Russia’s recent blocking of Telegram is reportedly disrupting its military operations in Ukraine
The decision to ban Telegram on national territory could have backfired on the Kremlin. Last week, Russia moved to ban a number of Western apps in a bid to push domestic users toward Max, an unencrypted public app. One of the restricted apps was WhatsApp rival Telegram (which was also blocked), a move that attracted rare pro-war soldiers and bloggers as the military was heavily dependent on the cloud-based messaging service for communications.
As reported pro-Russian military channels are now complaining that the sudden Telegram outage – coupled with Elon Musk’s access to Starlink earlier this month – is now actively harming frontline operations. In addition to being the messaging app of choice for millions of Russian civilians, soldiers also use Telegram to communicate directly on the battlefield. The government said last week that Telegram had violated domestic law and that the decision was intended to “protect Russian citizens.”
Bloomberg Senior European diplomats said the double blow of Telegram’s sudden unavailability and SpaceX’s decision to block Russia’s use of Starlink terminals in Ukraine earlier this month had had a significant impact on Russian communications. Starlink’s satellite coverage is particularly important for coordinating the Russian military’s drone strikes, the frequency of which has been disrupted in recent weeks, giving Ukrainian forces an advantage.
It remains to be seen whether these developments will have a longer-term effect on the course of the conflict, but a Ukrainian drone operator who calls himself Giovanni told the that the Russian army lost “its ability to control the terrain” following the Starlink outage. “I think they lost 50 percent of their offensive capacity,” he said. “That’s what the numbers show. Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, less of everything.”
