Russia declares in siege and captures Telegram founder, Pavel Durov
The secret services accuse him of facilitating the recruitment of young people to commit terrorist acts
MoscowRussian security services continue their crusade against Telegram and its founder, Pavel Durov. While the Kremlin and its technocrats resist definitively burying the application, aware of how popular it is in the country, the FSB – the former KGB – goes ahead, accuses its head of “collaborating with terrorist activities” and places him on the wanted list. According to the spies, the platform has done nothing to prevent Ukrainian secret services from using a dating chatbot to recruit Russian youth and adolescents with the aim of carrying out “acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murders, and cyber fraud operations”.
According to the FSB, over the past year, 46 Russians between the ages of 12 and 22 have been lured into committing terrorist acts through the Daivintxik channel, widely used in Russia among young people to meet people. They assure that Ukrainian intelligence agents posed as girls to try to gain the trust of boys and get them to click on phishinglinks. Once they fell into the trap, they would contact them again, pretending to be Russian security officials, threaten them, and demand that they commit crimes.
The alleged evidence of the crimes, paradoxically disseminated by the Russian Investigative Committee on its Telegram profile, shows young people confessing to having been victims of anonymous intermediaries. Another paradox is that Russian state media have published chats that would demonstrate the methods of Ukrainian special services, but in the images, it is observed that the interface is not Telegram's, but VKontakte's, the Russian Facebook. In fact, Daivintxik remains accessible on VK and Max, the messaging service recently developed by the Kremlin with the aim of displacing its foreign competitors. And yet another paradoxical element is that Telegram is one of the favorite networks for Russian spies to recruit saboteurs abroad.
Following this accusation, Russia has included Durov on the list of internationally wanted persons. The creator of Telegram, born in Russian territory but with passports from the United Arab Emirates and France, currently resides in France, according to Moscow authorities. In the unlikely event that he is extradited to his country of origin, he would face a prison sentence that could range from five years to life imprisonment. When the French police arrested Durov two years ago accused of insufficient cooperation with the authorities, the Kremlin ridiculed these claims and Vladimir Putin described the Paris prosecutor's office as "selective".
In response, this Wednesday, the official Telegram profile on X limited itself to publishing a photo of Durov giving the finger to the camera. The businessman announced at the beginning of the year that Russia had opened a criminal investigation against him and accused them of fabricating pretexts to restrict access to his application in an attempt to "suppress the right to privacy and freedom of expression". In fact, previously, Durov had already received millionaire fines for not removing channels in which terrorist acts were allegedly facilitated or in which LGBTI content, considered extremist in Russia, was disseminated.
Clash between technocrats and spies
A few months ago, the Kremlin ordered the messaging platform to be blocked unless it cooperated with Russian security agencies. Currently, users can only access it through a VPN network, which allows censorship to be bypassed. However, on Monday, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that negotiations with the company were still ongoing, even though Telegram representatives did not seem willing to back down.
This resistance from Putin's political circle to definitively ban the platform clashes with the discretion of the FSB, determined to put an end once and for all to a tool that escapes its control. The Presidential Administration does not want to deliver the final blow to Telegram because citizens use it en masse to communicate and inform themselves. The growing internet blockade is a very unpopular issue in Russia, which is largely causing the president's party to fall in the polls with less than two months to go until the legislative elections. The measure is also not popular with the Russian army. Military bloggers complain that Telegram is still the preferred medium for soldiers to communicate quickly and secretly on the front lines, and they regret that there is no sufficiently secure and effective alternative to replace it.
