The Russian government has forced major domestic companies — including Sberbank, T-Bank, the search engine Yandex, and social network VKontakte — into a surveillance operation targeting citizens who use virtual private networks (VPNs), software that masks a user's location and enables access to blocked websites. A report by RKS Global, an internet freedom advocacy group, found that 22 of 30 popular Russian apps actively detect whether a user has a VPN installed and retain that data on servers accessible to security services, marking what researchers describe as a shift from passive censorship to active, app-mediated surveillance. Tens of millions of Russians rely on VPNs to reach platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, which were banned after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but courts have begun treating VPN use as an aggravating factor in criminal prosecutions, placing users at growing legal risk.