Yes, but Telegram FAQ was written by Telegram employees themselves, right? In 2018 the Russian regulators tried to block Telegram servers and it almost worked (they didn’t have enough capacities to block it completely). Given that 70-80% of their business heavily relies on the traffic within Russia, it caused serious troubles, despite some collateral damage. Imagine the US government temporarily blocking even a small fraction of Amazon servers – the damage will be enormous. So what happened in 2019? The ban suddenly stopped, the Russian state media declared the conflict „had been settled“, Durov and the Russian opposition declared „victory“. There was a period of silence, after which some journalists started noticing that several prosecution processes against opposition members involved screenshots of their Telegram communication. These screenshots looked weird in that they showed the chats from a „third person perspective“, as if a third person was present in the chat. Many factors, not all but suspiciously many, pointed to a possibility that the authorities possess either the decryption keys themselves or can partially access selected chats by requesting the access from Telegram. Noticeable is also the fact that such methods have been used in other popular communication app such as VK and Viber for a long time.

I do not favor conspiracy theories and I do hope that I am wrong. But there’s too many coincidences.