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Russia has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorism and issued an international arrest warrant for him.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, Telegram is a messaging app built around privacy and minimal moderation, which has made it enormously popular and also a magnet for criminal and extremist activity. It has somewhere around a billion users worldwide and both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war effectively live on it, from officials and soldiers to war bloggers. Durov was born in Russia but left in 2014 after the government demanded he shut down opposition communities on VKontakte, the Facebook clone he built before Telegram. He sold his remaining stake that year under pressure, and it passed to Kremlin-aligned ownership. He now holds French and Emirati passports and lives in Dubai. Russia tried to block Telegram outright in 2018, failed, and gave up two years later. This year the Kremlin throttled it and started pushing MAX, a state-backed alternative with no end-to-end encryption that admits up front it will turn over user data whenever the state asks. Russians can still reach Telegram through a VPN, and 65 million of them use it daily by Durov’s April count. The Kremlin and the Defense Ministry still post there themselves.

What’s going on now: The FSB security service said Durov has been placed on an international wanted list. According to the FSB, Telegram failed to remove channels, chats, and bots used by Ukrainian special services and by groups Russia designates as terrorist and extremist to prepare and coordinate sabotage and terrorist acts, mass killings, and cyber fraud inside Russia.

The case at the center of it involves a dating chatbot called Daivinchik/Leo. The FSB’s account is that Ukrainian operatives posed as young women, lured men into buying small gifts, then had people impersonating Russian law enforcement tell the targets they had unwittingly funded Kyiv’s war effort and could work off the problem by cooperating. From there, according to the agency, the targets were pushed into arson attacks on transport, energy, communications, and financial infrastructure, along with courier work for money laundering.

The FSB says 46 Russians aged 12 to 22 were caught up in it over the past year, that the adults among them face long sentences on terrorism and sabotage charges, and that Durov ignored Russian reports about the channel and never took it down. Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor had separately flagged the same service in 2025. Ukraine has not commented.

Durov’s response came fast and without words. Telegram’s account on X posted an image of him holding up his middle finger. He has said before that Russian authorities are “fabricating new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram.”

This all comes as Durov is also facing a French investigation dating to his 2024 arrest in Paris over allegations that Telegram failed to counter criminal activity or cooperate with law enforcement. He denies wrongdoing there too, saying Telegram has exceeded its obligations, and has accused France of using criminal charges to force political censorship on the platform.