Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Ivan Lizan
[REGNUM] Telegram founder Pavel Durov was accused in France of failing to counteract the distribution of criminal content via the messenger. He was placed under judicial supervision and ordered to post bail of 5 million euros. In addition, Durov was banned from leaving France and required to report to the police twice a week.
In general, the 12 articles of the criminal code, incriminated to Pavel Durov by the French prosecutor's office, are as severe as they are absurd. Similar charges can be brought against Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Sergey Brin and Larry Page together.
It is obvious that in a normal – competitive, fair and impartial – trial the charges against Durov will fall apart. But in this case Paris is acting together with Brussels and Washington, and Durov should not hope for justice. And it is even more obvious to everyone that the matter is clearly not in the lack of desire of the Telegram founder to satisfy the requests of French law enforcement.
In addition to the official reason for Durov's detention, which boils down to maliciously ignoring Telegram requests from law enforcement agencies, there is a whole bunch of complementary unofficial ones. All of them look no less plausible.
Firstly, the US desire to destroy the Toncoin (TON) cryptocurrency, which Durov launched against the will of Washington.
Secondly, Brussels’ desire to force Telegram to create a pre-moderation system, that is, censoring content in accordance with the wishes of European bureaucrats.
Thirdly, but this reason is almost impossible to prove, there was probably a motive to gain access to encryption keys for secret correspondence in the messenger for the purpose of using them in domestic political struggle or espionage.
Due to Pavel Durov's diverse interests, these reasons should be considered together: they certainly do not contradict each other. Moreover, while French President Emmanuel Macron may indeed be concerned about the fight against crime and, say, the desire to spy on his allies and opponents, Brussels is much more concerned with censorship than maintaining law and order. And the United States has been paying close attention to cryptocurrencies for several years now in order to prevent the erosion of the global financial system.
In general, Durov was “caught” under a combination of articles, and they charged him with whatever they could.
MALICIOUS DISREGARD
Durov's philosophy is based on libertarianism: he does not feel any reverence for the state in principle.
He criticized the Russian past back at the turn of the 2000s and 2010s, and in 2014, if we are to believe Durov, he was asked to provide personal data of the organizers of the Euromaidan groups. Pavel refused, not “wanting to betray millions of Ukrainian users,” and suffered three times: in 2014, he lost control over the social network, in 2017, Petro Poroshenko blocked VKontakte in Ukraine, and from 2018 to 2020, Roskomnadzor blocked Telegram.
In 2017, French intelligence services, together with UAE intelligence (Durov holds passports from these countries), hacked Pavel's iPhone to gain access to the correspondence of ISIS terrorists (a terrorist organization banned in Russia). The countries took this step, as The Wall Street Journal writes, because the messenger administration maliciously ignored requests from law enforcement agencies.
In 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered Telegram blocked for refusing to provide data on the administrators of neo-Nazi groups accused of attacking a school in Aracruz. And after Pavel’s arrest, South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol called for a thorough investigation into digital sex crimes after media reported that Telegram chats were frequently filled with erotic fake images and videos featuring South Korean women.
In general, Durov ignored law enforcement agencies for a long time and systematically. He cooperated only in rare cases, for which he was blocked in China, Iran, India and Brazil, as well as Spain (for three days). The authorities of France (in 2023), the Netherlands and Germany complained about the messenger.
Therefore, no matter how strange it may seem, Durov could have been detained for simply ignoring requests - sooner or later, law enforcement officials would have run out of patience. But this is only true in the case of France, since there are indeed plenty of oddities in the case.
UNCOORDINATED CRYPTO PROJECTS
Durov is also annoying Washington, but he has his own reasons, which may not be connected with ignoring requests and refusing to introduce censorship.
The Durov brothers, Pavel and Nikolai, initially developed Telegram as a messenger, but messengers are extremely difficult to monetize. The subscription model is not suitable because it scares the audience, selling additional features is ineffective, and advertising in Telegram only appeared in the fall of 2021 - 8 years after its launch.
But advertising for the Durov brothers was nothing more than a "crutch". In early 2018, Telegram announced plans to launch the TON blockchain platform. To do this, Telegram Group Inc. and its subsidiary TON Issuer sold 2.9 billion tokens and raised $1.7 billion. The project was initially scheduled to launch in October 2019, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) obtained a temporary injunction. It considered Telegram's actions to violate US securities laws.
