So what?
There are European, American, Chinese, Middle Eastern governments all doing the same thing.
WHY the furore over a Russian doing the same?
More click bait and scaremongering?
Already under attack by Russia's telecommunications regulator, a new source of woe has emerged for crypto-chat app Telegram: malware. In news that won't surprise anybody at all, researchers from Cisco Talos say the malware attacking Telegram's desktop app was written by a Russian speaker. Vitor Ventura and Azim Khodjibaev …
WHY the furore over a Russian doing the same?
Who told you it is government? In fact, most likely it is not. Telegram was (and still is despite the block) used quite extensively in business comms in Russia so you can get your hands on fairly interesting stuff by stealing messages.
Russia are the appointed bogeyman and as such, they are mentioned in any and every news story that might be negative in some way. I even saw Putin associated with a Flu outbreak, literally the headline read: "Flu pandemic, as dangerous as Putin"
Most people of sound mind can see this for what it is
Unfortunately, we have a lot of people in this country, and the world, who read newspapers, and some, read nothing BUT newspapers, and as you can guess, they are incredibly well-informed about what reality is, their newspaper editor told them so, so it must be true. They don't need to analyse the predigested information, its predigested. No thought necessary, they don't even bother trying to find out, like a headteacher might do when dealing with 2 kids who've been fighting and each blames the other, that would be the sensible thing to do