Submission declined on 5 June 2026 by Helpful Raccoon (talk). This draft appears to contain text generated by a large language model (such as ChatGPT). You cannot use LLMs to generate article content. LLM-generated pages with certain obvious signs of being machine generated may be deleted without notice. Instead, only summarize in your own words a range of independent, reliable, published sources that discuss the subject. See the advice page on large language models for more information. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by Helpful Raccoon 2 months ago. Last edited by Helpful Raccoon 2 months ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: Please rewrite from scratch without the use of LLMs. Helpful Raccoon (talk) 01:40, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: Submitted with COI disclosure on User:Ircopz per WP:PAID. Notability established through ~25 independent Generally Reliable secondary sources (Meduza, Mediazona, Vedomosti, Kommersant, The Moscow Times, RFE/RL, TechCrunch, The Register; Freedom House FOTN 2019/2022; HRW, RSF, Access Now, CPJ, OVD-Info; ECHR judgment Stomakhin and Others v. Russia, 10 July 2025). Article weight on litigation history reflects proportional RS coverage per WP:DUE. Primary-source citations limited to uncontroversial registration details under WP:ABOUTSELF. Ircopz (talk) 13:53, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Red Shield VPN is a virtual private network (VPN) service operated by Private Network Labs LLC, a limited liability company registered in Florida, United States. It was originally launched in 2017 as TgVPN, a Telegram-bot-based proxy and VPN service operated by Private Networks LP, a limited partnership registered in Scotland, before being rebranded in December 2019.^[1][2][3]

The service's predecessor, TgVPN, was blocked by Roskomnadzor in 2018 during a mass-blocking operation targeting the Telegram messenger. Private Networks LP subsequently sued Roskomnadzor in a Russian court; according to Vedomosti and Pravo.ru, this was the first lawsuit brought by a VPN service against the agency in Russia.^[4][5][6] After the Russian courts dismissed the case at every level up to the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the company took the case to the European Court of Human Rights. In July 2025, the Court ruled in Stomakhin and Others v. Russia that Russia had violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights in blocking TgVPN, and awarded the company €7,500 in respect of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage and costs and expenses.^[7][8]

In July 2024, Red Shield VPN was among 25 VPN applications removed from the Russian Apple App Store at Roskomnadzor's request, an event documented by Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, and CPJ.^[9][10][11]

Private Networks LP was registered in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 17 February 2017 as a limited partnership.^[2] The company launched TgVPN the same year as a guided proxy and VPN configuration service operated through a Telegram bot.^[8] Russian press identified Vladislav Zdolnikov, an IT consultant, as the founder of the service.^[12] Russian-language coverage has characterised the service as focused on Russian-speaking users circumventing Russian internet-censorship measures.^[13]

On 13 April 2018, the Taganskiy District Court in Moscow ordered Roskomnadzor to block Telegram for failure to provide the Federal Security Service with access to encrypted communications.^[8] On 16 April 2018, a deputy Prosecutor General directed Roskomnadzor to block "filter-bypassing services" allegedly facilitating access to prohibited content on Telegram.^[8] Within one week, Roskomnadzor blocked approximately 20 million IP addresses belonging to major cloud services including Google, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Microsoft, and Hetzner.^[8] In May 2018, Private Networks LP's hosting providers notified the company that TgVPN's domains and IP addresses had been blocked as part of the operation.^[8]

On 13 June 2018, Private Networks LP filed a lawsuit at the Moscow Arbitration Court (case А40-132989/2018) challenging the blocking. According to Vedomosti and the legal-trade outlet Pravo.ru, this was the first lawsuit by a VPN service against Roskomnadzor in Russia.^[4][6][5] The company was represented by Sarkis Darbinyan, a lawyer with the Russian internet-freedom organisation Roskomsvoboda.^[14]

On 18 September 2018, the Moscow Arbitration Court, presided over by Judge Lyubov Dranko, dismissed the complaint, finding that Roskomnadzor had acted in compliance with the Information Act; the court also held that the legislation did not provide for alternative blocking measures.^[15][8] The Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal dismissed the company's appeal on 7 December 2018; the Commercial Court of the Moscow Circuit dismissed the cassation appeal on 22 March 2019; and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dismissed a further cassation appeal on 12 July 2019, declaring itself incompetent to determine whether TgVPN's resources were used to enable access to prohibited content.^[8][16]

Freedom House's Freedom on the Net 2019 report on Russia described the TgVPN lawsuit and its dismissal as part of the broader pattern of Roskomnadzor over-blocking during the Telegram operation.^[16] A 2018 coalition statement signed by Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, CPJ, and more than twenty other organisations specifically named TgVPN as a target of Roskomnadzor's over-blocking.^[17]

On 2 December 2019, Private Networks LP rebranded TgVPN to Red Shield VPN.^[1] The rebrand coincided with the release of native applications for iOS, iPadOS, Android, Windows, and macOS.^[1]

