1. Thanks to the sanctions, it is virtually impossible for RF citizens to purchase anything abroad with Russian credit cards.
2. VPN was design not to obfuscate but to encrypt - that is, the protocol doesn't conceal the fact that VPN channel is being used, you just cannot peek into the content in this channel. Which means that more and more sophisticated tools are being used to block VPN communications.
it looks like they are basically impossible to detect, given the failure to block them, outside of timing attacks (seeing if a request crosses Russia's border and comes back quickly after), however that is fully mitigated by just having having the vpn "disconnect" and route traffic directly to Russian unblocked sites, which would otherwise be able to perform such a timing attack detection
pretty interesting stuff, there are several versions of this system, and even the ones that have existed for a while work pretty well
(machine translation)
How would this ever work with a whitelist? did you even read the post?