Thanks for your support Robin! Hopefully Georgia will get a free and fair vote today!

And as a fun parting gift they also lost all my luggage. Apparently it never made the deportation flight.

Forgot to add in my sleep deprived state, they took away my phone for the whole time as soon as they put me into holding and didn’t return it until right before boarding the deportation flight to Dubai. I landed safe and sound though!

I got put in a holding area overnight for about 11 hours and am now on board a flight to Dubai. Denying press that want to cover the election access to Georgia is a rather concerning sign as to what can be expected about the fairness of the election.

They refused to give any reason as to the denial of entry and the paperwork simply states “Other Reasons”. They never asked me any questions, clearly someone higher up had flagged my passport after my last trips.

I’m a Swiss citizen, I don’t need a visa and I have visited Georgia several times this year to document the government actions. Images from my last few trips: https://t.co/qL6kdeR93C

I tried to enter Georgia (the country, not the state) to photograph the election. I’m an @IFJGlobal accredited journalist. On arrival my passport had clearly been flagged. They took it, I waited for 1.5h and then got paperwork saying I was denied entry and was being deported.

Don’t fall for TG’s privacy marketing. There are plenty actually private options available like @signalapp. Those apps are banned in Russia, the supposed haven of free speech, while Telegram isn’t just allowed, it’s the main comms for Oligarchs and the Russian military.

Its basically guaranteed that the usual pro-Kremlin voices will be extremely focused on calling this an anti-privacy crackdown which is ludicrous given that TG never provided privacy to begin with and made decisions that actively let them monitor the communications.

It will be interesting to see if the TG actively starts deleting historical data while Durov is in prison. They would likely do this under the guise of privacy, pretending to save their own users and a generally anti-western sentiment.

Given the above, combined with the Russian embassy already requesting consular access to Durov despite him not being Russian any longer, I would expect any TG employees that RU can pressure got communications as well.

TG data will be an incredible treasure trove. Durov made the active decision not to use end to end encryption (except for secret chats which no one uses as they are hidden in an obscure corner of the app) meaning the TG team was able to read all the comms all along.

The same applies for most of the Russian oligarchs who likely discussed things like how to buy drones for their military, assist with kidnapping Ukrainian children as well as coordinate their mistresses, the bankers hiding their money etc.

For example, it is likely that Tucker Carlson would have used TG to coordinate the Putin interview. He would have avoided a Gmail (Google), WhatsApp (FB) or other US based services. TG is the obvious go-to. Probably not with Putin himself but at least with fixers etc.

Durov’s Arrest and the potential civilian impact: Durov was effectively the head of communications for the Russian invasion army. But not just them, also for the Russian propagandists, politicians, oligarchs as well as the paid and unpaid friends of Russia all over the world.

If Macron wants the Russian army to be destroyed in a week, he could merely hand Telegram's keys to Ukraine.

Given the sensitivity of the information Durov has access to, it seems likely that we won’t know the true story for a long long time.

Even more suspiciously, the Russian consulate has requested access to Durov, who not only is a French citizen, he is no longer a Russian citizen.

Durov obviously knows all of this. Yet he voluntarily flew to France. Maybe just very very bad planning but the possibility that he was being pressured by Russia and made a deal with France to get an ally and avoid falling out of a window seems at least plausible.

Besides the military comms, much of Russias elite also uses TG extensively. It would be an absolute treasure trove for material to pressure Russian oligarchs to stop supporting the Kremlin regime.