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A mobile phone displays the Telegram app login page.
Russia

What Russia's push to ban Telegram means for its economy — and war effort

by Olena Goncharova

“Why do you block the internet?” reads one of the comments under the latest post on Roskomnadzor’s official VKontakte social media page — a bland Women’s Day greeting from the very censorship agency leading Russia’s harshest crackdown on online communication in years. Russian authorities have set April as the target for finally blocking Telegram, one of the last popular international messenger apps still accessible in the country, and force users toward the Kremlin’s glitchy “national messenger

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War in Iran, war in Ukraine: Europe must act where it counts

"Flying balalaika" or a "death moped with wings" is how Ukrainians refer to the Iranian-Russian Shahed drone. On March first, one of these crude, cheap, but devastatingly effective killing machines struck a US military operations center in Kuwait, killing six American soldiers. The youngest was twenty years old. In the first week of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, more than 1,000 of these murderous balalaikas were launched by the Revolutionary Guards and regime-aligned forces, targeting everyth

A person stands on a roof looking at a plume of smoke following a strike in Tehran, Iran, on March 3, 2026.

About Russia

The Kyiv Independent’s coverage of news on Russia. Spanning eleven time zones across Eastern Europe and Asia, Russia has an estimated population of 146 million people. Russia’s capital city is Moscow, which is home to almost one in 10 Russians. Russia’s official currency is the Russian Ruble.

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