From the moment Pavel Durov was arrested in France last month, Russia’s public space erupted in indignation.
Depending on who you asked, France had launched an attack on freedom of speech; a Russophobic harassment of one of the country’s greatest entrepreneurs; or a Nato-led intelligence operation aimed at penetrating the command and control of Russia’s army in Ukraine.
The furore led others to the opposite conclusion: agitation in Moscow proved, they argued, that Mr Durov is in fact a Kremlin agent; his public persona as an exiled free-speech champion, a cover story; the “secure” messenger he runs, a spy tool.
So what does Mr Durov know? And is he about to handover the keys to Russia’s war in Ukraine to Nato?
The truth is shrouded in several layers of fog.
There’s the usual mystery surrounding questions of intelligence and national security; there’s the difficulty of distinguishing genuine concern from paranoia and propaganda; and there is a war on, with all the proverbial implications for truth.
“I think the Kremlin is worried he knows where the bodies are buried and that Western intelligence can obtain a lot of insight into Russia’s conduct of the war,” said John Foreman, a former UK defence attache in Moscow, when asked about the Russian reaction to his arrest.
“But is this a substantive concern, or is it the paranoia of Russian security services and ongoing belief in the West’s insidious plot to do Russia down?”
An intelligence plot seems far-fetched, he said, but the issue is “murky”. “There’s a lot more going on here than it suggests... At its head, it looks like Russia fears the West will de-encrypt secrets and stop disinformation, but what is it at its heart?”
Mr Durov, 39, came to prominence in Russia for founding Vkontakte, a social network modelled on Facebook. He lost control of that company after refusing to hand over data on Ukrainian protesters and left Russia in 2014, saying he would never return.
He went on to find wealth with Telegram, an instant messaging app he launched in 2013 and that became wildly popular in Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East both for private communication and as a source of uncensored news.
Today it is widely used by both Russian and Ukrainian war propagandists, and – especially in the Russian army – for battlefield communications.
That’s the root of the anxieties triggered in Russia when he was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside of Paris on Aug 24.
French authorities have charged him with permitting the app to be used for a range of illegal activities including child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking. He denies the allegations, which his lawyer has called “absurd”.
Mr Durov, who has been released on bail but banned from leaving the country, said in his first public statement on Friday that he should not have been targeted personally, and warned against going after “innovators” in social media.
“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” he said.
Neither he, nor the French authorities, have said anything to suggest the arrest is about espionage.
But the suspicions will not go away. And to understand why, you have to go back to his last clash with a regulator over censorship.
“The biggest mystery about Durov these days is what actually happened in 2018 and 2020, when Telegram was blocked in Russia, and then for some mysterious reasons, the ban was lifted,” said Andrei Soldatov, an exiled Russian journalist who specialises in the Russian security services.
The Kremlin back then asked – or rather demanded – of Durov two things.
The first request, from Roskomnadzor, the country’s media watchdog and censor, to be more proactive at removing illegal, harmful, extremist content.
For free speech campaigners that was suspicious because the Russian law on extremism can (and often is) be stretched to include legitimate political criticism of the authorities. Mr Durov resisted.
“But there was a second request, which was way more important. And this second request came directly, came from the FSB, and that was about providing encryption keys to get access to Telegram,” said Mr Soldatov.
The Federal Security Service wanted to be able to read private messages sent on the app (it is worth noting here that most Telegram conversations are not secure – you have to select “secret chat” to turn on the safety features).
That would be in line with Russian cyber surveillance doctrine, which is basically that the authorities have – or ought to have – back-door access to all communications on Russian soil.
Mr Durov’s answer was that this was impossible: the encryption keys for each chat are unique, generated randomly when a chat is started, and stored on users phones, not on Telegram’s servers: there was no “key” he could hand over even if he wanted to.
But FSB officers are not stupid, says Mr Soldatov – they would have understood that they were asking for the impossible if the encryptions were generated as described.
“I do not think, given what I know about FSB or how they behave, that they could just give up,” he guesses. “They probably used this as a pressure point to gain some other concession.”
In 2020 Roskomnadzor lifted its ban on Telegram (which was easily circumvented and never really worked) after coming to an agreement on restricting some harmful content. Pragmatism seemed to have won.
The assumption among some Russian activists – though no one could quite prove it – was that another, unspoken, deal had also been done regarding the FSB’s demand for a backdoor.
There is no conclusive proof that any such deal was made. Telegram and Mr Durov still insist that they did not hand over encryption codes.
But if that suspicion was correct, it would explain the agitation of Russian military bloggers. After all, if he could open the backdoor for the FSB, he could do it for the French too.
If Ukraine-sympathetic western officials and pro-war Russian military commentators can agree on one thing, it is that the implications could be serious.
“The fact Telegram has become almost the main means for controlling units in the zone of the SVO [special military operation] is only a secret for some people in the main communications directorate,” Rybar, a generally reliable Russian war blog, noted after Mr Durov’s arrest.
“Why there isn’t a secure military messenger is not a question for me,” another blogger gloomily posted as he urged followers to delete Telegram messages immediately.
Messaging apps are convenient
It is a good question. But the answer may be broader than the military bureaucrats in Moscow that Rybar and other Russian war bloggers alluded to.
It may be that in war, as in civilian life, the convenience and ubiquity of smartphones and messaging apps is difficult to compete with.
In other words, it is just more practical for commanders of overstretched, under-resourced and improvisation-dependent armies to ping out orders over Telegram, Whatsapp, or Signal (the app preferred by Ukrainian soldiers) than to use clunky, bespoke alternatives.
That’s not to say such options do not exist. Both Ukraine and Russia have experimented with specially encrypted phones and numbers, or resorted to old fashioned wire-connected field telephones to avoid hackers.
Rybar reported that a Russian military messenger app is under development, but has been allowed to languish by indifferent officials. It would be both “sad and funny” if Mr Durov’s arrest finally prompted them to take the project seriously, the channel noted.
Concern West could access military secrets
But the case goes well beyond the question of military security.
Mr Foreman, citing Russians he has spoken to, says there are three camps of Russian officials angered at Mr Durov’s arrest.
Many are concerned that the West could penetrate Telegram and access military secrets.
But there are also those who see it as an opportunity to show the “double standards” of the West, which claims to champion freedom but cracks down on Russian-owned media – an example of “Russophobia”.
Thirdly, there are those angry about a clampdown on their tool for spreading disinformation in the West.
And there’s another layer of anxiety to consider, says Mr Soldatov.
For many of the Russian war bloggers most agitated by Mr Durov’s arrest, Telegram is their most important, perhaps only, publishing platform.
If it is compromised or ends up being blocked, they could lose their main publishing platform and huge audiences they have built up there.
The same goes for news channels and bloggers in Ukraine, Iran (despite an official ban), and several other countries where the platform has become a key source of news (and misinformation).
All that reflects the many roles Telegram, but also other apps, now play in modern societies; closed and democratic, at war and in peacetime.
In that sense, followers of the tech revolution put Mr Durov’s arrest in France in the same loose category as his previous clash with the Kremlin, or Brazil’s ban on X, formerly Twitter, over Elon Musk’s refusal to censor far-Right accounts.
All are skirmishes – possibly the first of many – between nation states and the tech barons who created and control the vast cyber world we all now inhabit.
No Russian official can publicly praise France for arresting a Russian citizen.
But Roskomnadzor and the FSB have also sought to tame the tech world. While they publicly condemn the French authorities, they will privately be taking notes.
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