The Best VPNs for Russia

If you live in or are traveling to Russia, you must choose a safe VPN with a proven track record for effectively bypassing internet censorship.

The country’s online censorship regime has accelerated in recent years, and it now blocks many international news websites, social media platforms, and civil society websites.

If you’re overseas and want to get a Russian IP address, it’s equally important to use a trustworthy VPN service that won’t share your browsing activity with the Russian government.

We’ve tested 62 VPN services and identified three that aren’t yet blocked and still work reliably in Russia.

If you want to get a Russian IP address, Astrill VPN has physical servers in Moscow. Other VPNs like CyberGhost and Proton VPN also have multiple servers in Russia, but they aren’t able to bypass online censorship as effectively as Astrill can.

Use the table below to compare the best VPNs for Russia based on their ability to bypass web censorship, obfuscation technology, logging policy, and more.

It’s not always possible to download and install a VPN before entering Russia. That’s why we recommend downloading a VPN before you travel to a region with online censorship.

Fortunately, the three VPNs we recommend in this list also provide alternative websites to download and install their software within Russia.

Simply contact your chosen VPN service’s customer support to get the latest URL that works.

Getting a Russian IP address is useful if you need to access content that’s only available within the country’s borders. The safest VPNs with servers in Russia are Astrill VPN, CyberGhost, and Proton VPN.

PrivateVPN and Windscribe Free are great if you’re connecting from within Russia, but they won’t help you get a Russian IP address.

Some major VPN services, like ExpressVPN, have removed their physical servers from Russia to protect their users from surveillance. As a result, it’s become harder to find VPN servers that reliably provide a Russian IP address.

Watch the video below to find out how to get a Russia IP address using a VPN:

If you’re looking to achieve the fastest VPN speeds in Russia, you’ll need to connect to a server as close as possible to your physical location.

This reduces the distance your internet traffic has to travel, minimizing any potential internet speed loss. If your VPN service doesn’t have servers in Russia, it’s best to choose a server in a nearby country like Ukraine, Latvia, Finland, or Kazakhstan.

Use the table below to find out which VPNs for Russia have servers near Russia:

Which VPNs Have Servers In Russia?

Here’s a detailed list of VPNs with servers in Russia in 2024:

• Astrill VPN
• Bitdefender VPN
• CyberGhost
• FastestVPN
• Hotspot Shield
• Ivacy VPN
• Kaspersky VPN
• Perfect Privacy
• Proton VPN
• PureVPN
• TorGuard
• Touch VPN
• VPN Proxy Master
• VPNArea
• VyprVPN
• Windscribe VPN
• ZoogVPN

A majority of top-rated VPNs do not have Russian servers at all, including ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Private Internet Access. However, you can still use these VPNs to bypass internet censorship by connecting to servers in neighboring countries.

A number of VPNs began shutting down their Russia servers in March 2022.

Surfshark released a statement that it would shut down Russian servers because it refuses to financially support Russian data centers. In addition, PrivateVPN shut down its Russia servers in March 2023 due to international sanctions on Russia.

Surfshark stopped operating Russia servers in 2022.

This happened just as Russian demand for VPNs skyrocketed due to online censorship of popular social media sites and news services.

The blocks on VPNs have made it more difficult for users to get a Russian IP address. However, it also means that these VPNs are unwilling to cooperate with the Russian government.

Here’s a list of VPNs that removed Russia servers recently:

• PrivateVPN
• SkyVPN
• Surfshark
• X-VPN

By encrypting your traffic and changing your IP address, VPN software can access blocked web content that’s deemed incompatible with the views of the Russian government.

As a result, many VPNs are blocked in Russia as part of a larger attempt to maintain Russian state control over the internet.

Using a VPN in Russia is not illegal in itself, but using an ‘unauthorized’ VPN is against the law.

The punishment for using an unauthorized VPN in Russia is 300,000 RUB (~$3,400) for the user and 700,000 RUB (~$8,000) for the VPN service.

To become an ‘authorized’ VPN service, the company must cooperate with the Russian state and agree to block all the websites in the government’s extensive website blacklist. They must also agree to share user data with Russian security services.

This makes using an ‘authorized’ VPN in Russia useless from a privacy and anti-censorship perspective.

We’re pleased to see many VPNs have ignored these regulations and continue to unblock websites censored by the Russian state. However, there is always a risk that a VPN with physical Russia servers might be forced to cooperate with data requests.

If you use our recommended VPNs with strong encryption and effective VPN obfuscation features, it’s very unlikely your traffic will be identified or intercepted.

