This app is used by millions of Ukrainians, and since the beginning of the war, it has become a valuable resource for receiving news and vital information - it's all about Telegram. The owners of this messenger are Russians by origin, who once owned VKontakte, now banned in Ukraine. TSN tracked down people who believe that there are serious reasons to believe that the management of Telegram can cooperate with Russian special services, and at the same time talked with the company's management about all the accusations against them.

Since February 24, the use of Telegram has increased 8 times, and the number of downloads in Ukraine reaches 10 million. Convenient and fast - this is how most Telegram users describe. For almost half of Ukrainians, it has become the main source of information - from news, official appeals, to personal correspondence. "There are a large number of circumstantial facts that indicate the connections of the telegram with the Kremlin," says Yaroslav Azhnyuk, an entrepreneur and president of Petcube, Ukrainian.

He considers territorial gromadas a potential threat during the war. "It looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then maybe it's a duck. For 6 years I have been collecting facts that pointed out to me that something was wrong with Telegram, something was wrong with Durov, they could not be trusted. Telegram has access to our microphones, to our photos, to our location, to a bunch of everything," he says.

The owner of the telegram is Russian-born Pavel Durov. More than 10 years ago, he owned the social network VKontakte, which was eye-catching by the Russian FSB. At that time, the Kremlin's special services were interested in the data of Russian oppositionists, and later in the personal information of Ukrainian Euromaidan activists. The fact that Durov at that time had contacts with people close to the Russian authorities is evidenced by his personal correspondence with the deputy head of Putin's administration and one of the main ideologists of the Kremlin, Vladislav Surkov, to which the publication "Novaya Gazeta" was accessed. "Durov assured Surkov that it was important that we do not ban VKontakte in Russia, because then people will go to other platforms such as the American WhatsApp, and that we have full access to everything that happens there," adds Yaroslav.

Later, Durov officially refused any cooperation with the FSB and, under pressure, would sell his stake in VKontakte. In Ukraine, this social network will be banned in 2017 due to links with Russian special services. With the proceeds, Pavel Durov created a telegram and subsequently moved the office to the United Arab Emirates. The new messenger will again haunt the FSB, Roskomnadzor will put sticks in the wheels of its work and try to block it on the territory of Russia. Everything will change suddenly. "In 20, the telegram was allegedly unblocked in Russia, although it was not completely blocked, saying that we reached an agreement, that we reached an agreement on cooperation in countering extremism and terrorism, we know what terrorism is in the Russian sense, they have terrorists - these are children whom they bomb in Mariupol, these are residents of Bucha and this is Navalny. whom they smear their underpants with Novichok," adds the entrepreneur.

In addition to this secret deal, the financing of the telegram is on guard. A few years ago, the company decided to attract investors and sell bonds. According to a number of media outlets, among those who invested their money there were now sanctioned because of the invasion of Ukraine - the Russian Investment Fund and an oligarch like David Yakobashvili. "If we analyze the sources of funding, we will see traces of the same Russian oligarchs, and we will also see that the official data on the funds that were spent and financed, they very weakly coincide with approximate estimates," Yaroslav said.

Two very real cases with a telegram that occurred after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine also make us wary. One of them - in February this year will describe the American edition of The Wired, which specializes in computer technology. In the article "The Kremlin went into a chat", the vice president of the Libertarian Party of Russia, Marina Matsapulina, will tell how the security services gained access to her private correspondence on Telegram after breaking into the door of her apartment and being detained. "That is, they just read my messages while they stood outside the door," Matsapulina said.

The second case occurred with a Ukrainian journalist from Kherson Ihor Bondarenko. After the invasion began, Igor fell under Russian occupation. In the middle of the summer, I decided to take a chance and tried to escape. He prepared the escape in advance. A month later, he deleted all correspondence in the telegram and cleaned up contacts that could arouse suspicion among Russians. "I cooperated on such an old friendship with Natalia Vateechkina - it was like the head of the "Right Sector" of the city of Kherson, she was hiding in the city. Therefore, I simply deleted all correspondence and all contacts that I had there with patriotic people in these messengers and left only everyday ones," says Ihor.

