💭 in your head · nothing to type
Picture a situation: between you and the tool you need — a closed border.
Don't picture it as a "list of blocked domains." Picture it as a smuggler's route. An experienced courier doesn't weep at locked gates. They know which paths stay open, where the cache is hidden, how to move cargo legally through the neighbouring crossing.
Run it in your head. What's your "cargo" (the AI tool you need)? Where's the "border" (a censorship firewall, a corporate firewall, no card access)? And — which routes are actually open?
Which crossing will you check first before building the route?
💭 in your head · nothing to type
Return to the border route: closed gates do not erase the journey; they make you check local crossings and cargo first.
Which available resource will become the first support for your route?
The Behind-Firewall stack (earlier in the course, Behind-GFW, after China's Great Firewall) fits anywhere AI services are closed by state filtering or by the vendors themselves. Below are two maps: China and Russia.
Without a VPN in mainland China, Claude, OpenAI, most AI IDEs, AI Studio, and Hugging Face are unavailable; GitHub and npm need mirrors. Cerebras must be checked locally, while DeepSeek, Qwen, and local models are available supports. In 2026, Qwen, DeepSeek, and GLM are strong open models; local providers often accept WeChat Pay and Alipay.
Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini (AI Studio) are closed to Russia by the companies themselves: they don't serve users in Russia, and a VPN doesn't change that — signing in through a VPN breaks their terms, and accounts get banned. Other foreign providers don't accept Russian cards either. DeepSeek opens from Russia, but there's no official way to top up its API balance with a Russian card. The available supports are Sber's GigaChat (there's a free tier for individuals; check the terms at sign-up), YandexGPT in Yandex Cloud (paid with a Russian card), and local models. There's no official data on Cerebras access from Russia — check it yourself.
A firewall gives itself away like this: the TCP connection to the server is established, but the TLS handshake times out, and it happens on several domains of the same service at once. Switching clients or disabling IPv6 doesn't help: the problem isn't your computer but a filter on the provider's side (in Russia, the TSPU boxes).