Russia Charges Telegram's Pavel Durov With Aiding Terrorism

Key points

• Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday with aiding terrorist activity and refusing to remove banned content.
• The FSB says Telegram left up channels, chats and bots it had flagged as promoting terrorism and extremism.
• Durov, who left Russia in 2014, lives outside the country and is unlikely to face a Russian courtroom soon.
• He is separately under judicial supervision in France after his August 2024 arrest in Paris over criminal activity on Telegram.
• Telegram has roughly 900 million monthly users worldwide and remains widely used inside Russia despite years of official friction.

Russia has now formally accused the founder of one of the world's biggest messaging apps of helping terrorists.

On Wednesday the Federal Security Service, known as the FSB and the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said it had charged Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire behind Telegram, with facilitating terrorist activity and failing to remove content that Russian law forbids.

The agency's complaint, first reported by The Hacker News, says Telegram left up "numerous channels, chats and bots" that Russian authorities had flagged as promoting terrorism and extremism. In plain terms: the FSB says it told Telegram to delete specific accounts, and Telegram did not.

Durov is not in Russia. He gave up his Russian residency in 2014 after refusing government demands to hand over user data from VKontakte, the social network he founded before Telegram. He now holds citizenship in the United Arab Emirates, France and elsewhere.

What is Telegram actually accused of?

The FSB says Telegram ignored takedown orders. Russian law requires platforms to remove content the state labels illegal, including material tied to terrorism, and the agency argues Telegram simply did not comply.

Telegram has long marketed itself as harder to censor than rival apps. It offers public channels that can reach millions, private group chats, and automated bots. That mix has made it a favourite for journalists, activists, cryptocurrency traders and, yes, criminal groups and militant recruiters.

The company has repeatedly said it removes content that clearly breaks its own rules but resists blanket government demands.

Is this connected to his arrest in France?

No, but the two cases rhyme. Durov was detained at Le Bourget airport near Paris in August 2024 and later placed under formal investigation by French prosecutors over a long list of alleged offences on Telegram, including distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud.

He was released on bail of five million euros and told not to leave France without permission. French authorities are not accusing Durov of committing those crimes himself. They are asking whether Telegram, as a company, did enough to stop them.

Since the French case, Telegram has quietly changed its tune. It updated its terms in September 2024 to say it will hand over IP addresses and phone numbers of suspects to authorities with a valid legal order, a sharp shift from its earlier stance.

Should ordinary Telegram users worry?

Probably not about this specific case. The Russian charges are aimed at Durov personally and at the company's moderation choices, not at individual users abroad.

Inside Russia the picture is messier. Telegram has been throttled, unblocked, and threatened repeatedly over the years, and Russian users have grown used to switching between apps. If you use Telegram for sensitive conversations anywhere, treat its default chats as you would a normal text message: private from strangers, not necessarily private from a determined government. Only Telegram's "secret chats" feature offers end-to-end encryption, meaning messages that only the sender and receiver can read, and it is off by default.

Whether Moscow ever gets Durov in a courtroom is another question. Russia has no extradition treaty with France or the UAE, and Durov has shown no sign of returning home.