Russia's draft federal budget for 2027–2029 would roughly double the annual subsidy to the Main Radio Frequency Center, the Roskomnadzor subordinate that runs the country's TSPU traffic-filtering equipment. The Moscow Times and Novaya Gazeta Europe reported on 1 October 2026 that the subsidy would rise from about 9.87 billion to about 19.87 billion rubles in 2027 and from about 9.84 billion to about 19.84 billion in 2028. The 2029 figure is about 19.87 billion, so the three-year total is nearly 60 billion rubles. Coverage ties the money to the effort to stop VPN use and other ways of bypassing blocks.
The case for the state's position
The government's strongest argument deserves a fair statement. Every state has a legitimate interest in the resilience of its national network, and the 2019 "sovereign internet" law was presented as a response to outages and foreign threats. Russia is also in an armed conflict in which drone attacks are a real security concern, and officials cite that to justify some network restrictions. On this view, spending on filtering and control infrastructure is ordinary critical-infrastructure investment.
The statute does not read like a resilience law only. Federal Law No. 90-FZ of 1 May 2019 requires internet access providers to install "technical means for countering threats" on their networks. The regulator supplies them to operators free of charge. It also allows the regulator to manage the public communications network centrally by controlling those devices or by issuing binding instructions to operators. That is a general-purpose control point, and the law leaves "threat" for the state to define. The European Audiovisual Observatory's summary notes that blocking under the law results from direct government-to-ISP interaction without court involvement.
What the money buys
Meduza's timeline shows how the control point has been used. Mass VPN blocking began in 2021, and about 14 services had been named by the end of that year, including ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Cloudflare WARP. In October 2023, Roskomnadzor head Andrey Lipov said all communications nodes were "100% covered by TSPU." Since then the legal pressure has moved from the network to the user. Instructions for bypassing blocks became grounds for blacklisting a site on 31 July 2023. From 1 September 2025, Article 13.52 of the Administrative Offenses Code set fines of up to 80,000 rubles for individuals and 500,000 rubles for companies, with higher penalties for repeat violations.
Mediazona's April 2026 review adds the operational detail. TSPU equipment has been used to disrupt some VPN protocols, though providers often respond by issuing new configurations. Major internet companies were told to detect and block users running VPNs by 15 April 2026. Operators were told to charge for international mobile traffic above 15 GB a month, a measure aimed at VPN users. Moscow and St Petersburg courts fined internet providers in March 2026 for letting users reach blocked sites such as YouTube by bypassing TSPU, and every recorded verdict found the provider guilty.
This suggests the budget increase is not an isolated line item. It is the capital side of a policy that now penalises providers and users together. A device that inspects and shapes traffic at every operator's network is the precondition for each of these measures.
Why the arithmetic is worse than it looks
The numbers are small against the whole budget. The bill's headline totals show planned 2027 federal spending of about 48.8 trillion rubles, so the TSPU subsidy is a rounding error in fiscal terms. The cost is borne elsewhere.
First, filtering is an arms race with an asymmetric payoff. Mediazona records that providers answered blocks on the VLESS protocol with new configurations. Each round requires new capacity and new rules on the state side, and a small tweak on the circumvention side. Doubling the subsidy buys more inspection capacity, but it does not change that dynamic.
Second, the collateral damage is large and mostly unaccounted for. Businesses, remote workers and researchers use VPNs for ordinary security and for reaching foreign services. Meduza's reporting also covers a proposed requirement that companies notify Roskomnadzor of corporate VPN use. Dependable encrypted connectivity is a basic input for any digital economy, and a regime that treats it as suspect taxes domestic innovation.
Third, the model removes accountability. Because the blocking takes place on state-supplied equipment controlled by the regulator, operators cannot audit it and users cannot appeal it in any meaningful way. The more capable the hardware, the more that discretion matters.
A proportionate alternative
A proportionate approach to network resilience would look different: published criteria for what counts as a threat, judicial review of blocking orders, and transparency about what the equipment can and cannot do. Resilience can be built through redundancy, domestic exchange points and incident response without giving one regulator a switch over all traffic. None of that is on offer.
The draft is still a bill rather than enacted law, and the figures could change as it moves through the State Duma. But the direction is clear: Moscow is paying to make censorship faster and more automatic, and it is pushing the cost of avoiding it onto citizens and companies. Open-internet advocates should treat the 2027–2029 allocation as a measure of how entrenched the model has become. For everyone else, it is a warning that infrastructure built for "resilience" can be redirected toward control.