Durov commented on the criminal case brought against him in Russia

The founder of the Telegram messenger Pavel Durov said that Russian authorities suspect him of facilitating terrorist activities. The corresponding criminal case against Durov was reported by Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda, based on materials from the FSB.

“Russia opened a criminal case against me for “aiding terrorism.” Every day, authorities come up with new excuses to restrict Russians' access to Telegram, seeking to suppress the rights to privacy and freedom of speech. A sad sight of a state that is afraid of its own people,” Durov wrote in his Telegram channel.

On the morning of February 24, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda published material saying that “Russia has endured provocations from abroad for a long time,” and Durov himself is called a “freedom fighter” with double standards. In particular, the publication criticizes the former head of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Anti-Corruption Foundation. The authors of the article, written with reference to FSB data, call them defenders of the free Internet who “escaped to Europe.”

Both publications accuse Durov of ignoring requests from the Russian authorities and refusing to dialogue with them. The media entrepreneur himself was accused of abusing slogans about freedom of speech, and the actions of the Russian authorities to block the messenger were called an attempt by Russia to protect the rights of its citizens.

The Telegram press service responded to accusations that the messenger allegedly provides foreign intelligence services with access to the correspondence of its users: “The Russian government’s claim that our encryption system has been hacked is a deliberate fabrication.”

The Telegram administration associated the spread of such accusations with an attempt by the Russian authorities to justify the restrictions of the messenger. Previously, Durov explained that the forced transfer of Russians to the “national messenger” Max will not be successful, since it is competition that is the driving force of innovation, and not “appointments by officials.”