Russia bans Discord chat program, to the chagrin of its military users

Russia has moved to ban Discord, a popular platform for real-time communication, drawing ire from the Russian military that has extensively used the app to coordinate units on the battlefield in Ukraine.

The ban, announced by the internet regulator Roskomnadzor on Tuesday, highlights a glaring technology lapse within the Russian military.

More than 2½ years into the war, it has failed to implement a secure, dependable Russian-made communications system, instead relying on privately owned platforms such as Discord and Telegram.

The ban has also renewed a wider debate about how Russia’s bureaucratic machine keeps frustrating the military effort.

Pro-invasion military bloggers, many of whom have a direct line to units fighting in Ukraine, ridiculed the move, saying that a bureaucratic decision to block Discord caught Russian troops off guard and left them without proper communications.

“A replacement should have been created and commanders should have been alerted to the plans so that the work at the front would simply not be broken in an instant,” one blogger wrote. “It’s called seeing a little further than your nose.”

Discord was created to provide gamers and cyber-sport enthusiasts with a reliable voice and text communication platform for gaming sessions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform expanded to serve various interest-based communities, educators and professionals working remotely.

Its key features, such as stable audio streaming between large groups of people and the ability to share screens, proved useful for gamers playing as teams of first-person shooters in Counter-Strike and other fast-paced games. These features were later adopted for real-life warfare by militaries on both sides of the front line.

In battlefield videos recorded by Russian soldiers and shared with friendly pro-invasion bloggers to post on Telegram, the Discord interface can often be spotted on screens in unit command centers.

“From a military point of view, the main problem with the Discord ban is not even that some command posts may be left without broadcasting from drones,” said military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk in a post on his popular Telegram channel called Rybar, “but that the relevant department of the Ministry of Defense does not seek to provide any alternative to the troops.”

According to Zvinchuk, similar systems that the military could use have been in development in Russia, but the Defense Ministry has failed to incorporate them in daily operations.

“In the absence of centralized provision of specialized software, the command will use available Western commercial services to organize combat control as they have to fight somehow,” he said.

“And then everything develops according to a familiar scenario: the bureaucrats suddenly realize that the servers of these programs – what a coincidence – are located in NATO countries, and the data is flowing online to where it should not go. And then the authorized body is given the order to abruptly cut everything off in one swoop.”

Roskomnadzor, which has been on a crusade for years to ban Western online platforms and create a “sovereign internet,” said in a statement that access to Discord was restricted “to prevent the use of the messenger for terrorist and extremist purposes, recruitment of citizens to commit them, sale of drugs, and in connection with the posting of illegal information.”

Last month, a Moscow court fined the American company for “failing to delete prohibited information.” Roskomnadzor later said it asked Discord to remove nearly a thousand pages and channels, including child pornography and extremist statements, but some content was still available.

Aside from targeting harmful content, Roskomnadzor has also used the term “prohibited information” to pressure Western IT giants to comply with the country’s censorship laws passed shortly after Russia launched its war in Ukraine. Under Russian laws, criticizing the war, military or government officials, supporting gay rights or sharing content authored by opposition figures can be punished by law and viewed as “calls for extremism.”

Google, Apple and other major companies have been locked in years-long court proceedings with Russian authorities, even after many of them curbed operations in the country following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The recent throttling of YouTube, which has been one of the last Western platforms available to Russian users without special tools like virtual private networks, has sparked concern that Russia’s attempts to limit any alternative sources of information and push its citizens away from foreign-based social media apps toward locally developed and heavily censored ones have entered a new chapter.

Some officials supported the decision, praising Roskomnadzor for its unrelenting stance against Western IT products.

“This is a signal to all foreign IT companies that sooner or later our regulators will run out of patience and desire to negotiate,” said Anton Nemkin, member of a parliamentary committee on information policy.

Nemkin claimed that Discord is dangerous for Russia because criminals register there anonymously and “actively recruit young people for illegal purposes.”

Still, many lawmakers came out this week with statements asking the regulator to reconsider the decision to limit access to Discord.

“Indeed, foreign companies providing telecommunications services often have a very noncompulsory approach to Russian laws,” said a member of the Communist Party, Denis Parfenov. “However, prohibitive measures do not seem to be the optimal policy.”

Parfenov said that Discord is “used by military officers taking part in the special military operation and by many citizens for work, leisure and for staying in touch with relatives who are far away.” He suggested that an overall parental control policy would have been a better solution.

Others have pointed out that Russia doesn’t have alternative software to match Discord’s capabilities.

“In terms of functionality, it cannot be adequately replaced by any domestic product. At this rate, there will soon be no social networks and services available in the country without a VPN. I am preparing an appeal to Roskomnadzor,” said parliament member Vladislav Davankov.

The decision to ban Discord comes a few weeks after Russian military bloggers discussed whether the government would also move to shut down the Telegram messenger app after its founder, Pavel Durov, was detained by France. The discussions reflected fears that Durov would give Western states access to private messages. Russian soldiers have widely used Telegram to coordinate operations in Ukraine and crowdsource missing equipment.