Attempts to keep Russians from using a popular messaging application recently banned by the Kremlin’s media watchdog are “absolutely stupid,” President Vladimir Putin’s internet ombudsman said Saturday.

Dmitry Marinichev, a former tech entrepreneur appointed by Mr. Putin to be Russia’s internet ombudsman in 2014, criticized recent efforts to ban the controversial Telegram encrypted messaging app in the wake of those attempts resulting in regulators blocking access this month to millions of unrelated websites, regional media reported.

“This is a war of swords and shields, and in this case swords in the form of Telegram will definitely win and always be a step, two or even three ahead,” Mr. Marinichev said in an interview with a Russian radio station, as interpreted by Google Translate.

“Therefore, I believe that this is absolutely stupid … absolutely wrong,” Mr. Marinichev told Kommersant FM with respect to Russia’s newly passed Telegram ban.

Russia’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, banned Telegram earlier this month after a Moscow court ruled that the company was not abiding wth federal legislation requiring that telecommunications and internet companies allow the government to access customers’ conversations.

Telegram lets users communicate through a feature called “secret chats” that encrypts messages in a manner that makes them indecipherable to anyone other than the legitimate sender and recipient, and its lawyer said previously that it was “neither technically nor legally” possible to provide authorities with the means to decrypt customers’ messages.

The watchdog’s efforts to ban Telegram have proven to be technically problematic as well, however, and Russians were blocked from accessions millions of websites this month after regulators blocked a wide swath of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses owned by Google and Amazon in its attempts to keep Telegram offline.

“The only option where you can achieve success is the prohibition of installing the application on subscriber devices located in the territory of the Russian Federation for Russian citizens,” Mr. Marinichev told Kommersant FM. “There will be no other technological levers for blocking. The total blocking of IP addresses also will not do anything, because you can change dynamically and change the network structure and application performance.”

Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, an admitted Telegram user, also conceded problems existed with the prohibition, state-owned media reported.

“There are certain technological and technical hurdles in this regard,” said Mr. Peskov, the Tass newswire reported Friday. “Probably, the very process of restricting access to Telegram has turned out to be more difficult than previously expected, which does not mean though that the court’s decision should not be enforced.”

Telegram boasts about 200 million users internationally, Reuters reported previously. Muscovites opposed to the ban are slated to hold a protest Monday in downtown Moscow.

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