In the days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his country, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, used his Telegram channel to send a defiant video message from the centre of the capital, Kyiv, calling on the nation to unite and resist the Russian attack.
The WhatsApp-like messaging service, co-founded by exiled Russian billionaire brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, has become a key weapon in a digital propaganda battle that will ultimately boost its usage and investor profile ahead of a possible $50bn stock market flotation next year.
Ukraine’s 44-year-old president, a former TV actor and comedian who campaigned over Telegram in the run-up to his landslide victory in the 2019 presidential election, used the service to refute claims that the army had been told to lay down arms, that an evacuation had been ordered – and to galvanise the populace by proving he would not be leaving the capital.
Telegram, which has more than 550 million monthly users globally, is already Ukraine’s most popular messaging app. The service’s much-hyped encryption and its ability to disseminate messages to groups of up to 200,000 – the limit on Facebook-owned WhatsApp is 256 members – has seen it dubbed the “app of choice” for terrorists.
Telegram was banned in Russia in 2018 after Pavel Durov refused to give the authorities access to its user data. However, the crackdown, which included blocking IP addresses, was easy to circumvent, and the service continued to grow. Russia gave in and lifted the ban in mid-2020.
The app has been adopted as a leading source of news outside state-controlled media, and in the Ukrainian war it has become a 24-hour news lifeline for civilians, journalists and even the military.
It has become the go-to platform for protest groups of all kinds, from Extinction Rebellion to anti-vaccination groups, from the US Capitol rioters…
