large models, some of which are exported and compete globally. First the engine, then the wall, and the order here is almost everything.
Russia is making moves in reverse. The wall is being built at an accelerated pace, amid sanctions and the collapse of the previously deep integration with the global network, while the AI ecosystem is still being assembled. The models exist, the clouds exist, but a full cycle capable of surviving in isolation without losing momentum is not yet in place. The question, therefore, is not whether to copy the Chinese model or not. The question is whether it is possible to finish the wall before the engine is built, and whether the wall will cut off the engine's fuel supply before it reaches its design capacity.
Repetition
Let's return to those two days in August 2023. Back then, it looked like a communications glitch or, at worst, a user training exercise. Today, knowing about 258 blocked services, about 2,3 billion rubles spent on an AI censor, and about the fact that the machine still hasn't learned to distinguish between a corporate tunnel and a bypass machine, those two days read differently. It wasn't an accident, and not even just a test. It was a short rehearsal for a mode in which both machines operate simultaneously and continuously. A rehearsal for the future, where an engine hums behind a wall, while the wall slowly cuts off its air supply. For now, the protocols have been restored. The only question is whether they will be restored next time.
While writing this text, the question began to answer itself. VPN services are sending out notifications to users one after another about server outages—according to their own statements, a new wave of blocking, spread out over weeks. As in August 2023, there is no official confirmation; there are only the operators themselves, stating that "many have been experiencing this in recent weeks." The difference with that rehearsal is one: back then, the protocols were restored after two days. Now, it seems, they have no plans to restore them.
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