Russia’s FSB has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorist activity and demanded that he be placed on an international wanted list.
This formalizes a case Durov first disclosed in February, one the FSB ties to how Ukrainian intelligence allegedly used a dating bot running on his app. The FSB said Telegram had been used “to prepare and co-ordinate acts of sabotage and terror” inside Russia and had failed to remove channels, chats, and bots used by Ukraine. The charge, assistance to terrorist activities under Article 205.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, carries up to 15 years in prison.
The bot is called Daivinchik/Leo. It works like Tinder but works inside Telegram, with up to 16 million monthly users. The FSB says Ukrainian operatives posed as young women there to befriend young Russians before pressuring or coercing them into attacks.
According to the Investigative Committee, Russia’s federal investigating authority, the agents sent phishing links about supposedly hacked government accounts, then, posing as Russian law enforcement, pushed their targets into setting fires and assaulting police.
Russian authorities say 46 people aged 12 to 22 have been detained since July 2025 across 16 regions over the alleged campaign. The FSB released a video it said showed several young people confessing to setting fire to gas stations after being recruited by anonymous handlers through Telegram.
Telegram’s press account on X answered with a photo of Durov raising his middle finger, an image Russian media noted he first published in 2011 during his fight with Mail.ru over control of VKontakte, the network he founded before Telegram. The post drew 1.3 million views by morning.
Durov rejected that earlier case in February. “Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech,” he said then. He called it “a sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people.”
The prosecution is happening alongside Russia’s push to move users off Telegram and onto MAX. Moscow has throttled Telegram’s traffic by 55%, according to Roskomnadzor, its own communications regulator.
It has steered users toward MAX, a state-built messenger with no encryption between users, pre-installed on every smartphone sold in Russia since September 2025.
Telegram is used by nearly 90 million Russians each month and around 950 million people worldwide, is what MAX is meant to replace. Durov has said Russia is restricting the app to force its citizens onto a state-controlled service built for surveillance and political censorship.
Unusually, Russia is charging the man who built the app, not the people who allegedly broke its laws inside it.
Durov has already experienced a version of this in France, where police detained him at an airport in 2024 over allegations that Telegram failed to counter criminal activity and cooperate with law enforcement.
France lifted his travel ban last November and Durov denies wrongdoing and says Telegram exceeds its obligations to moderate content and answers valid legal requests.
