Why Russia Needs Specialized Circumvention Tools Beyond Standard VPNs
The developers of Tunnel Kitten explain why another circumvention project is necessary despite the availability of numerous VPN services and solutions like AmneziaWG. A prolonged outage affected many long-term users, damaging trust and requiring ongoing fixes. Standard VPNs do not address the core issue: creating and maintaining tools to bypass internet blocks has been criminalized in Russia. This legal asymmetry makes public VPN services and self-hosted solutions risky or insufficient for users facing state-level censorship. Tunnel Kitten positions itself as a project focused on a different task that accounts for these legal realities. The team emphasizes that the problem is not merely technical but tied to the criminalization of circumvention efforts.
HabrAug 14, 2026Translated from Russian