Introducing new VPN servers that work in Russia

Posted on March 13th, 2019 by in Service Updates.

protonvpn servers russia

 

Russia is the 32nd country to join the Proton VPN network. These servers will offer secure and private Internet access to the largest country in the world.

Over the past year, we have received many requests, both on social media and through our support channels, to install servers in Russia. As part of our mission, we plan to add Proton VPN servers in every country in the world, and we are glad to finally add VPN servers in Russia.

VPN servers in Russia can provide access to content that is only available to someone using a Russian IP address, and also provide VPN users in Russia lower latency when they use Proton VPN. In order to provide better connectivity to the rest of our European network, our Russian VPN servers are located in St. Petersburg. This will also reduce the latency in the connection between these servers and our Secure Core servers in Iceland.

Our Russian servers are available to everyone with a pain Proton VPN plan.

If you don’t have a paid Proton VPN plan, please consider upgrading to Proton VPN Plus to get access to servers in over 65 countries, Secure Core VPN for enhanced privacy, and advanced features like support for BitTorrent and other P2P protocols, and secure streaming of your favorite Netflix and Hulu shows.

You can help support our efforts to expand online privacy and security and access these additional features by signing up for a paid plan today.

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Of course, if you on our Free plan, you can connect to our servers in the Netherlands, United States, and Japan from within Russia.

Important note about online privacy in Russia

Russia has poor online privacy protections, and we advise any of our users who have questions about the safety of our Russian VPN servers to read our post addressing how to use VPN servers in high-risk countries.

The launch of these Russian VPN servers does not change Proton VPN’s legal status or our stance towards user privacy and security. Consistent with our policy when it comes to high-risk countries, we are relying upon third party infrastructure in Russia, and will not maintain any of our own staff or infrastructure in Russia. This keeps our status as a Swiss company secure, and means we are not subject to Russian jurisdiction.

Technical security measures and privacy recommendations

Proton VPN has a set of policies and guidelines for servers in higher-risk locations that make it more difficult for a foreign authority to compromise the privacy of Proton VPN customers. For example, we use trusted infrastructure partners, provision our VPN servers on our own, and only use bare metal servers. Details about these policies can be found here.

For our VPN servers in St. Petersburg, in addition to our standard security measures, we have also added a few extra layers of protection. First, network traffic is encrypted between the server itself and upstream ISPs, making it more difficult to intercept traffic between those two points. Furthermore, by peering in St. Petersburg, where the Russian Internet meets the rest of the world, we can connect directly to European ISPs, which, again, makes it more difficult to perform traffic interception.

None of these measures are foolproof however, so if the Russian government is part of your threat model, we recommend you either avoid the Russian VPN servers entirely, or use our Secure Core feature when connecting to any of our servers in Russia.

When using our Secure Core feature, your Internet traffic is routed through multiple servers, including hardened servers that are controlled and owned by Proton VPN. With Secure Core, even if the exit VPN server in Russia is compromised, your traffic can only be traced back to the Secure Core server, keeping your true IP address private.

Need a free VPN account?

Proton VPN is a secure, community-supported VPN service. It was developed by the same team of scientists that met at CERN that created Proton Mail, the world’s largest encrypted email provider. We offer the only free VPN service that does not have limit your data, throttle your connection speed, subject you to privacy-invading ads, or log your online activity. To join today, click the signup button below. If you already have an account and want to upgrade to access our VPN servers in Russia, click upgrade.

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Protect all your devices

Proton VPN works on various desktop and mobile clients: Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and iOS. You can download all our native apps here.

Our mission is to make a secure and private Internet that is accessible to everyone. Thank you for your support. Keep an eye out for new developments on our social media pages below.

Best Regards,
The Proton VPN Team

You can follow us on social media to stay up to date on the latest Proton VPN releases:

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To get a free Proton Mail encrypted email account, visit: proton.me/mail

Prior to joining Proton, Richie spent several years working on tech solutions in the developing world. He joined the Proton team to advance the rights of online privacy and freedom.

22 comments

  1. Craig

    Hi, November 2019 – do you still have vpn endpoints in Russia? I am in Australia and want to access computers inside Russia. Is this still possible? Thank you.

  2. Richie Koch

    Hello,
    As of November 25, 2019, we have 12 servers in Russia. We list all of our servers here: https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers.
    We also update anytime servers are undergoing maintenance here: https://protonstatus.com/.
    Cheers.

  3. Elena

    Hi, do still have servers in Russia as lot of VPN services removed them?

