The Battle for Telegram: How Pavel Durov’s Libertarian Dream Led to His Arrest in Paris
On a mild August Saturday in 2024, 34-year-old French crime reporter Raphaël Maillochon of broadcaster TF1 was celebrating his son’s first birthday at a countryside home two hours south of Paris when he received a message from one of his law enforcement sources. Accustomed to weekend pings from contacts who preferred Telegram for its perceived greater security than other messaging apps, Maillochon—officially off work that day—couldn’t resist setting down his unopened champagne bottle to check the alert.
The source shared news of an upcoming arrest of un gros poisson—a “big fish.” If confirmed, the story would outstrip every other headline in France and beyond. “Stay tuned!” the message read.
Maillochon tried to focus on the party, but kept glancing nervously at his Telegram inbox. Around 6 p.m., as guests sat down for aperitifs, the source confirmed: the big fish was none other than Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. Police were tracking Durov’s private jet, which was scheduled to land in Paris that evening after departing Baku, Azerbaijan, and would arrest him if he was onboard.
Though Maillochon used Telegram daily for work, he had to look up the Russian-born CEO online. He quickly learned Durov first rose to prominence as co-founder of VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown alternative to Facebook, before building Telegram into a global tech powerhouse. Durov had long framed himself as a libertarian crusader for online privacy and free speech; after blaming the Kremlin for forcing him out of VKontakte in 2014, he entered self-imposed “exile,” a move that cemented his anti-authoritarian credibility among supporters. By 2024, Telegram neared 1 billion global users, and Durov had publicly announced plans to take the company public by 2026. It quickly dawned on Maillochon how massive the story he had stumbled on actually was.
At 8:59 p.m., his phone pinged again: “He’s been arrested.” Maillochon excused himself from the party and stepped into the garden, cross-checking the tip with sources across multiple police departments, the French public prosecutor’s office, and Europol. By 10:24 p.m., his story went live on TF1’s website, and from there it spread to news outlets around the world.
Maillochon’s sources told him Durov had no idea what awaited when he disembarked at Paris’ small Le Bourget Airport. In his initial police interviews, Durov came off as petulant and arrogant, even bragging about his connections and claiming he had traveled to Paris to meet with President Emmanuel Macron. He also reportedly requested that French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel—until recently majority shareholder of Le Monde—be notified of his arrest; Politico.eu later reported Durov even used his one allowed phone call to contact Niel. (Devon Spurgeon, a Washington DC-based PR consultant for Telegram, told WIRED Durov called his own assistant, not Niel. Niel did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.)
As Maillochon and other French reporters would go on to uncover, prosecutors had been secretly investigating Durov for months over allegations he and Telegram failed to block widespread illegal activity on the platform—including fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), organized crime, and terrorism, according to French authorities. According to the French outlet Libération, the national Gendarmerie alone documented 2,460 unanswered legal requests to Telegram between 2013 and 2024. Maylis de Roeck, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told WIRED that once investigators realized how many cross-departmental probes were being blocked by Telegram’s lack of cooperation, they issued an arrest warrant. In their view, Durov’s ongoing silence amounted to complicity.
In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, no one from Telegram commented publicly. One of Durov’s close associates, George Lobushkin, former head of PR at VKontakte, told WIRED: “I am in shock, and everyone close to Pavel feels the same. Nobody was prepared for this situation.” Lobushkin added he worried “a lot” about Telegram’s future if Durov remained in custody.
In the U.S., one of the first public reactions came from right-wing media host Tucker Carlson. In a post on X, Carlson called Durov “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies.” Elon Musk reposted a clip of Carlson’s interview with the caption “#FreePavel.” Even Edward Snowden, a longstanding critic of Telegram’s security claims, expressed alarm, writing on X: “I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications.” For his part, Macron released a statement affirming France is “deeply committed to freedom of expression,” adding the arrest “is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
By Sunday evening after the arrest, Durov’s custody was extended to the maximum allowed 96 hours. Per Maillochon’s sources, Durov slept in a cramped cell, though investigators made the rare concession of allowing him to receive a fresh set of clothes. During further questioning, Durov claimed he had not ignored law enforcement requests—police had simply sent their requests to the wrong contact. (This mirrored a 2022 claim he made when Brazil’s supreme court temporarily banned Telegram, when he argued legal requests had essentially gone missing in the system.) Durov also told investigators he had previously cooperated with French intelligence on terrorism cases.
On August 28, nearly four days after his arrest, Durov was formally indicted on six charges. The most serious charge—complicity in running an online platform that enables organized crime and illicit transactions—carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a €500,000 ($521,000) fine. Durov was released that same night after his €5 million ($5.2 million) bail was paid in full, but he is barred from leaving France and required to check in at a local police station twice a week.
