“Durov was and remains an FSB agent.” Telegram will be blocked only for Russian soldiers (and not in the Russian Federation as a whole) so that the FSB can control the situation – riots are starting. This was stated by the former head of the Cyber Police, Sergey Demedyuk
On the sidelines of the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2026, a dev.ua journalist spoke with the former head of the Cyber Police Department of the National Police of Ukraine and former Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Serhiy Demedyuk.
On the sidelines of the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2026, a dev.ua journalist spoke with the former head of the Cyber Police Department of the National Police of Ukraine and former Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Serhiy Demedyuk.
The conversation was about Telegram. As Russian media recently reported, Telegram will allegedly be completely blocked in Russia from April 1. And the blocking will allegedly be «total» — by analogy with Instagram and Facebook. The application will not be downloaded either via mobile networks or through fixed Internet systems.
Serhiy Demediuk is sure that what is being reported in the Russian media is a special «PR campaign.» And Telegram will not be blocked completely. Only for a certain category of citizens.
«Nobody blocks anything to anyone. They block the military so that they switch to the FSB-controlled messenger, so that they have complete control over the situation at the front,» Demedyuk emphasized.
He explains this by the fact that the situation at the front is currently unstable.
«No matter how much Russia shows through information that everything is under control there, everything is not under control there. The Russian military is rebelling there, especially conscripts. It’s not like here, believe me. It’s rougher there, it’s not more comfortable there.
The recruitment process itself is very attractive to them. Money, preferences… But once you get there, they understand that they are meat, minced meat, they will be destroyed, that they will not receive funds for long. And resistance begins. These videos, where you see them being tied up, that they refuse to go to the front, are just isolated facts that we expose and show. They do not show this at all,» Demediuk emphasizes. And the forced transfer of soldiers to another messenger is designed to completely block access to this information.
«I don’t think that Durov has gone over to the side of European law enforcement agencies and started cooperating with them. He was an FSB agent, and he remains so. I think that it is impossible to stop being an agent in Russia. Once you get involved, that’s it, it’s for life. Or, as they say, fall out of a window, or work until the last minute,» the former head of the Cyber Police emphasized.
