Russia is taking a significant step in tightening control over internet access. Last week, the country’s media and telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, reportedly asked Google to remove 47 VPN apps from its Play Store.

A VPN, or a virtual private network, is a privacy and security tool that people in Russia increasingly use to spoof their location and get access to content that Russian ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are blocking — and it’s a long list. Users in Russia complain that YouTube is heavily throttled to a point where most people there can’t use it, and it’s impossible to gain access to the likes of X, Facebook, and Instagram without a VPN.

Between March 15 and March 21, 2025, Roskomnadzor issued multiple takedown notices targeting VPN services, including 1.1.1.1 + WARP, HideMyNetVPN, VPN4TV, and Secure VPN, Lumen Database, which tracks global content removal efforts.

According to Roskomnadzor, the takedown requests are based on Russia’s law No. 149-FZ, “On Information, Information Technologies, and Information Protection.” The regulator argues these VPN services facilitate access to content banned in Russia — and it says that this violates the country’s internet laws.

And that’s not all.

During that period, users in several Russian regions, including the Urals and Siberia, experienced internet outages. Popular apps such as TikTok and Twitch were inaccessible, and even two of the most widely used encrypted messaging apps, WhatsApp and Telegram, were down.

Roskomnadzor said they weren’t to blame for the outages and that it was “the use of foreign server infrastructure where failures are recorded.” However, experts argued it was Russia’s recent decision to block 1.5 million Cloudflare IP addresses that affected the accessibility of many of these services and websites.

This isn’t the first time Russia has taken steps to limit VPN options in app stores either.

Last year, Apple removed many top VPNs from the Russian App Store after a request from the Russian government. In March 2024, the Russian government also demanded access to VPN servers hosted within the country, which led many VPN providers to remove their servers from Russia.

Still, the best VPNs for Russia continue to work there.