Internet named after Durov

The authorities are destroying the way of life of millions of Russians. How can Telegram respond?

Students of the Free University gave a precise definition: over the past ten years, the popular, and not the “national” Telegram has literally become the basis of life for our compatriots. Through the messenger, Durov maintains family, friendly and professional connections. Have fun and manage work projects. It turned into the main media - and this was primarily due to the shrinking public space around.

Now the Kremlin officials, who spent these years in their “special communications”, conveyed an order through the “turntable” from the 70s: to deprive the people of Russia of their usual way of life. At the end of last year, the relevant departments reported to Putin that the alternative in the form of Max had been successfully implemented , was popular, and the people were thus ready for the closure of the Runet. The decision to impose Mach on citizens does not take into account the deep-seated distrust of people in government initiatives (here we can recall the state’s experience in fighting the pandemic six years ago), as well as the strong reluctance of citizens to devote the competent departments to the details of their personal lives. As well as abandoning the multivocal information environment, where undesirable organizations in the same stream can coexist with channels about discounts on marketplaces and Z-bloggers.

Having set a course to destroy Telegram, and in fact the main communication medium for Russian residents, the authorities are making the third major mistake since 2022. At first, they planned an invasion of Ukraine by a group that was obviously not ready to fulfill its goal if it was greeted in Kyiv with Stingers and Javelins instead of flowers. Then, to compensate for this failure, Putin announced “partial mobilization”—probably his most unpopular decision in twenty-five years. Instead of queues of patriots at the recruiting stations, the authorities received a queue in Upper Lars. Now people are being taken away from their “cart” - the most familiar and dear thing that was on our Internet. This is also done in order to clean up the results of previous mistakes, but that’s not the only reason.

What is the point of the attack on Telegram? The main reason is the redistribution of property. It is in this context that it is necessary to consider the statements of the FAS about the illegality of advertising on sites blocked in Russia.

Officially behind Mach is VK Group with Kiriyenko Jr. (son of presidential administration official Sergei Kiriyenko). Along with the deterioration of the Russian economy, control over key digital assets is becoming a critical source of enrichment for the beneficiaries of the war. Senator Suleiman Kerimov received Wildberries by paying huge compensation to Ramzan Kadyrov. The Kiriyenko family, with the support of interested parties in the intelligence services, wants to redirect financial flows passing through the messenger to themselves. For this purpose, arguments are used that are well understood by those educated in the KGB system: enemies, agents, scammers and traitors are concentrated in Telegram, and it is also not very convenient there to listen to people’s conversations and quickly imprison them for what they said.

In fact, the state, or rather its proxies, act as a “power entrepreneur,” that is, a racketeer from the 90s, imposing on people their uncontested service in the form of Max, putting a knife to their throat, in order to then receive their rent.

If we look for rationality beyond this corruption-financial component, then the Kremlin needs an isolated Internet in order not to lose its power in the next stage of the war or its end, when the destructive consequences of Putin’s adventure become visible even to his most loyal supporters.

Journalist Farida Rustamova writes that Russian officials do not trust the Max messenger, install it on clean phones and buy additional SIM cards for its use. The attempt to force citizens into the messenger, which is entirely controlled by the FSB, turns out to be not very popular. The only chance for Max is that he has no alternatives left.

Detail from Rustamova’s publication: officials who are far from technology prefer to trust the talent of Pavel Durov, who will come up with something again, just as he came up with Telegram after VKontakte and ways to bypass the first version of Roskomnadzor censorship during the blocking of the messenger in 2018. It is too early to bury Durov’s project, Russian officials themselves hope, in whose interests it seems that Runet is now being destroyed.

How can Durov answer? Telegram, like the free Internet in general, faces two problems. Firstly, with an extremely sophisticated system for analyzing Internet traffic, built over the eight years since the first confrontation with the messenger and allowing targeted blocking, for example, of calls and video communications as part of “slowing down” the platform. The second problem is even more fundamental: these are Iranian-style shutdowns, when mobile communications are unavailable in the center of Moscow. At the same time, “white lists” are being introduced - access to several hundred government-controlled platforms, which, according to the authorities, should be sufficient for an ordinary citizen: for example, banks, marketplaces and propaganda media.

A technological answer to both of these problems theoretically exists. If Durov decides to launch a new campaign against blocking, his real national messenger, distributed everywhere in Russia, could use its infrastructure to create its own version of the Internet, which is not controlled by the authorities. For example, rebuild your architecture to p2p protocols - a well-known example of the latter are torrents. Unlike centralized messengers, where information is transmitted through servers owned by a company, p2p assumes that data is transmitted directly from user to user. Such an architecture already exists on the market - for example, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey introduced the Bitchat messenger in 2025.

P2P protocols are, in theory, much more resistant to blocking (although the technical experts I consulted while working on this text say that the modern Russian censorship system can now be effectively used against classic P2P protocols). At the same time, experimental platforms built on such technology have one significant problem: a limited number of enthusiastic participants. But if Telegram, which has the largest base of active users in Russia, starts using this technology, p2p could become the new mainstream.

The response of the Russian authorities to Telegram's partisan actions would likely be criminal cases against Durov and his employees, possibly under the “terrorist article” that has already been announced by Russian propaganda.

The criminalization of the platform, in turn, will lead to the destruction of Telegram’s commercial model on the Russian market and will turn the messenger into more of a partisan way of “fighting the regime.”

It is not clear whether such a step makes sense for Durov, given his problems in other jurisdictions (in the EU, for example, such a step may be seen as preparation for the creation of an “unblocking” platform for the distribution of illegal content).

On the other hand, Durov’s personal fortune is already rapidly declining due to the loss of the Iranian and Russian markets: according to American Forbes, over the year the value of the entrepreneur’s assets fell from 17.1 to 6.6 billion dollars. If Durov’s identity as a “libertarian” and a fighter for a free Internet was worth anything, it’s time to play this game with the Russian state.

Traditional p2p will not help fight shutdowns and will be at least difficult under whitelist conditions. But in this case, Telegram, again theoretically, has an even more radical solution. In Russia there are tens of millions of active devices on which the popular messenger is installed, these devices are equipped with Bluetooth and WiFi. There are solutions that can organize horizontal p2p networks without access to the Internet at all, transferring information from device to device directly using built-in radio modules. Given a sufficient density of devices, this can work, as was tested during the Hong Kong protests back in 2014, where activists used FireChat, built on a model of direct data transmission via Bluetooth and WiFi.

The Russian cyberbank looks like this: the authorities completely turn off the Internet, but Durov responds by turning on his own, allowing people to exchange messages and write to their Telegram channels. This Internet will be slow, unstable and unable to transmit sound and video, but it is better than no network at all. The answer to such outrageous behavior can only be recognizing several million Russians as terrorists and catching people with phones in public places.

A completely decentralized model, built on user radio modules, is associated with solving a complex mathematical problem of identifying a specific network node and a specific device. The Internet named after Durov is only a theoretical opportunity to fight Russian censorship based on the messenger infrastructure.