LONDON/WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) – The US government has pushed new, increased funding into three technology companies since the start of the Ukraine conflict to help Russians sidestep censors and access Western media, according to five people familiar with the situation.
The financing effort is focused on three firms that build Virtual Private Networks (VPN) – nthLink, Psiphon and Lantern – and is designed to support a recent surge in their Russian users, the sources said.
VPNs help users hide their identity and change their online location, often to bypass geographic restrictions on content or to evade government censorship technology.
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Reuters spoke to executives at all three US government-backed VPNs and two officials at a US government-funded nonprofit organization that provided them with financing – the Open Technology Fund (OTF) – who said the anti-censorship apps have seen significant growth in Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Between 2015 and 2021, the three VPNs received at least $4.8 million in US funding, according to publicly available funding documents reviewed by Reuters. Since February, the total funding allocated to the companies has increased by almost half in order to cope with the rise in demand in Russia, the five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The funding flows through the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – a federal agency that oversees US government-backed broadcasters, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – as well as via the Washington-based OTF, which is funded entirely by the US government and overseen by the USAGM.
Laura Cunningham, president of the OTF, said the organization had increased its support to the three VPNs because “the Russian government is trying to censor what their citizens can see and say online in order to obscure the truth and silence dissent.”
Censorship evasion tools, including the VPNs, backed by OTF averaged more than 4 million users last month in Russia, Cunningham added.
In a statement, USAGM also said it was supporting the development of a range of censorship circumvention tools, including VPNs. It also did not give precise data on their funding.
“With the Kremlin’s escalating crackdown on media freedom, we’ve seen an extraordinary surge in demand for these tools among Russians,” USAGM spokesperson Laurie Moy said.
Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to an emailed request for comment. In a statement, the Kremlin rejected allegations of online censorship: “We don’t censor the Internet. Russia regulates certain Web resources, like many other countries in the world.”
Martin Zhu, director of engineering at nthLink, said his app’s daily users in Russia had recently soared after it was promoted heavily by US government-funded news websites such as Voice of America: “The graph went from 1,000 one day to 10,000 the next day , to 30,000 the day after that, to 50,000 and straight up.”
“There are a lot of people in Russia who don’t trust Putin, and government media,” he