The prosecution of Durov, CEO of one of the world’s largest mainstream platforms, is unprecedented. It also comes at a moment when his stated libertarian ideals and laissez-faire approach to content moderation have grown in influence among global tech leaders. According to Character Limit, a book by journalists Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Durov’s small team size directly inspired Musk to fire 80% of Twitter’s staff after he acquired the company. Musk gutted Twitter’s moderation and trust-and-safety teams, reasoning that if Durov could run a billion-user platform with roughly 60 full-time employees (most based in Dubai), he could too. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg cut Meta’s U.S. fact-checking teams and loosened restrictions on inflammatory content across Meta’s platforms, saying recent elections represented a “cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”
Durov, many close to him say, never anticipated how high the stakes would become. One senior former Telegram employee told WIRED that while an arrest was technically possible under strict European digital legislation, it was still startling. Yulia Conley, Telegram’s first official head of external and government relations, who is speaking on the record for the first time to WIRED, called holding Durov personally responsible for all activity on the platform “unreasonable.” “I wouldn’t say that he had it coming,” Conley told WIRED. But she suggested that Telegram’s “scarcity of human capital in this very important domain of content moderation could be the main reason why the current escalation had occurred.” The issues that led to Durov’s arrest stretch back nearly a decade.
In September 2015, Durov spoke on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. It had been just over a year since he sold his stake in VKontakte, and he framed himself as a digital nomad traveling the world with a small team of Telegram engineers. Dressed all in black, he fit the part, speaking with the unapologetic confidence of a classic tech disruptor.
Telegram was barely two years old at that point, and already processed 12 billion messages a day. What did he think of competing apps? “They suck,” Durov said—especially WhatsApp. When the interviewer brought up reports of ISIS operating on Telegram, he asked: “Do you sleep well at night knowing that terrorists use your platform?” After an awkward grin, Durov composed himself and answered: “Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism. I don’t think we should feel guilty about it.”
The next day, Telegram launched the feature that transformed it from a simple messaging app into a full social network: “Channels,” which let users broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers. Within days, ISIS operatives launched their own official channel on the platform. Just two months later, ISIS attackers carried out coordinated bombings and shootings at Paris’ Bataclan theater and Stade de France, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more. ISIS used Telegram to claim responsibility for the attacks to a global audience.
Five days after the attacks, Telegram removed 78 ISIS-linked channels and announced new efforts to curb terrorist activity on the platform. But the company still marketed itself as a safe space for users to avoid government surveillance, especially for users who communicated via end-to-end encrypted “secret chats.” (Contrary to popular belief, end-to-end encryption has never been the default setting for most Telegram chats.) Within weeks of the Paris attacks, the European Union launched the Internet Forum, an initiative to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts between tech platforms and member states. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter all joined quickly. Telegram did not. Its privacy policy stated bluntly: “We never share your data with anyone. No.”
This unapologetically defiant stance proved to be a successful marketing strategy that helped Telegram grow in unexpected places. Even as the platform became known in France as ISIS’ platform of choice, it also gained traction among French political circles. A legal representative for Ludovic Chaker, a manager on Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign, confirmed to WIRED that Chaker had his team use Telegram groups and “secret chats” for internal communications. Telegram quickly spread through the French political establishment, with members of parliament even using participation on the app to identify which of their colleagues supported Macron.
But Durov’s public image as an Übermensch of privacy and free speech hid a messier reality: over the years, he would repeatedly bend his own stated principles when it suited him, dodge consequences when necessary, cut deals with governments when required, scramble to keep Telegram solvent, and then end up reinvigorated by some event that reaffirmed his anti-authoritarian brand.
One example is the narrative Durov promoted of being a principled exile from Putin’s Russia. According to independent Russian outlet iStories, which recently analyzed leaked Federal Security Service (FSB) border crossing data, Durov actually entered Russia 41 times between 2015 and late 2017. (Irina Bolgar, Durov’s partner at the time, confirmed to WIRED that he was frequently with her and their children in St. Petersburg throughout this period; their relationship was not public knowledge at the time.)
Eventually, Durov’s public stance of defying the Kremlin became a real conflict. In July 2017, the FSB ordered Telegram to turn over encryption keys for half a dozen accounts “suspected of terrorism-related activities.” Durov’s company refused, arguing end-to-end encryption (which only applies to “secret chats”) made it impossible to comply. Suddenly, Durov and Telegram’s employees in Russia faced personal risk from the Kremlin, forcing Durov to find a new safe base for himself and the company. (While WIRED previously reported Telegram staff worked in St. Petersburg until at least 2017, Spurgeon said the company “has never legally or physically been connected to Russia.”)
Durov also urgently needed funding. How much would it cost to keep Telegram running as its user base grew? Durov estimated around $620 million in a 2017 document shared with potential investors, which later became public during a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation. By late 2017, news leaked that Telegram planned to launch its own cryptocurrency on a custom blockchain. The presale opened in 2018, letting investors buy into Durov’s new project, with “Grams” tokens to be delivered later. The presale raised $1.7 billion, around a quarter of that from U.S. investors. High-profile investors included Kremlin ally Roman Abramovich; former Russian government minister Mikhail Abyzov; London-based oligarch Said Gutseriev; Jan Marsalek, a fugitive Austrian tech executive later accused of being a Russian spy; and, as iStories recently revealed, a company linked to mining in the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine. Weeks after the presale closed, the Russian government officially blocked domestic access to Telegram.
