The detention of Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging app, in Paris on Saturday has raised questions about the future of a platform that has come to define the public perception of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion in 2022 helped transform Telegram from a niche communication tool for Russia’s educated classes into a global phenomenon. The app has allowed millions of people to follow battlefield developments in near real time, turned soldiers into the narrators of the conflict unfolding around them and gave both propagandists and dissidents a pulpit in the struggle for the hearts and minds of those monitoring the war.
Telegram was founded by Mr. Durov with his brother in 2013. Mr. Durov, a Russian-born French citizen, was arrested in connection with an investigation opened last month into criminal activity on the app and a lack of cooperation with law enforcement, French prosecutors said.
One in two Russian citizens use Telegram today, either to obtain information or to communicate with others, up from about 38 percent at the start of the war, according to the Levada Center, an independent Russian pollster.
Many Russians turned to the messaging app for news about the war after the Kremlin banned most other major Western social media platforms in the country, including Facebook and Instagram. The government has also shuttered the few independent newspapers, websites, and radio and television stations, and jailed hundreds of people for questioning the official narrative of the war.
About one in four Russians each day read Telegram’s public message boards, called channels, which provide a more unvarnished view of the war, according to a poll conducted by Levada in April. Five years ago, that figure was mere 1 percent.
Others are drawn to the app’s strong encryption and privacy settings, which make it an attractive means of communicating sensitive information at a time of escalating censorship and repression in Russia.
The combination of Telegram’s large audience and the platform’s perceived security have made it a favorite communication tool in Russia for champions of the invasion and opponents alike.
Independent journalists now in exile have used the app to continue covering the war and informing the Russian audience about its toll. Previously obscure military buffs and satellite data analysts amassed millions of followers on Telegram after the invasion, becoming vital arbiters of opinion on the course of the war. Volunteers have used the app to raise donations for the troops and to help evacuate civilians caught in the fighting.
Telegram has also become a prominent source of war information in Ukraine. Many in the country, for example, turn to Telegram for air raid alerts, which are considered to be faster than the official government app.
But perhaps most tellingly, frontline soldiers have turned to Telegram to document their lives and deaths, changing the very nature of how information spreads in a wartime. Telegram’s lack of restrictions on violent content means the app has become a portal for some of the most gruesome combat videos, exposing the reality of a 21st century war where drones and body cameras have created an unmatched amount of real-time footage.
Russian soldiers also regularly use Telegram to communicate military information with each other, highlighting how the war in Ukraine has been fought by a combination of military and commercial technologies, which also include hobby drones and Starlink routers.
“To date, Telegram has become perhaps the main means of units’ command and control” a pro-war collective of Russian military analysts, known as Rybar, wrote on Telegram after Mr. Durov’s detention.
Rybar added that Mr. Durov’s detention has exposed Russia’s need to develop more secure channels of military communications.
Telegram’s power to shape the narrative of the war became clear in the summer of 2023, when the Russian warlord Yevgeny V. Prigozhin used the messaging app to announce — and then narrate — his short-lived rebellion against the Russian military command. Millions in Russia and abroad watched on Telegram images and videos of Mr. Prigozhin’s armored columns move toward Moscow as the country’s television channels played their usual entertainment programs.
Mr. Durov’s detention is now threatening Telegram’s status as the dominant medium chronicling the war.
Some analysts said his detention could complicate the company’s fund-raising, stirring doubts about its future financial viability. Others have expressed concerns about the sustainability of Telegram privacy protections after the French media reported that the country’s law enforcement agents are seeking access to the database of private chats on the app.
A Russian Telegram channel close to the country’s intelligence agencies, called Baza, reported on Monday that the country’s security officials have received a directive to delete the app from their phones.
“Everyone who got accustomed to using Telegram for sensitive conversations and chats must immediately delete them, and don’t do it in the future,” Margarita Simonyan, a Russian state media executive and prominent propagandist, wrote on Telegram on Sunday.
The Russian government has tried to get people off Telegram before, partly out of fear of providing the company run by Mr. Durov with sensitive national security information. But a 2018 effort to block access to the app proved largely futile, and the government abandoned those efforts two years later.
Since then, Telegram has become the main channel for Russian government announcements.
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