The fee would apply once a subscriber exceeds 50 GB of international traffic per month on 5G networks, according to Kommersant, which cited a source familiar with the discussions. The size of the payment has not been disclosed.
No decision has been made. Telecom operators currently lack the technical means to implement the proposal, so the timeline could slip, the source told the newspaper. The Digital Ministry has said the system should be operational by October.
Another source told the newspaper the issue has not been taken off the agenda, but that various options are now under discussion. In that source's view, the measure cannot be implemented technically because international 5G traffic runs through the LTE network.
To bill for it, operators would have to separately identify international traffic, account for switches between 5G and LTE, and reconfigure their billing systems. Anton Prokopenko, director of products at the company Vigo, said operators are technically capable of calculating the volume of international traffic, but the question is how far this can be done in real time.
The Digital Ministry did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment. VimpelCom, MegaFon, MTS and T2 declined to comment.
Sergei Kudryashov, a partner in the digital transformation practice at Strategy Partners, called the 50 GB threshold high: in 2025, a private subscriber used an average of about 24 GB of total mobile traffic per month. Just 13.8% of subscribers consumed more than 50 GB of total traffic, and the pool is even narrower for international traffic on 5G alone.
The idea is being discussed as one of the measures to reduce VPN use. Russia's 5G networks officially launched in September in 16 cities and are available to roughly 10 million people.
In the spring, as The Insider reported citing Forbes, Digital Ministry head Maksut Shadaev proposed that operators make international mobile traffic paid after 15 GB per month, with the mechanism due to launch on May 1. A fee of about 150 rubles per gigabyte over the limit was discussed. According to Kommersant, the authorities decided not to oblige mobile operators to introduce the fee for subscribers before the State Duma elections.
Yet three months earlier, the Digital Ministry had publicly stated it had abandoned the idea. On July 7, Deputy Minister Ivan Lebedev, asked at a State Duma session about a possible fee for foreign internet traffic, said the measure was not under consideration. According to The Insider, Kommersant's article recounts Lebedev's remarks in reverse: the newspaper writes that the deputy minister said the Digital Ministry was considering introducing a fee for VPN traffic.
The sources disagree: The Insider says the published quote from Lebedev indicates the opposite of how Kommersant recounts it, while Kommersant attributes to the deputy minister a statement that the fee is under consideration.