Apple
Russia directs Apple: Remove VPN Services used to access media blocked by Kremlin on App store
Apple has deleted several Virtual Private Network (VPN) apps from the App Store in response to a request from Roskomnadzor, the nation’s government media watchdog.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian government’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has blocked opposition media websites and banned some Western social media networks.
Red Shield VPN and Le VPN received identical notifications from Apple’s app review team, stating that their apps would be deleted “per demand from Roskomnadzor.”
VPNs allow users to access banned websites and applications anonymously by establishing encrypted tunnels for internet traffic.
While recommending developers get in touch with Roskomnadzor directly, Apple provided minimal explanation.
However, the move is clearly seen as part of strengthening Russia’s hold on internet censorship.
Users who wanted to access the app and updates elsewhere were encouraged by Red Shield VPN to change the country associated with their Apple ID.
However, the proposal did not arrive before it publicly criticised the Cupertino powerhouse in strong terms. That stated:
“Apple’s actions, motivated by a desire to retain revenue from the Russian market, actively support an authoritarian regime. This is not just reckless but a crime against civil society.
“The fact that a corporation with a capitalization larger than Russia’s GDP helps support authoritarianism says a lot about the moral principles of that corporation,” Red Shield VPN stated.
Indications are that in August and September of last year, Roskomnadzor blocked VPN services on a significant scale in two waves.
They had an impact on the IPSec, OpenVPN, and WireGuard protocols. In October 2023, Sergei Khutortsev, the director of the Public Communications Network Monitoring and Management Centre at Roskomnadzor, announced that in the previous two years, 84 applications and 167 “malicious” VPN services had been stopped.
This vigorous campaign of censorship goes beyond VPNs.
Roskomnadzor is creating an AI-powered system to keep an extensive list of prohibited content, thus strengthening its hold over the Russian internet.
The organisation also mandates that telecom providers ban some 300,000 SIM cards that aren’t registered every week.
Earlier report stated that the International Criminal Court’s prosecutors are looking into claims that Russia conducted cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, committing war crimes in the process.