Telegram is more than a mere social-media app to Moscow. Russian troops heavily rely on Telegram, which has become a critical communications tool for Russian forces during the war in Ukraine. This isn’t just the headline of an article in Western media outlet, it’s a well-known fact for every Ukrainian.
What is Telegram?
Now based in Dubai, Telegram was founded by Mr Durov and his brother in Russia in 2013 in the wake of the Russian government’s crackdown on the internet after mass pro-democracy protests rocked Moscow.
The app uses end-to-end encryption which sees messages coded in a way that no-one but the sender and recipient can view them. Telegram itself cannot monitor encrypted private communications, but it has the ability to ban both channels and accounts.
The service currently has about 900 million active monthly users and has positioned itself as a more secure alternative to US-owned platforms including WhatsApp and Signal.
Telegram has become the main channel for transmitting intelligence, adjusting artillery and controlling drones.
The WSJ reports that Russian soldiers and spies rely on Telegram to communicate on the battlefield. It helps to coordinate movements, direct artillery and gather intelligence.
“Many are joking that the arrest of Pavel Durov is essentially the arrest of the chief signals officer of the Russian armed forces,” said Aleksey Rogozin, a Russian Parliament adviser and former senior military industry executive.
While Ukrainians prefer Western platforms like Signal or Discord, Russians opt for Telegram, largely due to its base in the UAE, a country with strong ties to Moscow. They believe the app is more protected from Western intelligence.
“As wild as it sounds, the transmission of intelligence, the targeting of artillery, the broadcasting of drone feeds and many other things are currently very frequently done via Telegram,” Rogozin said on Telegram.
“Telegram is not an officially condoned communications system for the Russian military, but its private chat and direct messaging systems are used tactically nevertheless by soldiers and some military units for coordination on the battlefield,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington think tank.
The arrest of Telegram CEO and co-founder Pavel Durov has sent ripples of panic and concern through Russia
Russian volunteers who supply drones, night-vision scopes, vehicles and other aid to military units operate almost exclusively through Telegram. The service also has offered a lucrative social-media platform to Russian war propagandists, with millions of subscribers, who work in close cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense.
“The detention of Durov, by itself, wouldn’t have necessarily caused such a resonance in Russia, except for one circumstance. De facto, it is the main messenger of this war, an alternative to the classified military network,” Andrey Medvedev, a correspondent for Russian state TV and a deputy chair of the Moscow city council, wrote on Telegram.
The Russian government has reacted to Durov’s detention in France with far more outrage and fury than would be expected given the circumstances of the entrepreneur’s departure from Russia in 2014.
Russian intelligence is trying to reassure the public by expressing confidence that Durov will not cooperate with Western governments. ‘I very much count on him not to allow it,’ Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told TASS news agency. However, if he decides otherwise, it could cause serious damage to Russia’s intelligence services, particularly their operations in Europe.
French and other Western law-enforcement agencies are unlikely to press Durov to relinquish Telegram’s source codes, said Christo Grozev, an open-source intelligence researcher. Grozev testified for the prosecution at the trial of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian intelligence officer who killed a Georgian-born Chechen activist in Berlin in 2019 and was returned to Moscow as part of a recent multicountry prisoner swap.
“But the Russians will be projecting, and they will be paranoid about what the French and the Americans are likely to ask of Durov,” Grozev said. “This fear would make it look like a very dangerous thing to the Russians. And raising this so publicly is a message to Durov that he shouldn’t cooperate with anyone.”