Over the past decade, the Russian government has made several attempts to increase its control over the domestic internet. Here are some of the most important events affecting the country’s online freedoms:

1. Blocking VPNs

Following the conflict in Ukraine, over 4,000 websites have been blocked in Russia, including Facebook, X, Instagram, BBC News, and Quora.

As a result of widespread blocks, Russian citizens have turned to VPNs to access banned websites. In retaliation to the rising number of VPN users, the Russian government began restricting access to VPNs like Proton VPN and NordVPN in June 2022.

A total of 167 VPNs have been blocked or restricted in Russia for not cooperating with Russian law, though the full list of VPNs being targeted is unknown.

Proton VPN recorded a 9,000% rise in Russian signups on the 24 March 2022.

Starting in April 2023, there have also been emerging reports of popular VPN protocols OpenVPN and WireGuard traffic being blocked by Russian ISPs.

As Russian internet censorship develops, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to bypass these restrictions. This is why we recommend using Astrill VPN or PrivateVPN, which have highly sophisticated obfuscation tools that work in Russia to bypass online firewalls.

2. Blocking Telegram

In April 2018, the Russian Communications Watchdog blocked over 4 million IP addresses in an attempt to ban the private messaging app Telegram.

Telegram remained online, while hundreds of unrelated websites and apps were unintentionally shut down.

The sudden rise in blocked IP addresses in Russia after the attempted block on Telegram.

The sites and services involved included MasterCard, Twitch, Viber, and popular e-commerce and online banking sites. It took over a month for these apps to be put back online.

3. The Yarovaya Law

In 2016, Russia’s parliament approved the Yarovaya Law.

This law requires all Russian telecom companies and Internet Service Providers (ISP) to store detailed user communication records for six months, and all connection metadata for three years.

This allows the government to access records of everything you do online at any time.

Promoting ‘extremism’ online is punishable by up to five years in prison. Under the Yarovaya Law, ‘extremism’ can include modest protests, including ‘humiliation of national dignity.’

4. Russia’s Domestic Internet

More recently, Russia has initiated the final steps of its censorship strategy — to create its own domestic alternative to the global internet.

In November 2019, the aptly named ‘Sovereign Internet’ law came into force. This law allows the Russian state to switch off Russia’s access to the worldwide web in the event of an “emergency.”

The government also launched its own version of Wikipedia, called Ruwiki, in July 2023. It was created by copying all of Wikipedia’s articles and removing or editing articles with narratives contrary to the Russian government’s official line.

For example, it’s completely missing an article on the Russo-Ukrainian War, and has a heavily cut version of Evgeny Prigozhin’s profile.

We use a unique, exhaustive testing process to make sure we only recommend the safest and most reliable VPNs for Russia.

We test every VPN service in five key categories, and use these results to calculate an overall rating for Russia.

Here is a table showing how the top-rated Russia VPNs performed in our testing categories:

VPNs with a data cap receive a reduction to their overall rating.

Here’s a more detailed list of the five testing categories, along with how much of the overall rating for Russia they make up:

1. Bypassing Russian Censorship: 50%

The most important attribute of a top Russian VPN is its ability to bypass censorship.

We use remote servers to test every VPN on its ability to access restricted websites and services.

The most effective VPNs will work to bypass website blocks on all servers, without limitations. However, we also reward the services that can work to bypass censorship almost all of the time.

2. Obfuscation Technology: 20%

Obfuscation is a type of technology designed to disguise or camouflage your VPN traffic.

Typical encryption stops third parties from being able to see your activity. Obfuscation prevents them from knowing it is VPN traffic at all.

This type of technology is vital if you’re looking to bypass online censorship safely and effectively.

For this reason, we test every VPN for the ability to select an obfuscation protocol from the settings menu. VPNs with multiple obfuscation options, AES-256 encryption, and IP leak protection are rewarded.

3. Privacy & Logging Policy: 10%

Russia has banned unauthorized VPNs, which means it’s important there are no logs of your internet connections in the country.

We analyze every VPN privacy policy in detail to assess its privacy policy, jurisdiction, and ownership. We do not recommend any service that collects identifying logs or has ties to the Russian government.

4. Speed: 10%

We regularly test for local speeds from the US, and international download speeds while connected to Australia, Singapore, the UK, and more.

After recording speeds connected to a VPN, we compare them to speeds without using a VPN to figure out the percentage drop.

The best VPNs only have minimal speed loss when connected to servers in the same continent. It’s likely that the further away the server you connect to, the slower your internet speeds will be.

5. Nearby Servers to Russia: 10%

Finally, we test every VPN to assess the number of server locations on offers both within Russia and its neighboring countries.

The closer these servers are to your physical location, the better your VPN speeds will be.

VPN services with multiple server locations in a wide range of neighboring countries are rewarded, while those that cater only to Western countries are penalized.