How to Use Telegram in Russia (and Was It Right to Ban It)

Do you want to use Telegram in Russia? It has recently been banned. Now, Russia is not China when it comes to website banning but it does block some sites unnecessarily, and Telegram is a great example of that. If you don’t know what Telegram is, it’s a messaging app that gained a massive following for not being based in America which is known for lack of privacy. And that’s the great thing about Telegram. It provides privacy.

Was It Right to Ban Telegram in Russia?

The most prominent point against privacy is that privacy gives everybody privacy, and that means terrorists and criminals of all kinds too. That is a cost that we must pay if we want full privacy. You are either all-in, or you are not in at all. If you truly want to have privacy, you need to be okay with all kinds of people having privacy and not just you and have that in exchange for safety which you might not have if somebody that’s doing illegal activities is using the app. Otherwise, are you really getting privacy?

Was it right to ban Telegram in Russia though? No. There are many ways to access Telegram with Russia banning it, and there’s far more than one tool to communicate with. Banning an app won’t change the fact there are a million of other ways to communicate with via other apps or such. If anything, banning Telegram harmed Russia more than it helped it.

How to Use Telegram in Russia

Do you want to know how to use Telegram in Russia? Don’t be in Russia.

That’s not a joke. That’s how you actually do it.

Except, you don’t have to leave Russia to not be in Russia.

Not when it comes to the internet.

See, on the internet, there are no borders. There’s only an IP address and where it is coming from.

If your IP address is coming from a different place than where you physically are, and that place being any other place than Russia and other countries that banned Telegram such as Iran, you will be able to access Telegram.

So what do you need?

A VPN service.

See a VPN is a virtual private network and as the name suggests, it’s virtual. It can place you anywhere on this planet, provided that the service you are using has servers in the location you want to connect to. In this instance, just about any server that is not in Russia will work.

You connect to a server, your IP location changes. Russia thinks you are not in Russia. Actually, Russia is not even involved in this equation at all anymore. It’s like you were never in Russia in the first place when connected to a VPN.

PrivateVPN offers 100 server locations in 56 countries. Well, take away one from this list if you want to use Telegram in Russia as of course, our Russian server won’t work with this. That leaves you with 99 servers or more than likely more as we are always adding servers to use.

Oh, and we don’t slow you down either because we buy our internet capacity directly from the IP transit provider. You don’t have a clue about what that means but just know that many VPN companies get it just from hosting companies instead of a mix of both.

How do you sign up? Oh, that’s the best part. It takes less than 30 seconds.

• Click on the Buy button on the top-right of the screen.
• Choose your plan which is at a great value by the way, and that’s not coming from us but from BestVPN.
• Provide your password and email.
• Choose payment method.
• Download our client.
• Connect to a non-Russian server.

That’s it. If you want to use Telegram in Russia even with the ban, that’s how you do it. And that’s how you do it with other websites and platforms that might be banned in Russia too.

Written by Michael Smolski.