The FSB accuses Durov of terrorism: he refused to cooperate with Russian authorities
Russia’s FSB has issued an international arrest warrant for Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, charging him with aiding terrorism. According to reporting by the Interfax agency, federal authorities allege that Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence services, terrorist and extremist organisations to coordinate attacks, recruit operatives and conduct cyber fraud inside the Russian Federation. A check of Interpol’s public red notice archive did not return Durov’s name among those sought at the time of publication – the FSB has not publicly stated that it has formalised a request to Interpol.
Durov himself had foreshadowed the trajectory of this affair as early as April 2018, when Telegram refused to hand over encryption keys to the FSB: Russia responded by banning the application. A few weeks earlier, Durov had just raised 1.7 billion dollars from Russian and international private investors for the TON project. Durov claims he was poisoned during that period, after receiving an anonymous package in the spring of 2018. In 2024 France arrested him on separate charges – trafficking in illicit material, fraud, money laundering, platform-facilitated child abuse – before progressively easing travel restrictions during 2025: in March an examining magistrate authorised him to leave France temporarily, and from July he was permitted to be absent for periods of up to two weeks, while remaining under judicial supervision and required to return. The French investigation remains open.
Telegram’s official response to the Russian warrant arrived on the platform’s X account: a photograph of Durov with his middle finger raised at the camera. Efficient communication, in the technical sense of the term.
Russia accuses Durov of having run a communications infrastructure that refused to function as a state surveillance terminal – not of criminal acts committed in person. The mechanism is the same one the Kremlin had already applied in 2018: informal pressure first, then administrative sanctions – this year Russia fined Telegram over 100 million roubles for content it failed to remove – and finally criminal escalation once the earlier levers proved insufficient.
Durov himself described this dynamic in a post in early 2026, accusing the Russian authorities of “fabricating new pretexts every day to restrict access to Telegram” in an attempt to “suppress the right to privacy and freedom of speech”. For as long as Telegram partially complied with requests, it remained a tolerable tool. When the refusal became systematic, it became a criminal offence.
This pattern has a logic that extends beyond Russia. France built its own case on a different category of offences – child sexual abuse material, fraud, money laundering – but the underlying structure is analogous: a platform that administers its own moderation autonomously becomes a legal problem the moment authorities decide that autonomy has gone too far. The formal offence changes; the function of the rule remains identical. As I have already argued on Atlas21 in the context of KYC and financial surveillance, the form of the control instrument varies, the logic stays the same: anyone who wants to operate outside the perimeter visible to the state is to be treated with suspicion.
The recurring argument in debates about these cases is that private communications platforms are havens for criminals. The argument is empirically partial and structurally instrumental. Partial because every means of communication – from postal mail to the telephone – has been used for illicit activity without that fact justifying universal preventive surveillance of all its users. Instrumental because the criminal, in institutional rhetoric, serves a precise function: legitimising the extension of access powers to the entire population using the same tool. Putin stated this with unusual candour in September 2024, commenting on Durov’s arrest in France: “All platforms of this type are guilty of this. If that is what they are doing to Durov, they should probably all be arrested.” It was a criticism of France – and he added that the actions of the French authorities appeared to him “not entirely clear, as they are selective” – but it captured the general problem with precision.
Privacy is tolerated for as long as it remains symbolic. It becomes a problem when it is operational – when it produces a real opacity that removes information from institutional control. Telegram was tolerated when it was perceived as a marginal tool; it became a target when it reached sufficient scale for its resistance to access requests to be meaningful.
