Telegram founder Pavel Durov detained in France

Russian-born tech mogul Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the popular platform Telegram, has been detained in France, French authorities confirmed Sunday. According to French media, his detention is related to alleged offenses regarding the social media app.

The Russian Embassy in Paris said early Sunday that it had requested consular access to Durov and demanded that French authorities “ensure the protection of his rights.”

“As of today, the French side has so far avoided cooperation on this issue,” the embassy said in a statement posted on Telegram, adding that officials are in touch with Durov’s lawyer.

Paris authorities said a statement regarding Durov’s detention will be issued Monday.

Durov was once viewed as a Russian Mark Zuckerberg. But he left the country in 2014 after he lost control of his social network because he refused to hand over Ukrainian opposition organizations’ data to security agencies.

French TV channel TF1 broke the news Saturday night, reporting that the billionaire was detained as he was traveling back from Azerbaijan aboard a private jet, which landed at the Bourget airport outside the capital.

Russia then sent a diplomatic note demanding access to Durov, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Sunday on Russian state TV, adding that the French government views his French citizenship as his primary nationality.

Durov lives in Dubai and is a dual citizen of the United Arab Emirates and France, according to Telegram. It’s not clear whether he renounced his Russian citizenship. The 39-year-old’s fortune is estimated by Forbes at about $15.5 billion.

Moderation rules under investigation

The French newspaper Le Monde reported that authorities detained Durov as part of a preliminary investigation that focused on the lack of content moderation on Telegram and the platform’s role in allegedly enabling criminal activity. The probe is looking at Telegram’s failure to cooperate with law enforcement on issues ranging from child pornography to cyberscams to organized crime, the newspaper said.

The French Interior and Justice ministries did not respond to requests for comment. Telegram also did not reply to a message seeking the company’s response.

The online app’s unmoderated messaging services have provided a platform for groups posting content that might be banned on other major social media networks, from right-wing groups to organized crime figures and militant groups.

Telegram is also popular with criminal syndicates and terrorist groups because of its encrypted messaging, which makes it hard for law enforcement authorities to monitor any illegal activities.

Hamas, for example, has posted grisly first-person videos of the conflict in Gaza to help build a narrative that its militants are freedom fighters justified in their killing and abduction of Israeli civilians. Visceral footage from body-worn GoPro cameras flooded its Telegram channels during the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. (The app also hosts groups that claim the attacks were a “false flag” operation staged by Israel.)

Russia attempted to ban Telegram in 2018 over Durov’s refusal to share encryption keys and give access to users’ messages to the country’s security services under laws passed by the Russian government to curb internet freedoms. But Russia has also used Telegram’s online messaging services to post regular battleground updates – at times graphic and misleading – since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have countered with their own version of the conflict.

Other governments have considered banning Telegram, also citing content-moderation concerns. The German government, for example, weighed that option during a 2022 debate over coronavirus vaccines, citing Telegram’s role in spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

In previous interviews with The Washington Post, Western officials have said Telegram has also been a useful tool for Russian military intelligence agency GRU to recruit for sabotage campaigns across Europe, including attempted disruptions and surveillance of transport lines used by NATO to supply Ukraine. In addition, Telegram had become a primary platform for Russia to disseminate disinformation in Europe and Ukraine, a senior European security official told The Post.

For his part, Durov has countered those allegations by arguing that his app, which passed 900 million monthly active users in 2024, should remain neutral and abstain from geopolitics.

Homegrown encryption

Durov has alienated many potential allies by attacking the security of other encrypted services and rejecting criticism of Telegram’s homegrown encryption, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, told The Post on Saturday. “At the same time, it is a really scary precedent to see a CEO arrested over content,” he said.

Russian officials and state media pundits quickly jumped on Durov’s detention to attack the West, slamming the “double standards” when it comes to matters of free speech.

“The French continue their fight for ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘European values,’” Russian lawmaker Andrei Klishas wrote on Telegram.

Russia’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, said that Durov’s detention was an example of the “very alarming totalitarian trends in countries which used to call themselves democratic.”

“Some naive persons still don’t understand that if they play more or less visible role in international information space it is not safe for them to visit countries which move toward much more totalitarian societies,” Ulyanov wrote on X.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who welcomed Zuckerberg to Russia in 2012, said that Durov’s detention should serve as a cautionary tale to all Russian entrepreneurs who flee Russia because of pressure from the Kremlin.

“(Durov) thought that his biggest problems were in Russia, so he left and got citizenship and residence permits in other countries,” Medvedev, who has emerged as one of the strongest anti-Western voices in Russia, wrote in a Telegram post. “He wanted to be a brilliant ‘man of the world’ living well without a homeland.”

The outrage of the Russian political elite was echoed by some voices on the American right.

X owner Elon Musk called Durov’s detention an “ad for the First Amendment,” adding: “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”

“Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram,” right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson, who recently interviewed Durov for his X-based show, wrote Saturday on X. “But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away.”

Durov recounted to Carlson in that interview that he fled Russia and resigned from his successful social media tech company, VKontakte – which served as the Russian answer to Facebook – because of the Kremlin pressure to share personal data of Ukrainian pro-democracy protesters during the 2014 Maidan revolution. But he also said he felt pressured by the U.S. government to give its law enforcement a back door into Telegram.

“We get too much attention … whenever we came to the U.S.,” Durov told Carlson.

- – -

Joseph Menn, Catherine Belton and Naomi Nix contributed to this report.