Why does the Russian military trust Telegram?
The founder and CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been arrested in France on charges that could potentially give him up to 20 years in prison. This is interesting in relation to the war in Ukraine because Telegram is such an important platform in both Russia and Ukraine.
Telegram is a difficult platform to categorize because it is several things at the same time. On the one hand, it is a very popular blogging platform in the post-Soviet countries, where it plays much the same role as Twitter (now X) does in the West. That is, it is the digital town hall where much of the public debate is taking place.
Telegram plays this role as a public blogging platform in both Russia and Ukraine. On the Russian side, we see journalists and influencers – including the so-called Z-bloggers – who provide more or less independent reporting about important events. In on the Ukrainian side, we also see public figures including President Zelensky and military institutions maintaining a substantial presence on Telegram because it is such a useful platform to reach a large audience.
But on the other hand, Telegram is also a service for encrypted instant messaging. It is debatable how good the encryption is, and the design of the app makes it cumbersome to enable real end-to-end encryption. But by using the app you do make it hard for law enforcement agencies to follow the communication if Telegram refuses to cooperate.
The many faces of Telegram
What makes the case against Pavel Durov so interesting is that depending on who you are, Telegram can be either of at least three very different things. If you’re a citizen in the West, then Telegram is mostly a platform that criminals use to coordinate illegal activities: narcotics sales, weapons trade, child pornography, human trafficking, contract killings. It is also the preferred platform for the scammers who try to impersonate me on YouTube. The charges against Durov are exactly about enabling these types of criminal activities because Telegram refuses to moderate the content on the platform or working with the French law enforcement agencies. In other words, for citizens in the West, Telegram is largely a platform that enables illegal activities.
If you are a citizen in one of the post-Soviet states, you will likely have a more positive image of Telegram, because it is the place where public discourse takes place and political views are exchanged. People in Russia see Telegram as one of the few remaining outlets where public debate can occur with some level of freedom of speech. It is not just government voices or Z-nationalists that are present on the platform. Also Russia’s liberal opposition uses Telegram to reach their audience, and they view it as an invaluable political tool.
Telegram as a military command tool
But the third category is really interesting: it is the Russian military. Telegram has become the de facto coordination and communication platform for the Russian soldiers in Ukraine. They use Telegram group chats and encrypted direct messaging for all kinds of tasks related to military command including coordination of movements, logistics, artillery targeting, etc.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the extent to which it is difficult for states to develop IT platforms that can compete with commercial services. The Russian military has obviously been working on building their own military communication systems that theoretically should provide the same kinds of features, but in reality they never managed to make it scalable or reliable. Therefore, today they rely on Telegram and Discord to cover their communication needs on the frontline. It’s not much different for the Ukrainians. They typically use Discord and Signal.
It is clear from the Russian reaction to Durov’s arrest that they are concerned about the possibility of Telegram shutting down or becoming compromised. If Durov were to hand over the encryption keys to the French intelligence services as part of some deal, the Russian forces in Ukraine would be screwed.
This means that we are seeing a strange alignment of interests between the Russian government and some figures in the Russian opposition. They both see it as a monumental threat if Telegram disappears. The Russian government see it as vital for political stability, and the opposition see it as vital for political change.
Why does the Russian state trust Telegram?
I think the position of these Russian opposition politicians is naïve. There is quite a bit of information that suggests that Telegram might be working with the Russian government. There have been instances where Telegram pages for one of Navalny’s initiatives was taken down, Ukrainian chat bots have been blocked, and also pages related to protests in Iran have been removed from the platform despite the ostensible commitment to unlimited free speech. From 2018 to 2020, the Russian government had an intensive campaign against Telegram where they tried to block the platform, but then for some reason they suddenly decided that they didn’t have a problem with Telegram anymore. Many people assumed that the Russian state gave up because it was technically difficult and resource demanding to keep patching the loopholes that the engineers at Telegram could come up with, but this explanation doesn’t correlate with the determination that the Russian state has had to go after other platforms. There have been situations where it was suspected that the Russian authorities had access to Telegram’s encryption keys, and it just seems strange that they would trust his platform enough to use it for sensitive military communication. If you are a dictatorship that is deeply concerned about regime security and guarding yourself against military coups, then you probably want to be able to monitor the communication between your military commanders.
One of the puzzling messages in the Russian newspapers following Durov’s arrest has been that the Russian military does not have an alternative to using Telegram for military communications. Why exactly is it that they don’t have an alternative? Why don’t they just use Signal? The Ukrainians use this app, and by all accounts it has a higher security level than Telegram. The explanation is simple: Signal is not allowed in Russia, and the Russian government does not want its citizens to have access to this technology. But they have no problem with Telegram.
While there is no clear evidence that Telegram is working with the Russian government, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that it might be the case. That might also explain the Russian panic about what can happen to Telegram now that its CEO is under arrest. If they know by experience that Durov is willing to make deals with governments that put him under pressure, then they have good reasons for being concerned.
It will be interesting to see where this ends, and what Durov’s arrest will lead to. Either way, it’s fascinating to observe how important our social media platforms have become for the conduct of warfare. The same tool that President Zelensky uses as a vital communication channel to the Ukrainian people is also the primary communication platform for the Russian troops that are attacking Ukraine. It will take a while before we really understand the consequences of this new technology on military operations in the 21st century.