Russian govt charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism

By Tony Halpin

 

Russia charged billionaire Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing him of allowing the popular messaging app to be used by Ukrainian security services.

 

Durov, 41, has been placed on the international wanted list, Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB, said in a statement on Wednesday.

 

The Telegram chief “failed to remove numerous channels, chats, and bots of this messenger, which are actively used by Ukrainian special services, terrorist, and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyber-fraud.” 

 

Russian officials opened an investigation in February into Durov, who’s also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, after he criticized the state’s crackdown on social media. The government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta accused the technology magnate at that time of being a “direct threat to socio-political stability” in Russia and alleged that he was under foreign influence.

 

Durov had accused authorities in Moscow of finding “new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech.” He called it “a sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people.”

 

That came after Russia’s communication watchdog limited access to Telegram, which is hugely popular in the country, accusing the app of failing to comply with domestic laws on storing personal data. It moved to block voice and video calls via Telegram in August last year.

 

The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, also claimed that the use of Telegram in combat areas had endangered the lives of Russian servicemen and that Ukraine’s special services can obtain information from the messaging platform and use it for military purposes.

 

Durov was charged in France in 2024 over accusations that he was complicit in the spread of sexual images of children and other crimes on his platform. He has since pledged to improve the way the site handles illegal and harmful content, and to make it easier for authorities to send requests to the app. The French investigation is continuing.