A former Roskomnadzor employee responsible for blocking websites in Russia is now the lead developer of AIVPN, a service that helps users get around such blocks, according to reporting by The Bell’s Maria Kolomychenko.

Ads for AIVPN appeared online in the spring of 2026. The service is marketed as a tool that can disguise VPN traffic, making it virtually indistinguishable from ordinary traffic and undetectable by deep packet inspection (DPI) systems.

Oleg Kirichenko, an IT entrepreneur from Rostov-on-Don, identifies himself as AIVPN’s creator. He now lives in Turkey and works on artificial intelligence projects. Kirichenko told The Bell he created AIVPN to help users in countries with restricted access to information.

But AIVPN’s commit history — a record of changes on GitHub — indicates that most of its code was written not by Kirichenko but by a user with the handle vminakov. The user joined the project in June 2026 and has since made several hundred changes affecting hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Using the AI model Claude, The Bell calculated that vminakov wrote nearly 90% of the source code in AIVPN’s latest release. He also developed most of the project’s key components.

The user vminakov is Vladislav Minakov, a former employee of the Main Radio Frequency Center, a Roskomnadzor agency whose responsibilities include blocking websites in Russia. At the center, Minakov worked on the “Revizor” system, which checks whether Russian internet service providers are blocking websites on Roskomnadzor’s banned lists.

Minakov rose to the post of technical adviser to the center’s director before leaving for another job in 2023. His LinkedIn profile now says he heads software development at GlavNIVTs, an organization overseen by the Russian Presidential Property Management Directorate. GlavNIVTs develops and deploys information systems for government agencies.

Kirichenko told The Bell he met Minakov through GitHub when Minakov submitted a pull request to the project:

Minakov also confirmed that he is helping develop AIVPN. He said he became interested in the project because of problems transmitting data reliably: “Lately, there have been problems with legitimate traffic: Even connecting two data centers can be a challenge sometimes. The AIVPN protocol makes all of that possible.”

Minakov said AIVPN is unrelated to his main job and has no political or commercial dimension. Bypassing blocks is “just one possible use,” he said, and anyone can inspect the code.

At The Bell’s request, specialists at RKS Global examined AIVPN. Sarkis Darbinyan, the organization’s co-founder and a legal adviser to the VPN Guild, said a quick review had found nothing suspicious in the code, but Minakov’s professional background still raised concerns about the project.

Mikhail Klimarev, who runs the Telegram channel ZaTelekom, agreed: “In any project, especially an open-source one, it matters who’s behind it. In this case, we see that the person behind the VPN project spent years essentially implementing censorship in Russia. We don’t know why he’s developing a VPN. Figuring out what’s inside it takes time and investigation. But under no circumstances would I install software like that on my devices.”

Filipp Kulin, an IT expert, told The Bell he has known Minakov since Minakov worked at the Main Radio Frequency Center. Kulin called Minakov “a genuine Z patriot” — a supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine — who nonetheless kept in touch with the telecom industry “and really did try to help with some things.” Kulin considers the concept behind AIVPN “out of touch with reality.”

“The idea might even be interesting, but it achieves nothing. The question isn’t how cleverly you can disguise the protocol, but where to find hosting providers you can actually access to bypass the blocks. If Roskomnadzor throttles half the hosting providers you could use for that, nothing works,” he said.