U.S. Promotes VPNs In Russia To Avoid Putin Censorship

The US government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians bypass censorship and access Western media, James Pearson and Christopher Bing reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: Censorship evasion tools, including the VPNs supported by the OTF, had more than 4 million users in Russia last month.

According to the sources, the financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) – nthLink, Psiphon, and Lantern – and is intended to support a recent surge in their Russian users.

VPNs enable users to conceal their identity and change their online location, which is frequently used to circumvent geographic restrictions on content or to avoid government censorship technology.

According to executives at all three US government-backed VPNs and two officials at the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a US government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with funding, the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24.

According to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in US funding between 2015 and 2021. According to five people familiar with the matter, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by nearly half since February in order to meet the increased demand in Russia.

The funding comes from the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a federal agency that oversees US government-supported broadcasters such as Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), as well as the Washington-based OTF, which is entirely funded by the US government and overseen by the USAGM.

The OTF's president, Laura Cunningham, stated that the organization has increased its support for the three VPNs because "the Russian government is attempting to censor what their citizens can see and say online in order to obscure the truth and silence dissent."

Censorship evasion tools, including the VPNs supported by the OTF, had more than 4 million users in Russia last month, Cunningham added.

USAGM also stated that it is assisting in the development of a variety of censorship circumvention tools, such as VPNs. It also did not provide specific information about their funding.

"With the Kremlin's escalating crackdown on media freedom, we've seen an extraordinary surge in demand for these tools among Russians," USAGM spokesperson Laurie Moy said.

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