Telegram will continue to adapt to the blocking, the messenger's founder Pavel Durov said.
„Welcome back to the digital resistance, my Russian brothers and sisters. The entire nation is now mobilized to bypass these absurd restrictions. Thousands of people are creating VPNs and proxy servers. "For our part, we will continue to adapt to make Telegram traffic more difficult to detect and block," he wrote.
According to him, 65 million Russians use Telegram via VPN daily, and over 50 million send messages.
In late February, RBC, citing sources, reported that the authorities had set a deadline for blocking Telegram; it would be blocked in early April. The sources described this as a final decision.
FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov said that month that Russian authorities had previously spoken with Durov, but “it didn’t lead to anything good,” and now there was no contact with him at all.
“He pursues his own selfish interests, which ultimately lead to a large number of crimes – such as juvenile delinquency, which we constantly discuss, terrorist acts and sabotage,” Bortnikov said at the time.
According to the FSB, Telegram in the Ukrainian military zone could pose a threat to the lives of servicemen, as the Ukrainian armed forces can quickly obtain data from the messenger.
Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev said that foreign intelligence agencies have access to Telegram messages. Representatives of the messenger reported that they had not detected any violation of the encryption of messages by foreign intelligence agencies, calling this data “deliberate fabrication“. Shadayev also claimed that 150,000 crimes were committed through the platform through fraud, more than 30,000 of which were related to sabotage and terrorist attacks.
Roskomnadzor accused Telegram of creating an infrastructure that allows “internet mining“ services to illegally distribute personal data of Russian citizens, including in the form of “personal files“.
To avoid blocking, Telegram must comply with Russian laws and “be flexible“ with the authorities, presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in March.
Andrey Klishas, head of the Federation Council’s Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building, commented on the restrictions on Telegram in an interview with RBC, saying that “all transnational companies must operate under the laws of the country where they want to provide services and where they want to build a customer base.”
“I think that in the end they will have no choice but to reach an agreement. They will have to start talking. And maybe they will agree on something. At the moment, this is not visible and they are blocking it. They are blocking it according to the law, and that is good,” he added.
According to Klishas, the question is “which comes first: the state and its rules or the platform and its rules.” “Both options have a lot of pros and cons. The state must decide whether to accept the idea of a major player with its own rules, its own standards, and, in a sense, explicitly or implicitly communicate to the state: “Guys, my standards will be mine“. It doesn't matter that this is Russian territory and that the users here are Russian citizens.“ “These will be my standards, as I have adopted them,“ he said.