The world is going to shit… also, I am asking out of pure curiosity - how does DPI interact with encryption where you live? Is encryption just plain illegal or what?

Yeah, I didn’t know about that, that sounds terrifying. At least I was still right in saying that they cannot block VPNs completely - you can still send traffic through HTTPS or DNS requests, but it is just too slow for most applications, however definitely enough to be able to communicate with other people in times of censorship. Based on my research Russia is also experimenting with CIDR whitelisting, which is even worse but does have the huge drawback of basically breaking the internet except for a few large sites.

You also can avoid all of these disruptions by camouflaging your packets as some generic protocol, which is already quite easy e.g. in Mullvad by using shadowsocks and ai disruption (randomising, among others, packet size and intervals). In fact, it will always be impossible to detect VPNs without deep packet inspection - and that would require banning ALL internet traffic encryption, which seems unrealistic because of the astronomical downsides, even in today’s political situation.