Russia's Federal Security Service charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism on Wednesday and placed him on an international wanted list, accusing the messaging app of failing to remove channels, chats and bots it said Ukrainian intelligence used to coordinate attacks inside Russia.
The FSB said the platform had been used "to prepare and co-ordinate acts of sabotage and terror," and CBS News reported that a conviction could carry a life sentence. The charge extends Moscow's post-2022 campaign to bring foreign tech platforms under state control. Durov, 41, holds French and Emirati passports and lives in Dubai, and Russian arrest warrants rarely travel.
The security service said a popular dating chatbot on Telegram had been used to recruit Russians for "sabotage and terrorist activities," and that 46 users of the chatbot, ages 12 to 22, have been detained across Russia since July 2025 on charges including arson and assaulting law enforcement officers, CBS News reported. Telegram counts about 950 million users worldwide and is widely used in both Russia and Ukraine.
Shortly after the FSB announcement, Telegram's account on X posted an image of Durov raising his middle finger. Neither he nor the company issued a written statement.
The Kremlin's platform war
Russian authorities have banned Facebook, Instagram and X since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, throttled YouTube, and blocked Signal and Viber, according to CBS News. WhatsApp and Telegram, the country's two most-used messengers, have been restricted rather than banned. WhatsApp said earlier this year that Moscow had "attempted to fully block" the service to push users toward MAX, a state-backed messenger whose developers openly say it will share user data with authorities and, according to Al Jazeera, does not offer end-to-end encryption.
Durov built VKontakte, Russia's Facebook analogue, before leaving the country in 2014 after refusing to shut down opposition communities on the platform. Earlier this year, he said Russian prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation against him and accused them of "fabricating pretexts" to restrict Telegram and "suppress the right to privacy and free speech."
From Paris to Dubai
The Russian charge follows Durov's 2024 arrest in Paris, where French prosecutors opened an investigation into whether Telegram's moderation policies enabled drug trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse material. Durov said in March 2025 that he had returned to Dubai after several months in France, according to CBS News. That investigation continues; he denies wrongdoing.
Durov's defenders cast the Russian filing as another attempt by the Kremlin to muzzle a platform Moscow no longer controls. BBC, Al Jazeera and CBS all cited his prior statement that Russian authorities were fabricating pretexts to erode privacy and free expression, and Telegram's middle-finger post landed within an hour of the FSB's announcement. Al Jazeera noted that critics of the platform argue Durov's hands-off moderation has also made Telegram a hotspot for illicit activity and extremism, a point French prosecutors have pressed since 2024.
Whether any government outside Russia acts on the warrant is unclear. Neither France nor the United Arab Emirates — the two countries whose passports Durov holds — has said it will.