But later all this information will be presented during interrogations by the Russian FSB. "So he throws on the table and the first question is who Natalya Vateechkina is and at that moment, I realized that everything. I did not expect, because I deleted all correspondence with her, contacts a month after I left, just altogether. And there on these sheets just everything I wrote, everything that I corresponded with her over the past six months, there were other correspondence, he showed me, we communicated so well from the first day to 8 pm," the journalist says.

After this moment, Igor will be captured and tortured. "We rode for about 40-45 minutes, they took me out of this bus, tore off this rag and I saw that I was standing in front of such a pit for about two or three meters and there were corpses of people lying there, they were men. They asked me if you want to visit them, I said no. At that moment, a single shot rang out from behind me and I don't know, it seems to me that they were from a fist between my shoulder blades and I fell to my knees, they laughed, picked me up, put this rag on my head again, put me in this bus," the Kherson resident recalls.

Whether Telegram really cooperates with Russian special services hostile to us, whether it transmits data of Ukrainians to them during the war, and whether it receives funds from institutions and oligarchs currently sanctioned - TSN addressed the company's management with these questions. Received a written response:

Have you registered cases of attempts to obtain personal information of Ukrainians during the last year? And how do you deal with it?

- The data of Ukrainian users has never been shared with third parties, including governments. We recorded a slight increase in hacking attempts and became convinced that they were ineffective.

A few years ago, Telegram made a deal with the Russian authorities to combat terrorism and extremism. Can anyone elaborate on the specifics of this transaction?

For the avoidance of doubt, we can confirm that no "secret agreement" has been concluded between any Russian state representative and Telegram or its employees. Telegram moderators have become more effective in combating publicly available questionable content such as child or ISIS propaganda. This was enough for the Russian government to officially "unblock" Telegram, which we believe could have been a face-saving gesture to stop demonstrating the ineffectiveness of government censorship tools.

Does Telegram receive any funds from individuals or legal entities included in the sanctions lists of Western countries?

- Telegram has never accepted any funds from sanctioned entities or individuals. You seem to be referring to reports that a Russian fund has purchased a small number of Telegram bonds on the secondary market Secondary market bond transactions are outside Telegram's control.

The Center for Countering Disinformation also undertook to assess the risks of using Telegram. "From location to key searches – what you searched for, what you're interested in, what information you were asked for. In the future, algorithms can calculate what you may be interested in," the center says.

The fact that user data in this messenger is not reliably protected is confirmed by the acting head of the department Andriy Shapovalov. "We can suspect anything, because in fact neither you nor I have read that agreement, that is, what exactly is set out in it is very difficult to understand, therefore, as in any other application, or social network, or messenger, I advise you to use information very carefully. If you're worried about your own safety, you need to take care of it before you need it," he says.

At the same time, Mr. Andriy advises not to exaggerate the capabilities of Russian special services, but to treat their actions on the Internet more responsibly. "There are methods by which a person can protect himself and take care of this before all this is needed, so carefully study the user agreement, carefully study the settings in the phone and see what the settings are in a particular application. Because most likely - it's all basically on the surface. I do not want to say a terrible thing, but in most cases - a person himself is to blame for what is happening to him," Shapovalov said.

The cyberpolice of Ukraine confirm that they were once also concerned about the reliability of the telegram, but no direct evidence of cooperation with Russian special services has yet been found. But they admit that there are loopholes through which your information can still fall into the hands of intruders and give their recommendations on how to protect yourself. "I would advise you not to follow links that you do not know, much less enter your authorization data into any bot groups or other dialogues with strangers, or bots. This refers to the phone number, the confirmation code that comes from the messenger itself and other information by which you can be identified," the cyberpolice advise.

He also advises downloading alternative and more secure messengers for communication, whose developers are not from the aggressor country. "Pretty good are the applications signal, WhatsApp, Trima," the department notes.

Read also:

The enemy sat on the old positions of the defenders and "pours" artillery: a wounded soldier told how he manages to hold Bakhmut

"At three o'clock everything exploded": a resident of a damaged high-rise building in Kiev told how his family escaped

They did not understand that they survived: employees of the veterinary clinic in Dnipro told about their experiences during the shelling