The co-founder of Telegram has described the arrest of its CEO Pavel Durov in Paris as part of a “global effort” to impose surveillance on the app, amid expert claims it could reveal a “goldmine” of information about Russian military operations in Ukraine.
Axel Neff, who co-founded the company with Mr Durov and Mr Durov’s brother Nikolai in 2013 suggested Russian fears that last week’s arrest is a political move to force new controls on the platform could be well-founded.
“I think this is a global effort to get government surveillance on Telegram,” he told i. “They are going after Durov to force his hand.”
He added that “Telegram will be fine” with services unlikely to be disrupted following the arrest. “The engineering team has been working there for 12 years. They are self-sufficient without Pavel,” he said.
The arrest of Russian-born Mr Durov has sparked fears among Russian military figures it could reveal information about Russian operations in Ukraine. The platform has become a vital means of communication for the Russian military and for Russia in general, where western social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have been banned by the Kremlin.
It is widely used by Russian soldiers in Ukraine for communication and logistics, and is reportedly used by senior officers to send orders, including to supply targeting information for artillery strikes.
Telegram is also heavily used by a network of influential military bloggers to convey reports and footage from soldiers at the front line, to coordinate fundraising, and play a key role in Russian information warfare.
“As soon as Durov gives up the keys to Telegram, which is a matter of time, in the absence of normal communication, our army will be even more vulnerable,” Russian military volunteer and analyst Roman Alekhine posted on the platform.
Rybar, a military blogger with close ties to Russia’s defence ministry, said Telegram had become “almost the main means of controlling units in Ukraine.” Another military blogger, Military Informant, warned: “Western special services may certainly gain access to sensitive information of the Russian armed forces.”
Vladislav Davankov, deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament, expressed concern that the arrest “may have political grounds” and could be used to access private information. Russian media outlet Base reported that government officials have been instructed to delete correspondence from the platform.
France insists that the arrest of the Dubai-based billionaire was not a political decision. Mr Durov was bailed on Wednesday but faces charges of allowing illicit material on Telegram such as child abuse and drug trafficking that could result in a lengthy jail sentence.
Mr Durov’s lawyer, David-Olivier Kaminski, said it was “absurd to say that a platform or its boss are responsible for any abuse” carried out on the platform, and Telegram was abiding by European laws.
Use of the platform is not officially endorsed by the Russian military, said Dmitri Alperovitch, head of US-based geopolitics think tank Silverado, but it is commonly used for “tactical communications by individual units and soldiers”.
Ruslan Trad, a security researcher and open source investigator tracking the conflict in Ukraine at the Atlantic Council, suggested that France could seek to create a backdoor into the platform through its administrators.
“What will be the guarantee for Moscow that the French will not get access to the admins?” he said.
Cybersecurity specialists are divided on whether Mr Durov could simply hand over “the keys” to the platform and expose sensitive Russian data. Telegram claims the company does not store encryption keys to decrypt users’ messages and that they are distributed across multiple jurisdictions, making it difficult for any authority to secure access.
But the site’s secrecy has made it difficult to assess the claims, says Antonio Arias, Chief Operation officer of the Quointelligence cybersecurity firm, noting that it has not made its encryption algorithms public unlike competitors Signal and WhatsApp.
“As it is a closed-source setup, it cannot be ruled out that full decryption is possible, without detailed technical insight into how the platform’s encryption is managed,” he told i.
Dr Thomas Withington, a military communications scholar and associate fellow at the Royal United Service Institute, suggests that following the arrest of Mr Durov, Moscow will “have to assume Telegram is compromised” and could be supplying a “potential intelligence goldmine” which could be fed to Ukraine so that it can take advantage on the battlefield.
Russian officials have raised the prospect of abandoning Telegram and transitioning to a new platform.
‘The army has enough means of communication not to grieve over Telegram,” said Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defence committee. “I am sure that even in case the messenger cannot be used, a replacement will be found quickly, the Russian soldier is not short of ingenuity.”
But Russia’s reliance on Telegram suggests deficiencies in other forms of communication, said Dr Withington. “It raises some serious questions about why Russian battlefield communications traffic is not pretty much exclusively moving across normal military communications channels,” he said.
Ukrainian forces also use the platform for publishing updates from the field and for other uses such as a hotline for Russian surrenders. But its military has relied on the Delta battle management system developed with Nato as its primary means for communications.
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Russia has its own equivalents, such as the YeSU TZ system used by senior officers, said Dr Withington, but “they have not always worked as advertised”.
Soldiers at the front have been plagued with poor quality equipment such as malfunctioning radios, he added, a problem exacerbated by corruption within the military and supply chain.
Sub-standard communications kit may have contributed to operational security failures during the war, such as Russian soldiers using un-encrypted software on personal devices that gave away their positions.
Introducing a new mode of communication could have damaging effects if it does not immediately work well, said Dr Withington, suggesting that soldiers could continue to use Telegram as they have become accustomed to, resulting in parallel systems and confusion with soldiers missing important information.
Gaps in communication could lead to organisational problems and create opportunities for Ukraine to exploit, he added.
The Durov case, and the resulting panic among Russian officials and analysts, is symptomatic of recurrent communication difficulties that have undermined the Russian military throughout the war, said Dr Withington.
“What the Telegram episode illustrates is a wider issue with the communications of the Russians in the war,” he said, suggesting this has underlined an important military maxim. “Don’t go to war until all of your communication systems work properly.”
Colonel Simon Diggins, a military analyst who served in the Middle East, told i that the West is also vulnerable to concerns over access to social media platforms given the rise in such sites for intelligence gathering.
“The rise of social media has led to a rebalancing of intelligence gathering from covert sources, whether, HUMINT [human intelligence], SIGINT [signals intelligence], imagery, to so-called ‘open sources’,” he said. “Indeed one might argue that the latter are now pre-eminent and covert sources are used to confirm information gathered from open sources and not the other way round.”
“The Russian concern over Telegram is also shared in the West over many Meta programmes – there are regular spats over government access, covert or overt, to those channels – and, of course, those, like TikTok, that emanate from China,” he explained.
