The arrest in France in 2024 of Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was framed from the outset as a debate about freedom of expression, privacy, and digital sovereignty. Durov was portrayed as the harassed libertarian.

But that discussion obscures what is essential. The political turn Durov had taken over the years, to the point of becoming a pawn in the Kremlin’s European strategy, because Telegram functions as a transmission belt for anything that attacks European democracies.

Durov’s arrest produced a strange alliance, to say the least. Those who came to his defense ranged from exiled Russian opposition figures, who still saw him as the libertarian icon of earlier years, to Kremlin propagandists, who saw his current usefulness to their interests. The latter claimed he was nothing more than a poor dupe who had believed that Western liberal democracies were better than the Russian regime.

In both narratives—both false—the democratic state is the absolute enemy and Telegram the last trench of freedom.

But the facts show that this story is false.

Durov clashed with the authorities until 2020. In 2018, for example, the Kremlin ordered telecom operators to block Telegram for refusing to hand over the keys that would allow messages to be decrypted.

But in 2020 the ban was lifted without any apparent reason and the relationship normalized. From that point on, Telegram has been a good boy with the Kremlin. It not only accepted its requests but actively collaborated with its repression.

In 2021 it blocked the “smart voting” bot developed by Alexei Navalny’s circle, who was later assassinated.

Durov’s public discourse also changed. From 2020 onward he focused his criticism on Apple and Google, not on the Russian state. In an interview with the Trump-aligned Tucker Carlson, a Russian propagandist in the United States, he doubled down on that line.