Pavel Durov, the controversial founder of the Telegram messaging app, has landed in yet another legal trouble after Russia charged him with facilitating terrorist activity.
The charges by Russia’s (FSB), accuse the messaging platform of being used by Ukrainian intelligence services to recruit Russians for attacks inside the country.
The fresh charges mark the culmination of a long-running investigation into the Dubai-based tech entrepreneur.
This is not first time when faces legal trouble. The 41-year-old billionaire has repeatedly run into trouble in Russia and France as he cast himself as a champion of free speech, news agency AP reported.
In the new charges, FSB has also added Pavel Durov’s name to international wanted lists.
The Russian-born Pavel Durov responded to the charges by posting an image of himself raising a middle finger on Telegram’s official account on X.
Pavel Durov has in the past denounced previous Kremlin attempts to restrict Telegram as an attack on .
The fresh case in Russia comes ahead of parliamentary elections in September amid rising public fatigue with the 4-year-old war in Ukraine and its growing economic fallout.
Who is Pavel Durov?
Pavel Durov was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. He now holds citizenship in France, the and the Caribbean island nation of St Kitts and Nevis.
At 22, in 2006, Pavel Durov and his brother, Nikolai, founded VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network that is similar to Facebook. The company later came under pressure from authorities after mass in 2011-12, eventually prompting Durov to sell his stake in VKontakte.
In 2013, he and Nikolai founded Telegram. In 2014, Durov left Russia and moved to Dubai.
Pavel Durov, who has a net worth of $6.6 billion according to Forbes, said in a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, that Dubai was “the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our users’ privacy and freedom of speech.”
has ix children from three former partners and once declared he had donated sperm that fathered 100 children in 12 countries, according to a profile in news agency AP.
Telegram, one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, boasts over 1 billion monthly active users worldwide.
The app allows for one-on-one conversations, group chats and large “channels” that let people broadcast messages to subscribers. Unlike rivals such as Meta’s WhatsApp, Telegram’s group chats allow as many as 200,000 people, compared to a maximum of 1,024 for . Experts have raised concerns that misinformation spreads easily in such large group chats, AP said
Much like its founder, Telegram has faced criticism for a lack of content moderation. This, experts say opens up the platform for potential use in money laundering, drug trafficking and sharing material linked to the sexual exploitation of minors.
Russian authorities and Western governments have criticised for refusal to share information about suspected bad actors when required by law.
Telegram banned temporarily in India
In India too, Telegram found itself entangled in the NEET UG question paper leak row and it faced temporarily ban in the country last month. Telegram was banned in India at the request of the (NTA) under Section 69A of the IT Act to prevent cheating, exam-related fraud and the spread of fake paper leaks ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance re-examination held on 21 June.
The app has faced ban in other countries, including China, Iran, North Korea, Nepal, Kenya, Brazil, Spain, Thailand and Russia. While some of these restrictions were temporary and linked to unrest there, Telegram remains banned and under investigation in several other countries worldwide for its links to illegal activities.
Telegram, a ‘hub’ of piracy
A recent study published by revealed that Telegram has emerged as a major platform for large-scale video piracy, where copyrighted content is rapidly distributed among users.
The study looked at 1,057 channels that shared 209k unique posts between December 2023 and January 2026. It found that the channels collectively distributed 19,033 unique copyrighted titles originating from 175 countries, accumulating over 4.85B unique views and resulting in a lower-bound estimated financial loss of $17.49B for content rights holders.
Other legal troubles
Russian authorities tried but failed to block Telegram between 2018 and 2020.
Earlier this year, Durov announced that the Russian authorities opened a criminal inquiry against him and accused them of fabricating pretexts to restrict access to Telegram as part of efforts to “suppress the right to privacy and free speech.”
In August 2024, Durov was arrested in Paris amid allegations that his platform was being used for illicit activity including drug trafficking and the distribution of images of child sexual abuse. He was released after four days of questioning on bail of 5 million euros.
Russian President had then described the French action as “selective,” arguing that many countries, including Russia, have raised concerns about bad actors using Telegram for harmful activities, and “all platforms of this kind are guilty of this.”
Latest charges carry life imprisonment
The FSB accused Telegram’s administration of failing to remove channels allegedly used by “Ukrainian intelligence agencies, terrorist and to prepare and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass murder, and cyberfraud” in Russia.
It accused Ukrainian security services of using a popular dating chatbot on Telegram to lure and recruit Russians for “sabotage and terrorist activities.” The Daivinchik or chatbot has 13.6 million monthly active users.
The FSB said 46 users of the chatbot aged from 12 to 22 have been detained across Russia over the past year for assaulting law enforcement officers, arson and other acts.
Durov could face up to life in prison if convicted.
(With inputs from AP)
