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The founder and CEO of social media and communications app Telegram, Pavel Durov was arrested in France on August 24th. The country, one of the Nine Eyes intelligence partners along with the U.S., UK, Australia and others, claims that the social media app is a hotbed for illegal activity, and Western media coverage blasts it as a tool of the Russian government. But the attack on Telegram is actually a testing ground for future attacks on encrypted messaging platforms and alternative news sources.
Then later in the show, we discuss the invasion by Ukrainian forces funded with U.S. dollars and using British tanks into the Russian territory of Kursk. The incursion marked the first significant breach of the Russian border by Ukrainian ground forces in the nearly two-and-a-half years since the immediate conflict began and follows a pattern of missile strikes and minor raids into Kursk and neighboring Belgorod since February 2022. Is this the sequel to the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 that was hyped up by Western media and governments but ultimately failed to make a significant difference? How do these developments figure into the longer history of the conflict, going back to 2014 and even further into history? And what prospects are there for peace rather than further escalation into a global conflict?
We’re joined by investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg to talk about all that and more.
Read Kit’s article Britain’s Kursk Invasion Backfires?
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About the Author
Rachel Hu is a journalist with “BreakThrough News,” a new independent media project, where she hosts the podcast “It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism.”
She is also a host on WBAI 99.5FM in NYC and has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist with the ANSWER Coalition for the last decade.
Rachel can be reached at: rachel@wbai.org.
Chris Garaffa has been an anti-imperialist and social justice organizer since joining the movement against the Iraq war in 2003.
Chris is a weekly guest on Sputnik Radio’s “By Any Means Necessary,” and co-hosts the podcast “The Reboot,” focusing on the intersection between technology and human rights.
Chris can be reached at: chris.garaffa@gmail.com.
@Bruce, very important to note that your source “Radio Free Europe” is a project of the US government started by the CIA. This article has multiple factual errors, including that suggesting Telegram generally has “encryption of communications” – in channels and group chats, nothing is encrypted. Only in one-to-one direct messages where you turn the feature on are messages actually encrypted.
Unfortunately, this is one of many falsehoods told about Telegram. The platform certainly has issues, but we have to consider the attacks on it to be part of a greater geopolitics – otherwise Mark Zuckerberg would also be under arrest for the things that happen on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp!
I never heard of Telegram before, but I found this excellent analysis of this controversial media outlet:
https://www.rferl.org/a/durov-telegram-disinformation-explainer/33093136.html