At the Youth Festival in Yekaterinburg, foreign participants were given Wi‑Fi without Roskomnadzor blocks

According to Signal Ural, citing a survey of foreign forum participants, websites and social networks blocked in Russia open on their devices without a VPN. The festival takes place in Yekaterinburg from September 11 to 17.

On the grounds of the Yekaterinburg-EXPO exhibition complex, three separate Wi‑Fi networks are operating. In the IWYF2026_GLOBAL network, intended for foreign delegates, traffic filtering is disabled, while IWYF2026_UNITED for Russian participants operates in normal mode, with all Roskomnadzor blocks in place.

The third network, IWYF2026_VIP, is closed and available only to speakers and organizers. You can connect to any of the networks only after entering the accreditation badge number, so Russian citizens cannot access the network with open access to foreign resources.

The festival is taking place at the venues of the Ural Federal University campus in Novokoltsovsky and the Yekaterinburg-EXPO IEC. The program includes concerts by Dima Bilan, the group Zveri, Zivert, NILETTO, Tatyana Kurtukova, Yegor Creed, and other artists, as well as speeches by Deputy Prime Ministers Dmitry Chernyshenko, Vitaly Savelyev, Marat Khusnullin, and Transport Minister Andrey Nikitin.

In June, Beeline launched a “white VPN” for subscribers, which allows them to use Spotify, Netflix, and other services that left the Russian market but were not formally included in the Roskomnadzor registry, without bypassing blocks.

Sources

• Material: theins.ru