[ScottBurson]

Do you really think Putin would hesitate to arrest him if he did that?

Snowden knows he is being watched closely. I suppose that is itself a reason to take what he says with a grain of salt, but I certainly don't take his silence on the Ukraine war as evidence of assent.

[ath3nd]

It's just not like Snowden of the past to endorse apps with bad privacy defaults and non encrypted group chats like Telegram. I'd have understood if he had said the same if the CEO of Signal was arrested, but I can't understand it for Telegram, an app that's mostly not used in an e2e encrypted way.

Telegram is also an app that is widely used by Russian troops to organize and also for dissemination of propaganda and misinformation. It's just not characteristic of Snowden to endorse apps that could potentially be honeypots/backdoored, and to equate such apps as important to free speech.