With Putin’s war on Ukraine, and the death of thousands of Ukraine’s civilians, many Russian citizen’s appear to be manipulated by the government owned media. Although many Russian’s may also be afraid to publicly say what they really think, and what they know ti be true. Regardless, Russia is heavily censoring any news media site that calls Russian’s terrorism a “war”.

Here are some possible ways that the outside internet could be accessed from within Russia, so that Russian citizens can see what the rest of the world is seeing and saying about this invasion.

Tor Browser torproject.org Tor aka The Onion Router, is a network built for anonymous web browsing that is accessed using the Tor Browser, Tails OS, or by one of several scripts that can be run to route all traffic through Tor. Tor uses three layers of encryption so that traffic is fully encrypted up until between the exit router and the source.

If Tor alone does not prevent blocked sites or censorship, consider reading about the options on Tor’s censorship circumvention site https://tb-manual.torproject.org/circumvention/

You may also consider changing your DNS to 1.1.1.1 which uses a secure DNS, a feature available in Firefox. This alone is likely not enough to view censored websites from Russia

VPNs are another way to possibly circumvent censorship online. I can personally vouch for Private Internet Access aka PIA https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ this is a paid subscription, but only costs around $35 yearly.

Free VPNs exist, but they are highly regarded as dangerous. Not because VPN companies want money, but because most free or community based VPNs tend to be full of vulnerabilities, including the ability or users to see traffic from other users.

Specifically for viewing censored media, you could consider a web proxy such as proxysite.com. Basically your using one website to open another. This is not recommended for privacy, so do not give any personal information. It is however, very useful for censorship.

I will continue to add other options as I learn of them. If anything isn’t mentioned here, consider adding a comment with other possible ideas.