I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I'm considering even creating a dial-up (yes, V.34 modem!) line somewhere near to Russia, to offer a side channel with text browsing, news, IRC and email. For when things get really, really bad (they will ...)
Before you ask: yes, dialup works on modern networks if the codec is G.711 (uncompressed). Most public phone network is this way because fax is a thing, but some bulk carriers or some enterprises use compressed codecs.
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.
Try to get a middle hop somewhere at a russian datacenter. Sometimes these have DPI censorship boxes disabled (?) -- I know one that lets me forward simple Wireguard from mobile routers to a EU server with a few SNAT/DNAT rules, even though ordinarily that would get blocked at first sight.
(Sadly, it's just Mikrotik gear that can't use any fancy censorship evasion protocols).
I have 3x-ui installed in Netherlands and everything works fine so far.
But sure, they are trying their worst to block every channel of data exchange they can.
On a positive note Russia is now the heart of digital piracy. They aren't in a mood to go after piracy groups.
Now? lol
Iron curtain is coming back up.
What are you doing in the West?
All Russian citizens should be deported unless they could prove that before their exodus they actively fought against Putin (protests, photos, police charges).
I'm so sick of fake refugees from Belarus in Poland. 95% of them became 'political refugees' just after graduating from University and ran to Poland for work. (without completing their mandatory few years of work in Belarus as exchange for their state sponsored university studies).
Similarly Russian citizens suddenly after the war are also political refugees ;) I never met even single Russian on poland nor claiming otherwise. Same for Belarusan MAN (women diffrently)
This is so demoralizing.
I feel your take will be taken down soon as it’s not the place for such discussion.
Just food for thought: what makes you to feel so entitled to judge people place of living? You know how we are not choosing where to be born and our mobility is restricted a lot of times? Is your separation for man and women comes from religion or other bias to categorize them?
Russia is our enemy. Simple as that. It's bizarre to allow those people in the west (everybody suddenly is a refugee which is fake) .
This is the literal job of state security. Besides, most of those $#@$###s get in not by pretending they've been persecuted, but simply because they already have deep cover and hold passports of other countries.
And I sincerely hope that you will never have to know what it's like to flee your own country, first hand. Peace.
The Russian government or the Russian people?
Oh look at you, how easy for you to demand of others that they put themselves in danger before you deem them worthy of protection. "You must have proof you've been arrested by Putin's police before we let you in here!". So they must risk the chance of immediate imprisonment in a freezing Siberian dungeon before you open your generous doors...
And graduates working for the Belarussian state, why is that acceptable and not considered as "conspiring with the war criminals" in your eyes? What other barriers are there that you have in your mind we don't know about, for someone who's worked as expected, and fled the country afterwards?
Fuck you. I have many people here (many of them queer) who had to leave everything and become forced emigres or asylum seekers.
Have a bit of compassion, would ya?
My childhood crush is in Ukraine (I mean, he's Ukrainian), my dear friend (Ukrainian) had to leave everything and seek refuge in NL. My friends (Russian) are under a constant threat of getting imprisoned for 10+ years because they still help support queer and trans people in Russia.
Compared to them I feel very privileged, because I was able to GTFO on my own. But if you think that all Russian citizens must be deported, you're either a troll or a madman. Besides, this is exactly what, for example, Stalin did to Chechens, or think about what the USA did to the Japanese.
Did it help someone? No. Did it ruin millions of lives? You fucking guess.
upd: made it all clearer, and sorry for all the profanity