  4. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hi, Elena. Yes, our servers in Russia are fully functional. Please note that if we feel that we can no longer live up to our privacy standards in a high-risk country, we will shut down the servers in that country. We explained the details in our blog post: https://protonvpn.com/blog/vpn-servers-high-risk-countries/.

  5. Ilia

    When you will come to Greece and Cyprus ..?

  6. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! Unfortunately, we cannot provide any ETA about implementing servers in Greece and Cyprus at this time. It will be considered, however. We appreciate your interest and make sure to follow our social media channels for all the news and updates.

  7. Tim

    This is a nice option for people in the west, concerned about government surveillance. We can never be too confident that servers in countries under the US umbrella are secure, but we can be reasonably confident that western operations are much less effective in Russia. On question I have is that when logged into the St. Petersburg servers, my IP shows up in Moscow. Why is this? Just curious.

  8. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! Thank you for your positive feedback! Regarding your concern, please connect to a ProtonVPN server (let us know which one), and open https://ipleak.net/. After you’ve done that, please send us a screenshot in the following link: https://protonvpn.com/support-form, so we can confirm that your connection is in order. The results that you are getting are most probably due to an outdated Geolocation database that some services are using.

  9. Moi

    needs sock5 options and ProtonVPN wil; be number ONE

  10. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! Unfortunately, we cannot provide any ETA about Socks5 at this time. It will be considered, however. We appreciate your interest. To follow the new features that are implemented in ProtonVPN you can follow us on social media channels.

  11. Narw

    Hi, glad to see more countries in the list!
    However, Switzerland, Sweden and Iceland (countries where secure core servers are located) are themselves not available under “secure core” which forces us to disable secure core if we want to connect to those servers.
    It it plan to have them available under secure core any soon?
    Again, tahnk you for the awesome job that you are doing here!

  12. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! Indeed, we are considering to add Secure Core exit nodes in Switzerland, Sweden, and Iceland, but we do not have any ETA for this implementation. It will be certainly done in our further developments.

  13. Fork

    Hello! This week the Russians want 10 popular VPNs to be connected to their blacklist or face a ban. The even send a warning to. Only one of the 10 follows and it’s a Russian-made one, the other 9 who ate foreign said “no” and even got out from Russia recently. It would be interesting to have a blogpost about, though. So will ProtonVPN do the same now since the warning or it prefers to censor people as the antivirus does?

  14. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! We have not received any order from Russia’s communications regulator agency Roskomnadzor, but if we did, we would not comply. As a Swiss company, we only consent to requests that have been approved by the Swiss judiciary.

  15. dima

    Thanx a lot! Way better for people inside this country to use this server. As usual allsecured and trusted. It was a long wait.

  16. Unseen

    Russia has a law that prohibits VPN Servers from providing uncensored access, clearly. Otherwise, such a server will get blocked; day by day this kind of laws are only getting worse and wider, the latest episode with an attempt to block ProtonMail is a perfect example of how it works; additionally in the past the Russian gov’t did take over servers of a famous VPN provider (see: 2016), therefore forcing it to get out from the country, I am afraid ProtonVPN will face the same fate. What does ProtonVPN thinks about that, isn’t it better to don’t deal with Russia at all, I mean because of the law?

  17. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! If we face difficulties in Russia, we will definitely shut down our Russian servers instead of compromising on privacy.

  18. Anonymous User

    Are you going to add some servers in Ukraine?
    It’s low risk country based on it’s internet laws and located in the middle of the Europe (not EU).

  19. ProtonVPN Admin

    Yes, we do plan to add servers in Ukraine, however we cannot give you an exact ETA at the moment. Please follow us on our social media channels for all the news and updates.

  20. Mihail

    FINALLY! THANK YOU! This is an awesome news! :)
    Steam bans all accounts that use VPN. But this is nice for live-streaming!

  21. Igor

    Hello, How I can permanently exclude Russian VPN servers from common list in VPN client on Mac OS and iOS? So that it’s never been possible to connect to these servers even accidentally? If you want to keep the status of a reliable VPN service, you should have this opportunity.

  22. ProtonVPN Admin

    Hello! Currently, we have not implemented this kind of feature, however, you can create custom profiles and choose the desired country and fastest server. Please note that if we ever feel that we can no longer live up to our privacy standards in a high-risk country, we will promptly share this information with our community and shut down the servers in that country, as stated in our blog post: https://protonvpn.com/blog/vpn-servers-high-risk-countries/.

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