The More VPNs Russia Blocks, the More Russians Download.

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.

The result has been the opposite of quiet. Russians downloaded VPN apps 9.2 million times from Google Play in March 2026 alone, fourteen times as many as in March 2025, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported, citing data from the analytics service Digital Budget published by the business daily Kommersant. Over the twelve months to March 2026, VPN apps were downloaded 35.7 million times. More than half of those, 21.27 million, came in the first three months of 2026.

Put that on a single calendar. For every VPN download in a month of 2025, there were fourteen a year later.

Two walls, one person

The two blockades land on the same people from opposite directions.

A Russian creator in 2022 could still be found by fans abroad, but had trouble being paid. Many of the payment routes she relied on vanished at once. As Euronews documented that March, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and American Express all left the country, and Twitch told Russian streamers on March 5 that it could no longer send money to Russian bank accounts. One creator told the outlet that adult content made up as much as 40% of her income.

Her complaint was precise. “They do not ban Russian users,” she said. “They only ban Russian creators.”

Another creator described a quieter kind of lockout to the same outlet. Her Russian ID was rejected at verification as coming from “a prohibited country or state”, so she could neither manage her page nor withdraw what she had already earned. Nobody had banned her. The paperwork simply no longer fit.

By 2026 the pressure runs the other way. The regulator is no longer worried about who gets paid. It is worried about what Russians can see. Every blocked protocol is an attempt to keep the domestic audience inside a fenced garden.

The download numbers suggest the fence is mostly a nuisance. People who want to reach the wider internet keep finding a door, and the harder the regulator pushes, the more doors get installed.

What the walls did to a category

For anyone outside Russia, the visible effect is quieter but real. A group of creators who were once easy to place, Russian women working under Russian names from Russian cities, became harder to pin down.

Since 2022, the label has come loose from geography. A creator with a Russian name and a Russian-language bio might be posting from Moscow, or from a country she moved to so that she could keep getting paid. From the outside, the two look the same.

That is the point at which a simple, maintained list becomes more useful than memory. Someone looking for Russian girls on OnlyFans today is better served by a page that groups them by what they publish now than by a bookmark saved in 2021, when half of those accounts still had working payouts. What no such page can show is the hard part: where she is actually standing, how the money reaches her and what it costs her to keep going.

The wall that keeps growing

None of this is settling. The regulator has moved from blocking apps to blocking whole protocols, and the downloads have kept climbing anyway. Sanctions, for their part, remain in place, and the card networks that left in 2022 have not returned.

So the same woman can be shut out twice: once by banks that will not pay her, and once by a regulator that would rather her compatriots did not see what she posts abroad. She is not the target of either policy. She is simply standing where both of them meet.

The VPN surge is usually read as a story about censorship. It is also a story about an audience that refuses to stay where it has been put — and about creators who were never asked which side of the wall they wanted to be on.