Four years after sanctions cut Russian creators off from their payouts, Moscow is trying to cut Russian audiences off from the rest of the internet. Neither wall works the way it was meant to.

On the last weekend of February 2022, Russian women who sold photos and videos online woke up to a message they had never seen before. “Please be informed that your country is not supported for payouts,” read one customer-support reply that circulated widely, Rolling Stone reported at the time.

Within days the platform said it had restored access. The money was another matter. In a statement to the magazine, the company explained that it had “very limited methods to pay creator accounts linked to Russia and Belarus” after Western governments cut Russian banks off from SWIFT. One creator estimated she had lost about $8,000 when her account froze.

That was the first wall: money could not get out.

The second wall went up much later, and it points the other way.

The second wall

In February 2026, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet regulator, confirmed it had blocked 469 VPN services, according to a record kept by the circumvention researchers at Lantern. Since December 2025 it has gone further than blocking individual apps, targeting the most widely used VPN protocols themselves, and promoting VPN services now carries penalties.

The goal is plain. If foreign sites are blocked inside Russia, the tools that reach them should be blocked too.

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If you live in the US and have ever opened a cam site late at night looking for Russian models, you have probably noticed that the choice feels thin. That is not bad luck. It is the clock. Moscow is seven hours ahead of New York, so by the time most Americans settle in for the evening, many Russian streamers are wrapping up their night and going to bed.

We wanted to know exactly when they are online, so instead of guessing we looked at the numbers.

How we measured it

LovePornCams checks the online status of every model on Stripchat, Chaturbate and BongaCams every 10 minutes and records which hours each one was live. For the country breakdown we used Stripchat models who list a country on their profile, over four full weeks of data from mid-September to mid-October 2026. All the tables are in our online-hours study.

Russian models: early afternoon in the US

Russian models peak at 17:00 UTC. That is 8 p.m. in Moscow, a classic evening slot, and it works out to:

• 1 p.m. on the East Coast
• 10 a.m. on the West Coast

At that hour there are about 1.7 times as many Russian models online as at their quietest hour of the day.

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