Seems like Putin is trying to recreate the CCP’s great firewall to hide the scope of his failure in invading Ukraine. It kind of reminds me of the last days of the USSR when they tried desperately to hide how bad the situation was. I’m curious how he technically plans to prevent foreign VPN use, he could create lists of known servers but my understanding is that VPN traffic is encrypted and not able to be identified as such, and of course he’s incapable of stopping starlink or similar satellite internet access.
It is possible to detect if traffic is being tunneled through a VPN with deep packet inspection. The great firewall actually does this and blocks popular VPN protocols like wireguard. However its possible to bypass the firewall by hiding/masking the traffic as being HTTPS data (like visiting a website) with software like shadowsocks.
