Russia's telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor has started blocking IP addresses linked to secure messaging service Telegram.

Russia wants Telegram banished from within its borders, supposedly on national security grounds. First on its list, therefore, according to Roem.ru* (translated), are addresses used by, er, Amazon Web Services (800,000 of them), and more than a million in the 35.192.0.0/12 subnet – Google's cloud.

In March, Telegram was told to hand over the keys by judge Alla Nazarova of the Supreme Court's Judicial College of Administrative Cases, and earlier this month the regulator filed a lawsuit to block the encrypted communications application from the country.

On Monday, Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov told the state newsagency Interfax (translated) VPN services are also on its watch-list.

Companies offering anonymisation services, he said, will be blocked if they allow users to connect to banned services.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov remains confident that VPNs will still give users a path to Telegram, and on Friday posted (translated) to his VK account that customers should continue to try to connect over VPNs.

There's been one perhaps-unintended consequence of the block: according to Bloomberg, Kremlin officials have had to switch to the Mail.ru-owned ICQ service “for communications with Russian and international media”. ®

*Correction: The author, who doesn't speak Russian, originally identified the site as Servers.ru (the banner advertiser) rather than Roem.ru (the publication). Thanks to editor-in-chief Yury Sinodov for bringing this to our attention.