In the end, Durov promised to return 72% of the attracted money immediately, and promised to give 110% of the invested funds to those who were patient by April 30. Investors, mainly from Russia, agreed to Durov's terms and were satisfied. The brothers found the money, the financial issue was settled. For the time being, the cryptocurrency project was put aside.
But the idea of "marrying" the messenger's nearly billion-strong audience with cryptocurrency was too attractive to refuse. And in September 2023, Durov presented the TON blockchain, in particular the Toncoin cryptocurrency, which, according to him, was planned to be used on a regular basis by businesses and developers in Telegram. The cryptocurrency was created by an open community of developers. As a result, the Durovs gave birth to a monster.
TON is not just a cryptocurrency, but also a set of services: proxy servers and a domain name system, a marketplace, a commission-free blockchain-based payment system, decentralized data storage, and applications for working with the service.
Even after Durov's arrest, TON did not fall out of the top 10 global cryptocurrencies, although it lost a little more than 20% of its value: shortly before the arrest, the coin was worth $6.8, and by the morning of August 29, it was worth $5.3.
ARREST BY OTHER PEOPLE'S HANDS
Against this background, a reasonable question arises: why is Washington angry with Durov?
Firstly, TON is built on the same libertarian philosophy as Telegram. It is inconvenient for the US and is not controlled by Washington. Pavel Durov reported this back in 2020, stating the world's dependence on the US in matters of finance and technology.
There has long been a legend in the world of cryptocurrency enthusiasts that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is unknown, is in fact nothing more than a cover for the CIA or another American structure that invented cryptocurrency. There is no direct confirmation of this, but in the Western press there are quotes from CIA Director William Burns that he inherited from his predecessors "a number of projects focused on cryptocurrency."
Regardless of whether the CIA invented the “bitcoin” or not, American intelligence agencies would certainly do everything possible and impossible to control any cryptocurrency, at least to understand who pays for what and when.
Secondly, cryptocurrencies - especially after Russia was disconnected from the global financial system with the blocking of banks and the ability to use freely convertible currencies - have become a widely used means of payment for settlements with unfriendly jurisdictions. And recently, they have also been legalized. And while Washington is fighting banks quite successfully (especially after Biden's decree of December 22, 2023), things are not so clear with cryptocurrencies.
The largest crypto exchange Binance left Russia under duress in September 2023 — this is how the US fought against circumventing sanctions through cryptocurrencies. But at the same time, and often unnoticed by the media, the US fought against cryptocurrency projects launched by Russians.
Cryptocurrency consultant Mikhail Zhukhovitsky counted six cases when the US directly or indirectly — through France and the UAE — destroyed Russian cryptocurrency projects, some of those arrested were extradited to the US. For example, the only developer of the Tornado Cash project who remained at large survived only because he was in Russia. And in the Bitzlato project, even coders and marketers were imprisoned, and they have been awaiting trial in pretrial detention for two years.
On August 25, Zhukhovitsky wrote that Pavel's arrest was the beginning of the destruction of his team, and on August 28, Politico reported that Nikolai Durov had been placed on the wanted list and was accused of refusing to cooperate with the Paris prosecutor's office for combating cybercrime in a case of forcing a minor to distribute "self-produced pornography."
Zhukhovitsky claims that the indictment for such cases is always prepared in the United States, and the arrests and detentions are carried out by others.
ONE AGAINST ALL
To put it simply, Durov's fate is unenviable: Paris, Brussels and Washington are against him. And the conclusions that come to mind from this story are extremely simple. Pavel Durov was let down by his own commitment to libertarianism, along with his belief that he could be above the clash of great powers.
One can maneuver between centers of power only for a certain period of time. Sooner or later one would have to make a decision, choosing a side that would allow one to preserve most of one's convictions, in order to live by the principle of "bend, but don't bend." The side is the "roof" in the person of the state.
When Canada detained Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's CFO and daughter of Huawei President Ren Zhengfei, at the request of the United States in 2018, the Chinese government stepped in and secured her release. Russia stood up for Bout, Yaroshenko, and Krasikov and also secured their release.
Durov ignored the "rules of the game" and did not want to choose a "roof". Now there is no one to stand up for him - and this is his personal tragedy.
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