On 11 January 2020, Private Networks LP lodged an application with the European Court of Human Rights against the Russian Federation (application no. 4945/20), represented by Zdolnikov and Sarkis Darbinyan. The application alleged that the wholesale blocking of TgVPN's resources under the 2018 Roskomnadzor order had violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that Russian domestic courts had not addressed the substance of the company's grievance.^[8] On 1 September 2020, the Third Section of the Court communicated the application to the Russian government, asking in particular whether the relevant provisions of the Information Act were sufficiently foreseeable in their effects and whether Roskomnadzor had exceeded the limits of what was permissible under the law.^[8]

On 10 July 2025, the Third Section of the Court, sitting as a Committee, delivered the judgment Stomakhin and Others v. Russia, joining nine applications including Private Networks LP v. Russia.^[7] The Court unanimously held that the nine applications disclosed a breach of Article 10 of the Convention concerning "various restrictions on the right to freedom of expression", and awarded each applicant, including Private Networks LP, €7,500 in respect of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage and costs and expenses.^[7] The Court applied its earlier case-law in Engels v. Russia (2020), which had addressed the lack of foreseeability and safeguards in Russian website-blocking law.^[7] The Court confirmed it retained jurisdiction over the Russia-era complaints because the underlying events had occurred before Russia ceased to be a party to the Convention on 16 September 2022.^[7]

On 22 May 2020, Zdolnikov registered Private Network Labs LLC in Florida, United States (document number L20000139395), as the sole authorised member, per Florida Department of State filings; the LLC subsequently became the operating entity for the Red Shield VPN service.^[3]

On 15 September 2021, during the 2021 Russian State Duma election campaign, Roskomnadzor imposed a TSPU-based block on Red Shield VPN.^[18][19] Meduza reported that Zdolnikov attributed the timing of the block to the morning publication of Smart Voting recommendations associated with Alexei Navalny; Novaya Gazeta Europe similarly connected the block to Smart Voting in its 2023 retrospective on Russian VPN blocking.^[18][20] Access Now documented Roskomnadzor's broader 2021 VPN blocking campaign in the context of the Smart Voting initiative.^[21] Freedom on the Net 2022 listed Red Shield VPN among 20 popular VPN services blocked in Russia by March 2022.^[22] The service remained operational in Russia following the 2021 block; in an August 2023 interview with Mediazona, Zdolnikov described ongoing technical efforts to counter Roskomnadzor's blocking measures.^[13]

On 4 July 2024, Apple removed 25 VPN applications from the Russian App Store at the request of Roskomnadzor, including Red Shield VPN.^{[23][24][25][26]} The company published a statement describing Apple's compliance as "a crime against civil society".^[10][27] Zdolnikov, named by TechCrunch as "CEO and founder of Red Shield VPN," provided the email notice from Apple that the company had received.^[9]

In September 2024, the Apple Censorship Project, a research initiative of GreatFire, reported that approximately 60 additional VPN applications had been silently removed from the Russian App Store beyond the 25 publicly acknowledged takedowns.^[28] On 2 September 2024, a coalition of more than twenty-seven human-rights organisations — including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, CPJ, Article 19, and GreatFire — published an open letter to Apple calling on the company to reinstate the removed VPN services.^[29] The letter specifically named Red Shield VPN alongside Le VPN, HideMyName, PlanetVPN, and AdGuard VPN.^[11] A Human Rights Watch report dated 17 December 2024 confirmed the takedown and named Red Shield VPN and Le VPN as the services that had publicly confirmed receipt of the Apple notices.^[30] The takedowns applied to the Russian region of the App Store only, and the service remained available through other distribution channels and in Apple App Store regions outside Russia.^[10]

Red Shield VPN provides applications for iOS, iPadOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, along with browser extensions for Chromium-based browsers and Firefox.^[1] Since its 2017 launch as TgVPN, the service has distributed setup instructions and connection configurations through a Telegram bot, which guides users through a step-by-step VPN setup; the service is not affiliated with the operators of Telegram Messenger.^[8]

In a 2023 interview with Mediazona, Zdolnikov described the service's technical approach as centered on protocols designed to resist deep packet inspection (DPI), in response to Russian authorities' escalating blocking measures.^[13]

In 2019, the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech listed TgVPN among VPN providers that declined to connect to Roskomnadzor's FGIS registry of blocked resources as required by Russian law.^[31]

Freedom House's Freedom on the Net reports for 2019 and 2022 cited TgVPN's lawsuit and the subsequent blocking of Red Shield VPN as examples of Roskomnadzor's expanding use of blocking powers.^[16][22] OVD-Info's English-language reference on human rights and new technology in Russia described the TgVPN case as "pending before the ECtHR" in advance of the 2025 judgment.^[32] Kommersant and other Russian outlets covered the 2018 blocking and subsequent lawsuit,^[33] while The Moscow Times cited Zdolnikov in his capacity as founder of TgVPN during reporting on the April 2018 Roskomnadzor blocking operation.^[12]

• List of virtual private network services
• Blocking of Telegram in Russia
• Internet censorship in Russia
• Roskomnadzor
• AmneziaWG
• Engels v. Russia
• Vladimir Kharitonov v. Russia

• Official website
• Stomakhin and Others v. Russia — full judgment, European Court of Human Rights
• Private Networks LP v. Russia — Statement of Facts, European Court of Human Rights

Category:Virtual private network services Category:Internet censorship in Russia Category:Internet properties established in 2017 Category:American companies established in 2020