The Russian ban reinforced Durov’s narrative of defying the Kremlin, which worked perfectly as he built relationships with European leaders. He reportedly visited the Élysée Palace to lunch with Macron, who suggested Durov move Telegram’s headquarters to France and offered him French citizenship. A former senior official who worked closely with Macron at the time told WIRED the president saw Durov as a kind of “trophy” in the geopolitical competition with Putin’s Russia. (Anastasia Colosimo, Macron’s current international press advisor, noted that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was granted French citizenship around the same time, and that no formal deal was struck between Macron and Durov.)
As Durov courted European leaders, Telegram adjusted its policies to align with EU priorities. A month after Russia banned Telegram, the company finally joined the EU Internet Forum, where it joined the Silicon Valley giants that had signed on years earlier to cooperate on removing dangerous content. The company also rewrote its privacy policy, removing the original promise to users that it would “never share your data with anyone.”
Around this time, Durov hired the company’s first dedicated head of external and government relations: Yulia Conley. Born in Russia and partially raised in Michigan, Conley has a master’s degree in environmental science from Oxford and previously worked for nine months at a UN sustainable development program in New York. At just 23 years old, she became Telegram’s main point of contact for content moderation and requests from international law enforcement.
During Conley’s tenure, Telegram’s relationship with law enforcement grew to the point that Europol regularly sent the company large datasets of content to be removed—and Telegram complied. Conley and a group of Telegram engineers attended a counter-terrorism “action day” in fall 2018, hosted at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. Working alongside law enforcement from six EU member states, they removed hundreds of pieces of terrorist content from the platform, including audio, video, and PDFs posted by ISIS and al Qaeda, along with the public channels that hosted the material.
A second action day was held the following year. Stéphane Duguin, who worked at Europol and led the launch of the forum, told WIRED that the 2019 event had representatives from all 27 EU member states in attendance. “Everyone was there,” he recalled. They watched on screen in real time as Telegram took down channels “one after the other.” In a contemporary press release, Europol praised Telegram’s content referral tools and automated detection systems. Conley told WIRED that “our engineers were producing models and automation tools like nobody else,” even with “scarce resources.”
Duguin added that at the time, no other company in the EU Internet Forum cooperated at the same scale as Telegram, and that much of the success was due to Conley. “She was really committed,” he said. “She can be proud. Because, honestly, it was not easy.”
While Conley was building goodwill for Telegram with European authorities, Durov faced a new crisis in the United States. In October 2019, the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram, arguing that the Gram token presale violated SEC registration requirements. The SEC demanded Durov return $1.2 billion to investors, forcing Telegram to find new sources of funding.
Back in Russia, the Telegram ban had become something of a farce. The platform remained the most popular messaging app in the country, despite the Kremlin’s half-hearted efforts to block it. In June 2020, the Russian government announced it would unblock Telegram after reaching an agreement over removing terrorist content. (Telegram has denied to WIRED that any agreement with the Kremlin existed.) The unblocking let Durov capitalize on the moment, and within a week, Telegram signed a settlement with the SEC agreeing to pay back the $1.2 billion.
After Telegram was unblocked, Durov began openly visiting Russia again, according to the leaked FSB border data obtained by iStories. In 2021, the year after unblocking, Telegram raised $1.7 billion through bond sales. Reports said the company got help selling the bonds from VTB, a majority state-owned Russian bank with close ties to the Kremlin, and Russian investment firm Aton, founded by a former government aide. While Russian media reported half the bonds were sold to Russian and European investors, Spurgeon told WIRED that “Russian investors did not play a significant role.”
Also in 2021, Durov gained citizenship in both France and the United Arab Emirates. After weathering public pressure from both the Kremlin and Western governments, and fixing Telegram’s immediate financial problems, Durov pulled back focus from content moderation issues. Conley left her role at Telegram that year. Sources told WIRED that after her departure, the company became less proactive, and cooperation with Europol and other authorities deteriorated. While Telegram remained in the EU Internet Forum, the 2019 action day remained the high point for removing malicious content, according to Duguin. (Spurgeon rejected this characterization, saying Telegram has always processed all takedown requests it receives.)
The investigation that led to Durov’s 2024 arrest began the previous winter with a single undercover operation. Investigators were pursuing a suspect on Telegram who they say pressured underage girls to send him CSAM and admitted on the platform to raping a young girl. According to a document seen by Politico.eu, when investigators asked Telegram to reveal the suspect’s identity, the company refused.
De Roeck, the prosecutor’s office spokesperson, confirmed to WIRED that investigators requested Telegram’s help identifying the suspect, and noted that the company was also ignoring requests from dozens of other police departments. “If it was one, we wouldn’t think anything about Telegram,” de Roeck explained