Russia has charged billionaire Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing him of allowing the popular messaging app to be used by Ukrainian security services.<\/p>\n
Durov, 41, has been placed on the international wanted list, Russia\u2019s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The Telegram chief \u201cfailed to remove numerous channels, chats, and bots of this messenger, which are actively used by Ukrainian special services, terrorist, and extremist organizations to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyber-fraud,\u201d the FSB said.<\/p>\n
Durov hasn\u2019t commented on the allegations so far and it\u2019s unclear where he is currently.<\/p>\n
He previously founded VKontakte, Russia\u2019s version of Facebook, and left the country in 2014, saying he was unwilling to comply with Russian security service demands to hand over the personal data of Ukrainians who\u2019d backed a pro-Western revolution in Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Russian officials opened an investigation in February into Durov, who\u2019s also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, after he criticized the state\u2019s crackdown on social media. The government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta described the technology magnate then as a \u201cdirect threat to socio-political stability\u201d in Russia and alleged he was under foreign influence.<\/p>\n
Durov had accused authorities in Moscow of finding \u201cnew pretexts to restrict Russians\u2019 access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech.\u201d He called it \u201ca sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people.\u201d<\/p>\n
That came after Russia\u2019s communication watchdog limited access to Telegram, which is hugely popular in the country, accusing the app of failing to comply with domestic laws on storing personal data. It moved to block voice and video calls via Telegram in August last year.<\/p>\n
The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, also claimed that the use of Telegram in combat areas in Ukraine had endangered the lives of Russian servicemen. It said Ukrainian special services could obtain information from the messaging platform and use it for military purposes.<\/p>\n
Durov was charged in France in 2024 over accusations that he was complicit in the spread of sexual images of children and other crimes on his platform, and was initially barred from leaving the country until a travel ban was lifted last year.<\/p>\n
He has pledged to improve the way the site handles illegal and harmful content, and to make it easier for authorities to send requests to the app.<\/p>\n
The French investigation is continuing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia has charged billionaire Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing him of allowing the popular messaging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1119247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7655],"tags":[50868,332,18330,13466],"class_list":["post-1119246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-russia","tag-pavel-durov","tag-russia","tag-telegram","tag-terrorism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117006588069149535","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1119247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}