The Russian prime minister's spokesperson says she was only kidding about using VPN to access the banned instant messenger Telegram

On Tuesday, when State Duma deputy Natalia Kostenko asked her Facebook followers not to contact her on Telegram (writing, “I’m not receiving your messages there”), Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s long-time spokesperson Natalia Timakova told her in a comment that she should install VPN on her phone. “It’s very simple. And it works all the time!” Kostenko later hid the post from the public, and on Wednesday Timakova wrote in a separate Facebook comment that she had only been “trolling” Kostenko.

The Russian federal government has blocked millions of IP addresses since April 16, trying to cut access to the instant messenger Telegram, which was banned for refusing to surrender encryption keys to the Federal Security Service in accordance with recent anti-terrorism legislation.