According to PC Magazine, oppressed Russians have been turning to VPNs to get information about what is going on in the world outside the Russian propaganda wall.

However, it seems that Putin wants to clamp down on that sort of thing, we guess out of the fear that he and his family will end up facing a firing squad in a cellar somewhere.

Russia has been increasingly blocking VPNs more broadly, and Apple has helped the country's censorship efforts by taking down VPN apps on its Russian App Store. At least 197 VPNs are currently blocked in Russia and Apple does not seem to have any objection to obeying the law.

To show why VPNs are necessary in Russia, Putin cut some regions of the country off from the rest of the world's internet for a day, effectively siloing them.

According to reports from European and Russian news outlets reshared by the US nonprofit Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Western news outlets, Russia's communications authority, Roskomnadzor, blocked residents in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, which have majority-Muslim populations, ISW says.

The three regions are in southwest Russia near its borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan. According to a local Russian news site, people in those areas couldn't access Google, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, or other foreign websites or apps—even if they used VPNs.

Russian digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda said that most VPNs didn't work during the shutdown, but some did. It's unclear which ones or how many worked, and they would have been presumably connected via Android phones.