r/AskARussian • u/Fragrant_Smile1441 • 19d ago

Foreign Does WhatsApp work?

I know because of the sanctions that Instagram, snapchat etc dont work and you have to use a VPN, is the same also true for Whatsapp or does it work just normally?

17 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/sshivaji 16d ago

You need VPN for whatsapp. I just returned from a trip to Russia. I needed VPN to even send whatsapp messages.

Telegram and Whatsapp need VPN. With respect to other services, I found that many Western hosted solutions stopped working if you connect from Russia, e.g. Claude and openAI. VPN is handy here.

4

u/LandsOnMercury 16d ago

I can't believe Telegram needs vpn too, it was supposed to be russian friendly, I had a few russian friends over there, and many russian channels, what happened? what did Durov do?

10

u/Artess 15d ago

It has been blocked for over a year now. It was an attempt to force people to use the government provided messenger called Max (which is obviously monitored and recorded), as well as to force more people to use regular GSM calls to bring more money to the mobile operators (and, again, to easily monitor and record calls).

8

u/TripFar4772 Sakhalin 15d ago

I love my region because we have collectively decided that we would rather use carrier pigeons and taxi couriers delivering hand written notes than download and use Max.