Telegram founder Pavel Durov broke his silence on Russia’s attempts to block the messaging app, writing in a post on his Telegram channel that Russian authorities had already tried to ban Telegram and spent years trying to ban VPNs.
Despite those efforts, he wrote, 65 million Russians still use Telegram daily via VPN, with more than 50 million sending messages every day.
The blocking attempts had merely triggered a widespread banking outage, Durov wrote, with cash briefly becoming the only way to pay for anything across the country the previous day.
He also recalled that Iran had banned Telegram several years ago, with the same result as in Russia: the government had hoped to push people toward its own surveillance-ready messaging apps but instead drove mass adoption of VPNs.
Durov wrote that tens of millions of Russians had joined what he called the Digital Resistance — the same movement he credited with 50 million members in Iran — with thousands of people setting up VPNs and proxy servers to circumvent the restrictions.
Telegram’s team, he promised, would continue adapting on its end, making traffic harder to detect and block.
In late February, several Russian media outlets reported that Russian authorities were planning to fully block Telegram by April 1. That did not happen, but many users in Russia found the app stopped working without a VPN as early as March. The Digital Development Ministry stated it had been tasked with reducing VPN use in Russia.
Durov had not previously commented on the attempts to block Telegram in Russia; Meduza had published an open letter to the Telegram founder.
In early March, the Russian business outlet Forbes Russia reported, citing calculations by Okkam based on Mediascope data, that nearly 96 million people logged into Telegram in January 2026, making it the most popular messaging app in Russia.
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