Will the arrest of Telegram boss influence the course of the war in Ukraine ?

Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev Agence France-Presse Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Telegram (900 million active users) has become the preferred platform for Russian pro-war bloggers to justify the operation and spread their disinformation.

Anna Smolchenko – Agence France-Presse in Paris

Published yesterday at 9:33 AM Updated yesterday at 8:22 PM

• Europe

The arrest in France of Telegram boss Pavel Durov, the Franco-Russian, has shone an unusual spotlight on the encrypted messaging service, a tool of Russian propaganda, but also of the Kremlin army, as the war against Ukraine drags into its third year.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Telegram (900 million active users) has become the preferred platform for Russian pro-war bloggers to justify the operation and spread their disinformation.

In Ukraine, even President Volodymyr Zelensky publishes his nightly message there every day.

Experts point out that in the absence of modern tools, Russian troops have used encrypted messaging for battlefield operations, intelligence transfer to the correction of artillery strikes, through the guidance of Iskander missiles.

And Moscow now fears that Durov will give the French the key to decrypting the messaging service.

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Russian bloggers, some of whom have tens of thousands of subscribers, “are terrified,” assures Ivan Filippov, an expert on Moscow’s propaganda, noting that Western intelligence access to the messaging service would be “an absolute disaster” for them.

On Tuesday, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the “very serious accusations” against the Franco-Russian, referring to a possible “attempt at intimidation.”

The 39-year-old billionaire is a self-proclaimed libertarian, a champion of Internet privacy, but controversial for his refusal of any moderation on the messaging service he co-founded. Moscow tried to block it in 2018, before giving up.

For blogger Andrei Medvedev, Telegram has now become the “main messenger” of the Russian invasion, an “alternative to classified military communications.”

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According to Alexei Rogozin, head of the Center for the Development of Transport Technologies in Moscow, some commentators even make fun of “the arrest of the head of communications of the Russian Armed Forces.”

“The transfer of intelligence, the self-correction of artillery, the sending of helicopter images and many other things are often done via Telegram,” adds the son of the sulphurous Dmitry Rogozin, former head of the Russian space agency.

“Stuck in the past”

Russian units have used command and control systems, “but they are not effective on the front lines,” says Mykhailo Samus, director of the New Geopolitics Research Network, a kyiv-based think tank. “The Russian army is stuck in the past. »

Ukraine, he adds, relies on the Delta system, developed in cooperation with NATO and praised by Kiev's allies.

While Durov's custody, extended until Wednesday, is unlikely to have a direct or immediate effect on the conflict, it could force Moscow to find a tool that can replace Telegram.

Andrei Medvedev considers it “difficult to predict how long Telegram will remain as we know it, or whether such a messaging service will continue to exist.”

The case weighs in any case well beyond the battlefield. The head of public television RT, Margarita Simonyan, has thus urged the Russians to delete their critical messages. The French arrested the businessman to obtain the decryption keys, she assures. “And he will give them to them. »

Complicity in organized crime

The French justice system is criticizing Pavel Durov for his inaction against the criminal use of his email.

The charges include, among other things, the refusal to communicate the information necessary for interceptions authorized by law, complicity in organized crimes and offenses on the platform (drugs, child pornography, fraud and money laundering by organized gangs) and the provision of cryptology services without a proper declaration.

His detention divides the Russian opposition, some of which accuses France of violating freedom of expression.

But the Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, who investigated Russian intelligence, claims for his part that the internal security services (FSB) and military intelligence (GRU) used Telegram to prepare “terrorist acts” and recruit henchmen.

“France has no reason to treat him differently from anyone who runs a platform selling drugs or child pornography,” he argues. “This has nothing to do with freedom of expression.”

The Free Russia Forum, run by opposition figure and former chess champion Garry Kasparov, notes that Durov has — willingly or not — allowed Telegram to become a “weapon of war.”

“No matter how the French Durov saga ends, we hope that Telegram will cease to be a tool for Putin’s war.”