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by drglitch 1916 days ago
Russia already has law in works to make possession of StarLink hardware illegal. There was some coverage in January: https://m.slashdot.org/story/380606
1 comments

While you can often see the claims that simple citizens can be fined under the proposed law, I could not find an official confirmation. Here is the law in question: https://sozd.duma.gov.ru/bill/1086353-7

The relevant part can be translated like this:

> (not complying with the law) entails the imposition of an administrative fine on officials in the amount of ten to thirty thousand rubles; On legal entities - from five hundred thousand to one million rubles.

For some reason the part about officials gets applied to simple citizens, which is completely incorrect in my understanding of the law.

So my guess is that you will not be able to legally to import Starlink receivers into Russia unless some kind of agreement will be achieved, but simple citizens owning such receiver will not be prosecuted (well, at least in the near future). Though they may be prosecuted under a different law if they'll try to share the unrestricted Internet access with other people. It's quite similar to VPNs, currently it's not illegal in Russia to use it to visit blocked resources, but it's illegal to provide such service (though any sane person would not use a VPN-service based in Russia to work around those blocks in the first place).