A wave of articles in Russian regional media is urging users to delete Telegram, citing risks from cyberattacks to overheating phones. Is it actually unsafe?
In recent weeks, a series of articles with near-identical headlines has appeared across Russian state-controlled regional media, warning readers to delete Telegram from their phones before March 31. At the same time, the pro-Kremlin tabloid Baza published a piece claiming that Russians’ iPhones have been overheating and breaking down because VPNs (often used to access Telegram) put too much load on the processor. All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of Telegram’s slow but apparently irreversible blocking by the Russian authorities. Meduza teamed up with the fact-checking project Provereno Media to make sense of this wave of warnings.
Scare tactics
Over the past few days, media outlets from Kirov, Lipetsk, Samara, Yoshkar-Ola, Chelyabinsk, and other Russian cities have published near-identical articles under headlines like “Experts warn: Better delete Telegram before March 31.” The authors insist that if readers don’t get rid of the app by the end of the month, using it will become unsafe.
The regional outlet Kubanskie Novosti, for instance, explains the risk this way:
Lawyers and cybersecurity specialists are raising the alarm: the accumulation of confidential information — passwords, banking details, work documents — in messenger chats can have serious consequences. Many Russian companies are also revisiting their internal policies on foreign services and moving away from them. So it only makes sense to urgently clean up your smartphones before March 31.
The articles don’t name any of the experts quoted, nor do they explain where the March 31 deadline actually comes from. Back in late February, RBC and The Bell reported that the authorities wanted to fully block Telegram by April 1. Then the authorities began throttling the app sooner than expected, in early March.
Judging by their uniform structure, overlapping recommendations, and recurring arguments, all these regional press articles appear to be rewritten versions of a piece published on February 11 by the Far Eastern outlet PrimPress. A few hours before that first piece appeared, RBC reported that the Russian authorities had begun “restricting Telegram’s operation.”
In that original PrimPress article, readers were advised to delete Telegram and WhatsApp not by March 31 but “before March.” The piece gave three arguments:
- Due to “increasing regulatory pressure,” major messengers could be blocked. Users would face “freezing, message delivery problems, and reduced functionality, and would have to scramble to switch to new communication channels.”
- Messengers are used to send phishing links and steal data, and “deleting unused services before the start of the busy spring shopping and travel season reduces the chances of falling victim to scammers.”
- Photos, videos, files, and voice messages sent through messengers “clog up your phone’s memory” — and “before spring, when you’ll be taking more photos, traveling, and using navigation apps, it makes sense to delete unnecessary messengers or at least give them a serious cleanup.”
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On March 18, PrimPress published a revised version of the article, updated to account for the Telegram block that had already begun. The mention of the ”busy spring shopping and travel season” was gone, but the other cybersecurity advice remained.
That text was subsequently picked up and republished by other regional outlets, some of which cited PrimPress directly. Notably, none of these articles suggest that readers switch to the “national” messenger Max — the app Russian authorities have been actively promoting, which has already been flagged for potentially surveilling its users and toward which Russians are deeply skeptical.
Is Telegram really an urgent safety hazard in Russia?
No, it’s not. And the arguments in these articles have neither legal nor technical grounding. The pieces appear to be aimed at less tech-savvy Telegram users and designed to play on their fears.
The outlet that published the original story, PrimPress, has ties to regional authorities. According to the SPARK business database, the outlet is owned by Viktor Staritsyn, who became an adviser to Primorsky Krai Governor Oleg Kozhemyako back in 2019. Kubanskie Novosti (quoted above) is owned by the regional administration.
In other cases, the connections between authorities and the outlets amplifying these anti-Telegram articles are harder to trace directly. But the publisher behind the Yoshkar-Ola outlet makes no secret of its pro-government leanings, while the Chelyabinsk publication covers almost nothing but the work of the local legislative assembly.
The coordinated publication of near-identical articles in pro-government outlets looks like a deliberate campaign to discredit Telegram — a propaganda complement to the ongoing block.
Baza, a pro-Kremlin tabloid that was absorbed into the media empire of Putin’s friend Yuri Kovalchuk in the fall of 2025, seems to be pursuing the same goal. On March 24, it ran a piece claiming that Russians’ iPhones are overheating and dying because the VPNs installed on their phones are “overloading the processor.”
The explanation in the piece is notably convoluted:
The main problem right now is charging your phone overnight with a VPN switched on. Previously, most Russians would scroll through [Instagram] before bed, then turn off their circumvention tools, put the phone on charge, and go to sleep. Now they’re more likely to leave everything running so they don’t miss a potentially “important message” in a messenger from family or management.