Russia Just Shot Its Own Radio Operator: Telegram Gets Throttled
This is particularly devastating in the wake of the Starlink loss
Russia just managed to do something Ukraine’s general staff has been trying to do for four years: break Russian frontline comms at scale.
Not by blowing up a relay tower.
Not by burning down a server farm.
By doing what authoritarian systems always do when they get nervous, they tightened their grip on the very tools their own troops use to function. Telegram.
The app that Russian units lean on for everything from basic coordination to drone alerts to the endless stream of “where are we, who’s where, what’s happening” messages that keep a modern unit from turning into a mob.
Now stack that on top of Russia losing broad access to Starlink terminals in and around Ukraine, and you get a nasty little compound failure. When comms go, competence goes. When competence goes, Russia doesn’t become more dangerous. It becomes more Russian.
The reporting out of the pro-war ecosystem says it plainly. “Starlinks are gone, now they’re jamming Telegram too. How are we supposed to fight? With carrier pigeons?” one soldier wrote in a message circulating on pro-war channels.
That line is funny until you realize it’s also a confession: a lot of Russia’s frontline “system” was never a real system…
It was a patchwork of civilian tech, black-market workarounds, and apps the Kremlin doesn’t control. The moment that scaffolding starts coming down, the battlefield doesn’t get quieter. It gets stupider.
Roskomnadzor goes after Telegram
According to The Kyiv Independent, Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor said on February 10 it would keep introducing restrictions on Telegram as part of a broader campaign to tighten control over Russia’s information space.
The same piece frames this as part of a longer effort that has already included restrictions around Telegram and WhatsApp calls.
This is the part where Moscow always tells itself a bedtime story.
The bedtime story goes like this: Telegram is a problem because it spreads “hostile narratives,” scammers, extremism, blah blah.
If the state slows it down, the state becomes safer.
The state becomes stronger.
The people become more obedient.
Then the front-line guys show up in video appeals and basically say: Сука, you’re about to get us killed.
In appeals shared by a Russian monitoring channel, servicemen addressed Roskomnadzor directly and pleaded with the regulator not to interfere. One identified himself by call sign and said Telegram was their only channel of communication, and he asked authorities not to deprive them of it.
Another warned the platform was crucial for responding to Ukrainian drone strikes and for quickly exchanging information.
The Starlink hangover
The timing here is the real punchline.
As I wrote last week, Russia has been leaning on “grey” Starlink terminals, and Russian milbloggers have complained loudly when access gets cut or blocked.
Ukrainian officials have talked publicly about Starlink verification and whitelisting processes designed to prevent Russian use. The result, per Ukrainian claims and Russian complaints, has been widespread disruption and scrambling for alternatives.
Now Russia takes a second hit, self-inflicted, by choking Telegram.
So, the Russian soldier’s carrier pigeon joke lands because it captures a real operational truth: they don’t have a clean fallback.
If you want to understand what Ukraine has done well in this war, it’s this: Ukraine fights like a modern force that improvises upward.
Russia fights like a late-Soviet force that improvises sideways. When the cheap civilian layer gets peeled away, Russia’s underlying military comms limitations reappear for the world to see, and they’re ugly.
It wasn’t only soldiers. The backlash spread through Russia’s pro-war blogger ecosystem, the so-called Z-community. These are the guys who usually respond to problems with some variation of “bomb harder.”
Even they sounded alarmed.
The Kyiv Independent notes that nationalist commentator Yegor Kholmogorov reacted with a slur directed at authorities. The military-linked channel Fighterbomber mocked the situation by noting Russia can’t cut Starlink for Ukrainians, yet it can cut Telegram for Russians.
A pro-war group described it as another “ban everything” stupidity and warned it would irritate the public.
That’s the core contradiction: the Kremlin wants total narrative control at home, yet it also wants a functional war machine. Those two goals collide when your war machine uses the same tools your citizens use.
Even regional officials reportedly worried. The Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov warned that slowing Telegram could disrupt urgent security information to residents in what is effectively a border-region war zone, and he urged citizens to use a state-backed messenger, MAX.
