Ukrainians not using VPN services, Internet traffic from Ukraine to Russia on decline

Ukrainians are not turning to VPN services on any significant scale after the Russian social networks were blocked. Internet traffic from Ukraine to Russia keeps decreasing, Watcher informs.

According to Watcher, after the Decree of the President of Ukraine enforced the decision of the National Security and Defense Council on sanctions against Russian social networks, some Ukrainians did turn to VPN services to circumvent the ban. This manifested as a growth of the Internet traffic in Runet from uses from the Netherlands, the U.S. and Germany. Ukrainians began to use VPN services, which route traffic from Ukraine to Russia through those countries.

According to the data of Liveinternet, the growth of traffic constituted 2.5 mln users. Although, Liveinternet cannot identify the same user accessing the Internet from different devices. So, some users were counted twice, and sometimes even more. It is possible the actual number of users of VPN services a day is about 1.5 to 2 millions.

Ukrainians did not begin to use VPN services on a large scale, and traffic from Ukraine to Russia keeps falling. 

The media outlet assumes the use of VPN services stays low due to tariffs of some cell phone operators  that did not count the traffic in “VKontakte” and “Odnoklassniki”. After the operators blocked access to Russian social networks, using VPN services made it too expensive and this may be a significant concern for many Ukrainians.