Head of Russia’s presidential human rights council calls VPN use ‘unnatural,’ says independent media offer only ‘the enemy’s point of view’

Russians who use VPNs are not looking for an alternative perspective online — they are looking for “what the enemy is saying,” Valery Fadeyev, the head of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, said. He called it “something unnatural” to use services that circumvent internet restrictions.

”‘Meduza,’ ‘TV Rain’ — that’s not an alternative point of view, that’s the enemy’s point of view. And that’s propaganda,” Fadeyev said at a conference on the state, problems, and ways of improving the activities of veterans’ organizations as a structural element of civil society, as quoted by the Russian business daily Vedomosti.

Fadeyev said he does not use a VPN himself.

The human rights council chief also weighed in on Russia’s state-backed messaging app Max — now written in Cyrillic as “Maks” — which Russian authorities have been pushing on the country’s residents by various means. There is a “strange widespread feeling that Maks is bad,” he said, adding that people used to say the same thing about Telegram.

The popularity of services for circumventing internet restrictions — VPNs above all — has grown in Russia as authorities have mass-blocked foreign social networks and messaging apps. In response, Russian authorities have stepped up their crackdown on circumvention tools.

Officials themselves have been forced to use these tools as well. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin continues to run its channel on Telegram despite the messenger being blocked in Russia, making clear that Kremlin press office staff use a VPN to do so.