- Telegram improved its anti-censorship protocol amid Russian blockages
- Telegram CEO still urges Russians to ‘stock up on multiple VPNs’
- Durov also suggests avoiding using Russian apps while connected to a VPN
Telegram CEO urges Russians to ‘stock up on multiple VPNs’ as messaging platform rolls out new technology to combat government ban.
On Saturday, Pavel Durov announced an upgrade to the app’s anti-censorship protocol, designed to keep users online despite interference.
The update follows reports that Telegram connectivity in Russia dropped to just 5% on Friday, according to data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and cited by New Gazeta.
As Telegram strengthens its own infrastructure, reliable VPN services remain a necessity to hide users’ IP addresses and bypass restrictions.
Durov also suggests avoiding Russian apps when connected to a VPN. The advice comes amid reports that the Kremlin is successfully detecting and blocking active VPN connections.
The fight for Telegram
After months of intermittent disruption, Russian authorities have moved completely block the country’s most popular messaging service in March.
OONI data reveals a rapid deterioration in service quality over the past 30 days, culminating in a record failure rate of 95% on Friday morning. This is a sharp increase from the 79% failure rate recorded just 24 hours earlier.
The increased blocking triggered an immediate response from Telegram’s engineering team, which deployed the enhanced anti-censorship protocol a day after the outage. In his announcement, Durov urged all Russian users to immediately update their applications in order to maintain a stable connection.
We have improved Telegram’s anti-censorship protocol. Users in Russia are advised to update their apps to stay connected. Thanks to the digital resilience of the Russian people, Telegram usage there has remained stable over the past week despite the total ban.April 11, 2026
While Moscow says the restrictions are necessary to combat criminal activity and protect personal data, Durov says the ban is a purely political maneuver. He claims the government is trying to force citizens to use “MAX,” a state-controlled messaging alternative.
This view is shared by several leading digital rights organizations. Sarkis Darbinyan, an expert at RKS Global, told TechRadar earlier this month that the crackdown is a calculated attempt to push the population into the state-sanctioned digital ecosystem “by any means necessary.”
Telegram is currently the country’s last great holdout; WhatsApp, Signal and Discord are already blocked, alongside Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Are VPNs still a viable option?
Following the initial ban on Telegram, government official Andrey Svintsov claimed that media regulator Roskomnadzor now had the technical capacity to selectively restrict VPN traffic, suggesting that circumvention tools would soon become ineffective.
However, these claims do not yet correspond to reality. Millions of users continue to circumvent restrictions by using VPN protocols that disguise encrypted traffic as standard web browsing.
In a recent update, Pavel Durov confirmed that more than 50 million Russians still use Telegram daily through VPNs.
To be precise, more than 50 million Russians send at least one message every day, with 65 million daily active users in Russia despite the ban. The number of monthly active users remains to be seen, but could easily be twice as high.April 4, 2026
However, the Kremlin appears determined to reverse this trend. Last week, Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev launched a plan to “reduce VPN use,” introducing new blocking mandates for businesses as well as fines and fees for individual VPN users.
Although some censorship-resistant VPNs, including Amnezia VPN, Windscribe, and NymVPN, told TechRadar that their products still work in the country, the situation is changing quickly.
For this reason, Durov’s advice to “stock up” on multiple services is a practical necessity. This means that if an app becomes unavailable, you can quickly access other alternatives.
Windscribe and Amenzia VPN offer free and secure applications, specially designed to defeat Russia’s blockade. Proton VPN Free and PrivadoVPN Free are then the main recommendations of our best free VPN guide.
