‘The Kremlin Sees Telegram as a Liability’ – Ukraine at War Update for Aug. 28

US Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris has agreed to a joint interview on CNN to be held this Thursday, along with her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. American voters are hoping that this, her first major media interview since President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid on July 21, will shed some light on her planned policy initiatives, including Ukraine aid.

Both Harris and her opponent, former president Donald Trump, have thus far conducted campaigns that are full of rhetoric, but light on policy specifics.

Trump has by all accounts run a negative-messaging campaign, focusing more on Harris’ laugh, physical appearance, skin color and ethnic background (her father was Jamaican, her mother Indian) rather than revealing any economic plan or helping resolve the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine.

Harris and Walz, meanwhile, have ridden a wave of enthusiasm with few details on domestic or international policy, including at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this month.

CNN announced on Tuesday that the interview, conducted by chief political correspondent and anchor Dana Bash, will air at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, Aug 29. Harris and Walz will be in the midst of a bus tour through the swing state of Georgia, which Biden won in November 2020 by only 0.23 percent (11,779 votes) and which polls show skewing towards Trump by a tiny margin this summer.

Other Topics of Interest

US Weighs ‘Iran-Style’ Sanctions on Russian Oil to Undermine Putin Ahead of Trump Presidency

The Biden administration has long avoided moves that might drive up energy costs, particularly in the lead-up to last month’s presidential election.

CNN is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, even if most of their programming is filmed in New York.

US voters and European leaders will likely be listening closely for any clues on what plans the candidates have to help Ukraine end Russia’s 30-month invasion. Harris and Walz have had next to nothing to say this month on the topic, while Trump has only boasted that he would end the war “in 24 hours,” without offering specific plans.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, is the only one of the four who has made his position clear, noting that he “doesn’t really care” what happens to Ukraine.

Medvedev says the Telegram platform is useful in influencing the average Ukrainian

The former Russian president and current deputy chief of the federation’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, said Tuesday that the Kremlin’s propaganda is “delivering its messages to an average Ukrainian” through social media app Telegram, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

The Russian-born CEO of the social media platform, Pavel Durov, was arrested in Paris over the weekend on charges that his platform is being used for illicit activities, including drug trafficking and the distribution of child pornography.

In an interview published Tuesday in the New York Post, analyst George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said “The Kremlin sees Telegram as a liability... It is the largest platform in Russia that the Kremlin does not control.” He explained that Durov fled Russia in 2014 when he reportedly refused to turn over the encryption keys to the Kremlin.

“If they get him delivered into their custody, and they can detain him and coerce him then, yeah, they could try to get the keys to Telegram, which Durov has been fighting against for years,” Barros told the Post. “That would be very bad.”

Meanwhile, Medvedev had conciliatory remarks about Durov, saying he was likely unaware of the illegal activity on his platform, and praised Telegram as one of the Kremlin’s key propaganda tools in reaching Ukrainians.

“Telegram is used as a messenger by a huge number of our [Russian] people, including those who are on the [front lines]. And our enemy has repeatedly said that they cannot control it,” Medvedev said.

“The materials we publish there reach the minds of average Ukrainians,” he added. “And they also begin to think that everything is somewhat different from what they see on TV. So this is obviously a political matter. And it needs to be sorted out.”

PM specifies the munitions used in Russian airstrikes on energy, while power blackouts are canceled

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Denis Shmyhal explained that Russia’s massive airstrikes the previous day on Ukraine’s power grid were not carried out exclusively by drones, as his office initially reported, but rather by missiles carrying cluster munitions. He said that the extent of the damages was not as severe as had been feared.

“Yesterday, by the way, we recorded the first missile attacks involving cluster munitions, they attacked our distribution substations,” Shmyhal said. “There were dozens of missiles. In dozens of strikes yesterday, we lost a very small amount of our equipment thanks to the first and second levels of protection,” he said.

State media outlet Ukrinform quoted Shmyhal as adding that, earlier, Russia had used drones to hit electricity distribution facilities. The prime minister had said that “there had been no missile strikes, as it was economically unfeasible for the enemy.”

Meanwhile, the outages that the country’s largest private power distributor, DTEK, had planned for the capital and elsewhere as a result, have since been called off.

“Kyiv, Kyiv region, Dnipropetrovsk region, Odesa region, Donetsk region: emergency shutdowns have been canceled,” a statement from DTEK on Tuesday reads.

The nation’s public power system operator Ukrenergo said that the grid instead would return to scheduled periodic shutdowns to build energy supplies.

Emergency blackouts had been introduced earlier on Tuesday in Kyiv and its surrounding region, as well as in the regions of Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Donetsk.