there are news articles (I admit, of questionable origin) the claim he visited Russia yearly for the past decade. I do wonder if it the situation is a little more complex then he was a fugitive of the Russian Government

Further, there have been constant references, in articles from very reliable, reputable sources (see: CNN, NYT, FOX, etc.) since Russia's invasion into Ukraine about Russia's use of Telegram. I don't know that I could count the number of times I've seen phrases akin to, "based on conversations between Russian military commanders on Telegram," used as a source. The issue is that Russia's military essentially sucked at setting up their own communications channels, so they fell back to Telegram.

Even Politico and the WSJ can confirm...

https://www.politico.eu/article/telegram-ceo-arrest-pavel-du...

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-military-telegram-fo...

Thing is, Ukraine also use Telegram a lot.

It is forbidden for military to military communication, but openly used a lot for information from authorities to the public.

A reason why russia use it is because they don't have anything better.

Ukraine on the other hand had fairly advanced systems well before recent Western military aid started arriving.

>encrypted messaging app

An app that's not e2e encrypted by default, doesn't support e2e encrypted group chats, and is annoying to enable e2e encrypted messaging in.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...