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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