As President Vladimir Putin struggles to control the narrative surrounding his war in Ukraine, a digital Iron Curtain may descend on Russia. The Kremlin has already taken steps to block Facebook and Twitter, and its latest move came on Friday when the government announced plans to block Instagram in the country as well.

Despite Putin’s efforts to restrict access to social media and information within his borders, an increasing number of Russian internet users appear determined to access outside sources and circumvent the Kremlin’s restrictions.

Many people are turning to specialized circumvention technology that has been widely used in other countries with limited online freedoms, such as China and Iran, to circumvent Russia’s internet censorship. According to digital rights experts, Putin may have inadvertently sparked a massive, permanent shift in Russian digital literacy that will work against the regime for years.

Russians have been flocking to virtual private networks (VPNs) and encrypted messaging apps since the invasion of Ukraine. These tools can be used to access blocked websites such as Facebook or safely share news about the war in Ukraine without running afoul of new, draconian laws prohibiting what Russian authorities consider “fake” claims about the conflict.

A rapid rise in downloads

According to market research firm SensorTower, Russian internet users downloaded the five leading VPN apps 2.7 million times during the week of February 28 on Apple and Google’s app stores, a nearly triple increase in demand reached to the previous week.

This expansion corresponds to what some Vpn Providers have reported. Proton, based in Switzerland, told CNN Business that signups from Russia had increased by 1,000% this month. (However, the company declined to provide a baseline figure for comparison.)

VPN providers are just one type of application that is becoming more popular in Russia. According to the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, a range of messaging apps, including Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp services, have seen a gradual increase in traffic since March 1, a trend consistent with an increase in traffic to global social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

However, the encrypted messaging app Signal may be the fastest-growing messaging app in Russia. SensorTower reports Signal downloaded 132,000 terms in the country last week, a more than 28% growth from the previous week. According to Cloudflare, Russian internet traffic to Signal has increased “significantly” since March 1.

Other private messaging apps, such as Telegram, saw a relative slowdown in growth that week but still saw more than 500,000 downloads, according to SensorTower.

Russian internet users have increased their reliance on Tor recently. This service anonymizes internet browsing by scrambling a user’s traffic and routing it through multiple servers worldwide. Tor’s metrics page estimated that thousands more Russian users were accessing the web through secret servers connected to Tor’s decentralized network as of the day of the Ukraine invasion.

On Tuesday, Tor users got a boost when Twitter, which has been partially blocked in Russia since the invasion, enabled access to its platform through a specialized website designed for Tor users. For its part, Facebook has had its own Tor site since 2014.

According to Sascha Meinrath, a communications professor at Penn State who serves on the board of Lantern’s parent company, Brave New Software, Lantern, a peer-to-peer tool that routes internet traffic around government firewalls, began seeing an increase in downloads from Russia about two months ago.

According to Meinrath, Lantern has seen a 2,000% increase in downloads from Russia alone over the last two months, with the service growing from 5,000 monthly users to more than 120,000. Meanwhile, Lantern has between 2 million and 3 million users worldwide, mainly in China and Iran, according to Meinrath.

“Downloads are skyrocketing for Tor, Lantern, all the VPNs, anything that hides who you are or where you’re going — Telegram — everything,” Meinrath said. “And because it’s a startup, people on Telegram are exchanging notes about what else you should download.”

According to Meinrath, the most tech-savvy and privacy-conscious users can combine multiple tools to maximize their protection, such as using Lantern to circumvent government blocks and Tor to anonymize their activity.

The war for information technology

The growing popularity of some of these tools emphasizes the stakes for Russian internet users, as the Kremlin has detained thousands of people for protesting the Ukraine war. And it contrasts with Russia’s efforts to crack down on social media, from blocking Facebook entirely to enacting legislation that threatens up to 15 years in prison for those who share what the Kremlin considers “fake” information about the war.

According to Natalia Krapiva, a lawyer with the digital rights organization Access Now, some Russian internet users have been using secure communications tools for years, even though the Russian government began restricting internet freedoms more than a decade ago.

According to Krapiva, the Russian government has previously attempted to block Tor and VPN providers. However, she claims that it hasn’t been very successful due to Tor’s open, decentralized design, which relies on a large number of distributed servers, and the willingness of new VPN providers to fill the void left by banned ones. According to Krapiva, Russia is currently engage in an intensifying game of cat and mouse.

While Putin may not be able to completely shut down censorship-resistant technologies, Kremlin supporters can still try to drag them into Russia’s larger information war and stymie adoption.

On February 28, Signal stated that it was aware of rumors that the platform had been compromised in a hack, which the company categorically denied. Without directly blaming Russia, Signal stated that the rumors were spreading as “part of a coordinated misinformation campaign meant to encourage people to use less secure alternatives.”

Signal’s claim demonstrates how quickly the information war has shifted from being about Ukrainian news to being about the services people use to access and discuss that news.

If only a small number of Russians adopt circumvention technologies to gain access to outside information, Putin may be able to dominate the country’s information space. And while there are many signs of increased interest in these tools, it appears to be on the order of thousands rather than millions for the time being.

“Of course, the concern is that the majority of people, the general population, may not be aware of those tools,” Krapiva explained. “[They] can be complex if your digital literacy is low, so getting a larger portion of the population to use these tools will remain a challenge.” But I’m sure there will be more education, and I’m hoping they will persevere.”

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