I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
Iron curtain is coming back up.
Look into vxray it works for my wife's family. AmneziaVPN worked for me during my last visit too.
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.