When governors are telling Moscow “please don’t break the alert system,” you’re no longer talking about abstract censorship. You’re talking about basic state functionality.
MAX and the authoritarian fantasy of a “state messenger”
The push toward MAX, in this context, is predictable. When an authoritarian state can’t fully control a platform, it tries to herd people into a platform it can.
That strategy always looks clean on paper. One app. One set of rules. One lever to pull. Problem solved.
On the ground, it’s messy because people don’t migrate on command unless the alternative stops working. It’s messy because soldiers and local officials don’t care about ideology when a drone is inbound. They care about speed and reliability. It’s messy because network effects are real, and you can’t decree them into existence with a memo.
So, what does Moscow do? It applies friction to Telegram to make the “official” alternative feel like the only workable choice.
The problem is that friction hits the front too.
This is how states break themselves in wartime. They don’t make one catastrophic decision. They make a series of “small” decisions that each prioritize control over performance.
Then one day, performance collapses.
If Ukraine has the ability for a massive offensive in the vein of the Kursk, now is the time, while the Russian military is reeling from a near-total collapse of frontline comms.
Here’s why:
When Telegram gets throttled, even intermittently, you create three immediate battlefield effects.
First, you delay the flow of micro-information. Drone alerts, sightings, movement updates, calls for a medic, last-known location of a friendly unit, confirmation that a route is mined, the kind of stuff that keeps small units alive.
Second, you increase uncertainty in unit coordination. Russia already has a long history in this war of units not knowing what neighboring units are doing, or even who is where. Every minute of comms delay amplifies that fog. The fog doesn’t protect you. It kills you.
Third, you increase the temptation to use even worse alternatives. That can mean unsecured channels, ad-hoc SIM swaps, sketchy apps, civilian networks, whatever works for 30 minutes. In a war, “whatever works” usually comes with a price.
I’m reminded of the Napoleon Bonaparte quote, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Russia can compensate for one of those disruptions for a while. It can’t easily compensate for both, especially not quickly, and especially not while it’s fighting a high-tempo drone war where seconds matter.
ISW has tracked a broader Kremlin trend since late 2022: a censorship campaign aimed at regaining control over the information space, including pressure on and co-option of milbloggers. Whether or not Moscow intended to kneecap frontline comms, the logic of that campaign makes outcomes like this almost inevitable.
This is what happens when you run a war like a PR campaign. Eventually you start making decisions that are good for narrative discipline and bad for battlefield performance.
So what happens next
Russia will try to patch this. It will push MAX harder. It will tell units to use official channels. It will threaten people for using Telegram “wrong.” It will carve out exceptions. It will quietly loosen throttling in some regions and tighten it in others. It will do the usual Russian thing where policy becomes a chaos generator instead of a stabilizer.
Some units will adapt with redundancy. Others will fail and blame everyone but themselves.
Ukraine will watch and exploit.
Because Ukraine understands something Russia keeps refusing to understand: modern war punishes bureaucratic arrogance.
It punishes it fast.
Russia built a war machine that relies on tools the Kremlin doesn’t fully own, and now the Kremlin is trying to tighten the leash.
The leash is wrapped around Russia’s own throat.
Слава Україні!
Occasionally, I despair that the Russian General Staff will begin reading this Substack and start to run effective after-action reviews. That they'll begin to improvise and improve in a meaningful and threatening way.
Then I'm reminded of what you've just clearly argued: they're the Russian General Staff, working as part of an authoritarian regime. If they were capable of introspection and evidence-based, agile continuous improvement, they probably wouldn't be the sort of regime that wages an anachronistic war of aggression in the first place.
May the regime be doomed to find out.
In the meantime, my heart aches for every human that pays, in blood and suffering, the cost of this foolhardy lesson; one already taught and documented a thousand times.
I’ve read that Ukraine is using the opportunity of Russia cut off from Starlink to eliminate or capture Russian teams in the grey zones which seems to me a strategy to preserve infantry while shoring up defenses. Meanwhile their strategic air campaign can continue to hit factories refineries, and supply lines.
Is that how you read the situation?