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While Durov has bragged about the encryption level of Telegram’s “secret chats,” they aren’t the default setting on the app and they are cumbersome to set up. Most messages on the network aren’t end-to-end encrypted, according to analysts.
The Russian government has reacted to Durov’s detention in France with far more outrage and fury than would be expected given the circumstances of the entrepreneur’s departure from Russia in 2014.
At the time, Durov relinquished his stake in VKontakte, a social-media platform he had created, to avoid having to comply with the Russian intelligence services’ demand to supply the details of Ukrainian users in groups affiliated with the Maidan Revolution against Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.
Once the news of Durov’s detention at a Paris airport emerged last weekend, several Russian lawmakers publicly called to exchange him for Westerners in Russian custody. After leaving Russia, Durov acquired the citizenships of France, St. Kitts and Nevis and the U.A.E.
On Wednesday, French judicial authorities brought preliminary charges against Durov for allegations including refusal to cooperate with investigations into illegal activity on Telegram. He was placed under court monitoring, barred from leaving France and could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
Russian media have reported widespread instructions by government agencies to delete Telegram chat histories, though a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, denied such an order had been issued.
Aleksey Zhuravlev, the deputy head of the Russian parliament’s defense committee, said the Russian military will be easily able to substitute Telegram, a statement met with skepticism by prominent Russian military bloggers.
The director of Russia’s SVR external intelligence service, Sergey Naryshkin, said recently that he expects Durov not to share with French and other Western governments any information that would harm the Russian state. “I very much count on him not to allow it,” the Russian spymaster said in an interview with TASS news agency.
A senior Western official said damage to Russia’s security establishment could be substantial—if Durov decides to cooperate, which is by no means certain.
An intelligence official in another Western country said Telegram, in addition to the battlefield in Ukraine, has been particularly vital for Russian intelligence operations to carry out sabotage in Europe. “Looking at the level of alarm with which the Russian government has reacted to this, it looks like they have genuine worries,” the official said.
French and other Western law-enforcement agencies are unlikely to press Durov to relinquish Telegram’s source codes, said Christo Grozev, an open-source intelligence researcher. Grozev testified for the prosecution at the trial of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian intelligence officer who killed a Georgian-born Chechen activist in Berlin in 2019 and was returned to Moscow as part of a recent multicountry prisoner swap.
“But the Russians will be projecting, and they will be paranoid about what the French and the Americans are likely to ask of Durov,” Grozev said. “This fear would make it look like a very dangerous thing to the Russians. And raising this so publicly is a message to Durov that he shouldn’t cooperate with anyone.”
Durov has boasted about how the encryption for Telegram messages is superior to what is offered by such platforms as Signal and Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp, both of which are blocked in Russia.
In May, Durov reposted an article alleging that Signal is penetrated by U.S. intelligence and that its leadership had fostered “U.S.-supported color revolutions abroad”—a favorite Kremlin talking point referring to popular protests that ousted authoritarian rulers in Russia’s neighborhood and the Middle East.
In April, Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence agency complained that Telegram blocked the bot it had used to collect intelligence tips in Russia and the occupied territories. Several similar Ukrainian bot accounts used for recruitment were also blocked, with some of them later reinstated.
“We don’t want Telegram to be a tool for violence,” Durov posted on his platform at the time.
While Telegram was blocked in Russia in 2018, when Durov complained about his inability to visit his parents there, he came to Russia in 2020 and Russian regulators removed the restrictions.
The following year, the Russian state bank VTB helped Telegram raise $1 billion in bonds, some of them purchased by Russian investors.
“We know that Durov did a lot, and sacrificed a lot in 2013-2014 not to disclose the data of Maidan activists,” said Andrei Soldatov, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
“What we don’t know is what are the conditions of his agreement with Russian officials in 2020, under which the ban on Telegram was lifted.”
At the time, Durov said that the lifting of the ban would have a “positive impact” on Russia’s national security, and he added that Telegram had developed ways of removing “extremist propaganda” without sacrificing users’ privacy.
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Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Appeared in the August 31, 2024, print edition as 'Telegram Arrest Sows Russia.
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