Tor Bridges for Russia

Roskomnadzor began blocking Tor in December 2021, targeting the Tor relay IP addresses directly (blocking connections to known Tor guard nodes). Within days of the blocking announcement, Tor downloads in Russia surged as users sought circumvention. Standard Tor connections (without bridges) were blocked at the ISP level. However, the blocking was incomplete: not all ISPs implemented it equally, and bridges immediately provided bypass. Roskomnadzor's approach differs from Iran's DPI-heavy system: Russia primarily used IP blocklists of Tor directory authorities and well-known relays, rather than deep packet inspection of Tor traffic patterns. This makes pluggable transports less critical than in Iran, but they provide defense against potential DPI escalation. By 2022, Tor usage in Russia returned to and exceeded pre-blocking levels, indicating that bridges successfully bypassed the restrictions for most users.

WebTunnel is a newer pluggable transport developed by the Tor Project specifically for environments where Tor traffic must appear as HTTPS web traffic. WebTunnel connections are indistinguishable from standard HTTPS connections to a web server. Russia's blocking primarily targets Tor relay IPs rather than traffic patterns, making WebTunnel particularly effective: even if traffic analysis were applied, WebTunnel passes. Obtaining WebTunnel bridges: available via bridges.torproject.org (select HTTPS transport, request WebTunnel bridges) and via email request. WebTunnel bridges are newer and thus less likely to be in Roskomnadzor's blocklist. Configuration in Tor Browser: request WebTunnel bridges from bridges.torproject.org, copy the bridge lines, and enter them in Tor Browser's bridge configuration. The bridge line format: bridge webtunnel [IP:PORT] [fingerprint] url=https://[domain]/[path] ver=0.0.1.

Snowflake provides robust bypass capability in Russia for the same reasons as in Iran - it uses WebRTC which Russia cannot easily block without disrupting legitimate applications. Snowflake is particularly convenient: no bridge addresses to obtain and manage, just select it in Tor Browser. Tor usage statistics show Russia as one of the top countries using Snowflake bridges, indicating its effectiveness. For Russian users: Snowflake should be the first choice for ease of use. If Snowflake is temporarily slow (due to high demand during political events), maintain a set of obfs4 or WebTunnel bridges as backup.

Running a private obfs4 bridge on a VPS outside Russia provides a bridge address that Roskomnadzor has not catalogued. Private bridges have the highest reliability because they are not distributed to other users and are not in any public database that blocking systems can access. For Russian users who have technical capability: request a bridge from a trusted contact outside Russia who runs their own bridge server. The bridge operator runs Tor with BridgeRelay 1 and obfs4proxy on a VPS in Iceland, Romania, or another country without political pressure from Russia. They share the private bridge address (from /var/lib/tor/pt_state/obfs4_bridgeline.txt) via Signal or other encrypted channels. For Russian users with budget for their own VPS: a Romania VPS Mini at $19.99/mo or Iceland VPS I at $29.99/mo is sufficient to run a private bridge. The bridge is for personal use and a small circle of trusted contacts.

Russia's sovereign internet law (the 'RuNet' legislation passed in 2019) enables technical isolation of Russian internet traffic from the global internet. Full implementation of RuNet isolation has been incremental. A fully isolated RuNet would fundamentally change circumvention requirements: bridges outside Russia might be unreachable if the routing to foreign IPs is blocked entirely. Current mitigation strategies that would survive full RuNet isolation: domain fronting (routing traffic through CDN providers that Russia cannot block without losing access to Google, Amazon, and Azure services), peer-to-peer mesh networks that route between users within Russia and back out, and satellite internet access (Starlink and similar) which bypasses terrestrial ISP infrastructure entirely. For the foreseeable future, Snowflake and WebTunnel bridges remain effective. Monitor news from the Tor Project and NetBlocks for updates on Russian internet policy changes.