Russian soldiers ordered to delete Telegram as nationwide block begins

Russian soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine have been ordered to delete the popular messaging app Telegram, with those not doing so threatened with transfer to the Russian military’s dangerous Storm-Z penal units, according to pro-war Russian Telegram channels.

The reports come amid evidence that a nationwide block against Telegram in Russia has already begun, after 18,000 people submitted reports to а Russian outage-tracking website that they were having problems accessing the app over the weekend.

On Sunday, Russian pro-war Telegram channel Dva Mayora reported that “orders have been issued on the front to delete Telegram from mobile phones”, citing unnamed sources in the Russian army.

Dva Mayora added that Russia’s military police had been tasked with checking soldiers’ phones for the app, with those refusing to comply with the order being transferred to Storm-Z penal units, which are made up of former prisoners granted early release to fight in Ukraine, and which have extraordinarily high mortality rates.

The report was confirmed by another pro-war channel, Belorussky Silovik, which said that the orders likely originated from within individual units, rather than the Defence Ministry itself, noting that command structures in a “number of other units” continued to operate via Telegram.

For the past year, Russia has been attempting to drive Telegram users to MAX, a Russian-developed alternative that provides no anonymity or privacy protections for its users. According to Dva Mayora, uptake of MAX on the front lines has been mixed, with some units banning its use entirely, while others have already migrated their chats onto the app.

Telegram is set to be blocked fully in Russia from 1 April, though initial reports suggested that Russian military units in Ukraine could be exempted from the ban. However, Vladimir Putin later indicated that he was in favour of banning the app on the frontlines as well.

Without providing any evidence, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed in February that using Telegram posed a “life-threatening” security risk to Russian troops, due to the alleged cooperation between the Dubai-based platform and the Ukrainian intelligence agencies.