Former employee of Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet censorship agency, wrote most of the code for AIVPN, a service designed to bypass government website blocks, The Bell reports

A former Roskomnadzor employee named Vladislav Minakov has written most of the code for AIVPN, a service designed to overcome government website blocks in Russia, according to The Bell's Maria Kolomychenko. Ads for AIVPN began appearing online in the spring of 2026. The VPN service is marketed as a tool that can hide VPN traffic, making it nearly indistinguishable from regular traffic and undetectable by deep packet inspection (DPI) systems.

Minakov, who is now based in Turkey, is a former employee of the Main Radio Frequency Center, a Roskomnadzor agency responsible for blocking websites in Russia. He worked on the "Revizor" system, which checks if Russian internet service providers are blocking websites on Roskomnadzor's banned lists. Before leaving for another job in 2023, Minakov rose to the position of technical adviser to the center's director.

He met the AIVPN creator, Oleg Kirichenko, through GitHub, where Minakov submitted a pull request. Minakov explained that he became involved in AIVPN due to issues with transmitting data reliably, stating that the VPN protocol makes these problems possible. However, experts have raised concerns about Minakov's background and the project's intentions, with some calling AIVPN "out of touch with reality."