Kaspersky is stopping the operation and sales of its VPN product, Kaspersky Secure Connection, in the Russian Federation, with the free version to be suspended as early as November 15, 2022.As the Moscow-based company informed on its Russian blog earlier this week, the shutdown of the VPN service will be staged, so that impact on customers remains minimal.The country's telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, announced VPN bans in June 2021 and then again in December 2021, prohibiting the use of NordVPN, Express VPN, ProtonVPN, VyprVPN, Opera VPN, PrivateTunnel, and others.The reason for banning 15 VPNs in the country was because their vendors refused to connect their services to the FGIS database, which would apply government-imposed censorship in VPN connections, and would also make user traffic and identity subject to state scrutiny.In August, Roskomnadzor announced a plan to introduce an AI-based internet scanner by December 2022 to analyze every new information that appears online."