Claude does not open from Russian addresses, and since 30 September 2026 Anthropic has been closing accounts that sign in through a VPN on a large scale. Here is what accounts actually get banned for, what a VPN can and cannot change, and how to set up Avocado VPN to lower the risk.
In an Avocado VPN subscription, Claude, Claude Code and Anthropic’s websites always go through the VPN — Claude never sees a Russian address. Pick one country for your work and stick to it: an address that jumps between countries is one of the signals accounts get closed for.
Russia is not on the list of countries where Claude is offered, and Anthropic names creating an account from an unsupported location as one of the reasons for a ban. The scale is large: according to Anthropic’s report, from July to December 2025 alone the company banned 1.45 million accounts. There were 52,000 appeals and 1,700 were overturned.
Stories from the Habr discussion of the ban wave, 2–6 October 2026 (in Russian). The links go to the individual comments.
The stories where the account survives have one thing in common: the address, the card, the phone and the time zone all point to one country. A VPN only handles the first — so that Claude never sees a Russian IP and the address does not change country. A VPN cannot replace your card or phone number; they should come from the same country as the address, as nearly every guide advises. Paying through intermediaries, Russian comments in your code and a sudden heavy load right after sign-up raise the risk too — T—Zh (in Russian).
A home, or residential, address comes from an ordinary internet provider — it draws less suspicion, but it is no guarantee either: in the cases above people get banned with one too. For work with AI services the Avocado VPN subscription has two US lines — New York and Miami, each with its own permanent address. We keep a constant watch on these addresses and check how services see them.
Sign in to claude.ai with the banned account: there will be a link to the appeal form, and you can export your chats from there — Anthropic’s help article. A refund is not guaranteed: some people get one, others do not. A new account set up under the same conditions may be closed within hours — as in the second-account story above.
Collected from open sources as of 7 October 2026. Anthropic does not disclose its anti-fraud rules, so these are users’ observations, not an official list. A VPN only handles the address — no VPN can promise your account will not be banned.
No. Claude’s website and API do not answer Russian addresses, and Claude Code gets error 403 straight away. Russia is not among the countries where Anthropic offers the service.
Not always for the VPN itself. More often accounts are closed for mismatches: the address changes country, the card and phone are from one country and the address from another, or there was a sign-in from a Russian address.
The same as your card and phone, if it is in the subscription: the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Latvia or the USA. And the same one every time you sign in.
Claude Code does not use the system proxy, so without TUN mode its requests go direct, from a Russian address. Turn on TUN mode in Happ or set the HTTPS_PROXY variable to an HTTP proxy address: Claude Code does not support SOCKS.
It makes the address less suspicious, but it does not remove the other signals: people report bans with residential proxies too.
Yes, 24 hours with no card. The trial has one server, in Latvia. You can pick a country, such as the USA, in the paid subscription.