SBU reports "clear cooperation" of Telegram administration with FSB

The actions of the Telegram administration indicate that the platform fulfills the requirements of the special services of the aggressor country Russia, said Oleksandr Melnychenko, representative of the SBU Department of Counterintelligence Interests of the State Information Security, at the Kyiv Stratcom Forum 2024: How to Communicate New Challenges to Ukraine and the World (Strategy for the Future)", a representative of the SBU's Department of Counterintelligence Protection of the State's Interests in the Field of Information Security, Oleksandr Melnychenko, said. He was quoted by Detector Media.

Melnychenko named three problems with Telegram, one of them being the "high probability" that the servers are located "mostly in the territory of the Russian Federation."

"The second problem is that the owner and development team are Russian citizens, even though they have acquired some other citizenships. And the third problem: we see clear cooperation between the Telegram administration and Roskomnadzor and the FSB, because when the FSB needs to block any Telegram channels in the territory of the Russian Federation - in Dagestan, in Bashkiria, just channels of the Russian opposition - Telegram immediately fulfills these instructions," the SBU representative said.

According to him, Telegram, TikTok, and social network X "do not understand the scale of the Russian special services and the scope of their use."

"The Russians have indeed created separate units in all special services that deal specifically with information influence using major platforms. These are thousands of accounts, and this is not an open activity, as in the case of Russian propagandists, but an activity of information operations. These are accounts of alleged Ukrainian citizens, Europeans, pseudo-journalists, etc. These platforms do not have any criteria for a unified fight against their activities. Moreover, they do not have such a desire, since their task is to make money, not to help Ukraine counteract disinformation and information operations of the Russians," Melnychenko explained.

He emphasized that the SBU "sometimes manages to block some" of these resources using various methods.

"The main problem here is that Telegram does not listen to the requests of the Ukrainian state the way it listens to the requests of the Russian state. [...] There is communication with them, but it is essentially ineffective, unlike TikTok, which, in principle, responds," Melnychenko said.

Just a reminder that the new head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine is a graduate of the Russian FSB academy.

Author - Serhii Kolomiets, 29/03/2024