A Kremlin campaign to shut down public use of Telegram – an enormously popular messaging app nearly impervious to state oversight – hit major cities across western Russia and central Siberia on Monday.
Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that thousands of users saw massive outages, malfunctions, and critical slowdowns of the app.
In February, Russian authorities declared Telegram – by far Russia’s most-used communications app, with a reported one billion monthly users – a threat to national security.
Telegram’s leadership was refusing to turn over encryption protocols which would allow law enforcement to read all traffic and identify users by individual phone number to the Russian state.
Those users still able to access the app on Monday reported that video and photo content could only be uploaded slowly. Worst hit, according to Telegram tracking data, were Russia’s two largest cities: the capital, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin grew up.
Other major cities with a high frequency of user complaints included Samara, Tyumen, Kazan. Slowdowns and outages were also reported in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Rostov, the independent Russian news agency Astra reported on Monday.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said on Feb. 10 that his company would stand firm against the Kremlin crackdown and that Russia’s citizens needed a means of communicating with each other without government oversight.
“Russia is restricting access to Telegram to force its citizens onto a state-controlled app built for surveillance and political censorship,” Durov said. “This authoritarian move won’t change our course. Telegram stands for freedom and privacy, no matter the pressure.”
Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media is actively promoting a government-developed messenger app called MAX which, according to a ministry spokesperson, is a safe, reliable way for Russian citizens to communicate with each other and is “a secure, domestic alternative to foreign apps like Telegram and WhatsApp.”
“MAX is a fully Russian messenger... on par with foreign competitors and not falling behind in its basic functionality,” said Russian Minister Maksut Shadayev in a public briefing to Putin on June 4, 2025.
During the televised meeting Shadayev said that the app “complies with Russian laws, offers better security/privacy than rivals and enables seamless access to government services, electronic signatures, digital ID, and more.”
Members of the Russian military overwhelmingly use Telegram, particularly in field operations.
The app is favored for its strong performance in low-bandwidth and unstable conditions, ability to run smoothly on old or damaged telephones, ease of use for uploading images and voice messages, and powerful security features – including end-to-end message encryption, self-destructing messages, functionalities for the prevention of message data from entering the cloud, and encrypted group chats.
Some Russian military users complain that MAX is buggy, unstable and clumsy to use. Dangerously, in their view, Shadayev’s MAX app lacks critical security features like end-to-end message encryption and the means of setting up an encrypted group chat, and some consider it wide open to potential compromise by Ukrainian and NATO intelligence services.
“Reference the plans to ‘suffocate the cart’ [a Russian army slang term for Telegram]. Directives have arrived from the [insulting term for the Russian army chain of command] to ban use and installation of the most secure national messenger in the world on devices,” Ilya Tumanov, a former attack jet pilot and frequent writer on Russian air force topics, wrote in a sarcastic Feb. 23 comment.
“These bans have been imposed many times in the past, and even in the pre-pre-past.”
On Sunday Russian military blogger Yegor Guzenko, a popular pro-Moscow war writer with over 360,000 readers, said that state efforts to impose the use of MAX on the Russian civilian population were being extended to combat units which, in his view, was dangerous and would likely give Ukraine’s spies access to secret Russian military information.
“An order was issued across the frontline mandating that all service members uninstall Telegram and install MAX instead. Military police will now check soldier’s phones, and anyone found using Telegram will be sent on an assault mission with an asterisk [a one-way mission to a certain death].”
In contrast, Russian military blogger Yury Podalyak on March 11 told his roughly 2.8 million subscribers across social media platforms that an order to Russian troops in Ukraine never to use the MAX messenger app remained in effect.
“The command of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has categorically prohibited personnel from using the MAX messenger in the [combat] zone. The reason for the ban sounds like a verdict for the developers – critical security problems that directly threaten the lives of soldiers and officers,” he said. “Despite colossal budgets and administrative pressure during its rollout, MAX still lacks basic end-to-end encryption of messages.”
“While the state… herds government employees, schoolchildren, and civilians into this raw and unprotected product for the sake of reports on ‘digital sovereignty,’ the army de facto recognizes its professional unfitness. Telegram, in a paradoxical way, has acquired the status of critical [Russian] military infrastructure,” he added.
Kyiv Post could not reconcile conflicting claims about whether the use of Telegram is currently sanctioned within Russia’s armed forces, however, all sources – including interviews with Ukrainian soldiers and Russian prisoners-of-war – confirm that Telegram is the messaging app of choice for both sides of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine.
Kyiv Post reviewed Telegram accounts associated with Russian combat units, and found that roughly two-thirds of the units were still posting fresh content on Monday.
Prior to Monday’s state action against Telegram, public communications in Moscow had been restricted for more than a week, with mobile internet shut down across the city and its outlying regions “for security reasons.”
Overnight on March 14, Ukraine kicked off one of its largest drone raids into Russia of the entire war – launching more than 300 strike aircraft into Russia over 24 hours, with at least 60 flying into the airspace above and around Moscow. Mobile internet shutdowns are a common Russian response to Ukrainian drone raids, because Ukrainian drones are thought to navigate using Russian mobile phone communications towers. No casualties or major damage were reported.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told local reporters on Sunday that the objective of the Ukrainian raid may have been harassment.