Russia's FSB security service has charged Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, with facilitating terrorism, and moved to place him on an international wanted list.

The charge accuses Durov of failing to take down channels and bots that the service says were used to coordinate attacks and sabotage inside Russia.

It is the sharpest turn yet in a long feud. Durov, already fighting a separate criminal case in France after his 2024 arrest near Paris, now faces prosecution in the country he left more than a decade ago.The FSB's language is severe.

Under Part 1.1 of Article 205.1 of Russia's criminal code, the service alleges that Telegram's refusal to remove channels devoted to “mass killings” and cyber fraud has caused “numerous human casualties,” including women and children, and billions of roubles in damage.

Durov's answer was scornful.  He called the case “a sad spectacle of a state afraid of its own people,” and repeated his charge that the Kremlin keeps inventing “new pretexts” to justify restricting Telegram inside Russia.

Telegram was blunter still about the motive. The company said Moscow's real aim is to cripple the app and herd users onto MAX, a new state-backed messenger it described as “engineered for mass surveillance and censorship.”

Encryption sits at the centre of the dispute. A Russian official had claimed the platform's encryption was compromised, letting foreign intelligence read Russian soldiers' messages, an assertion Telegram flatly rejected, saying “no breaches of Telegram's encryption have ever been found.”

The pressure has been building for months. Russia began restricting Telegram in the summer of 2025 and opened a criminal case against Durov in February, and two days before the charge the Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, complained that Telegram's representatives had “not been very active” in talks.

The backdrop is the war. Telegram is indispensable to both sides in Ukraine, carrying everything from official statements to battlefield footage, and Russian soldiers, reporters, and officials lean on it as heavily as their opponents do.

That ubiquity is exactly what Moscow now turns against it. The FSB frames Telegram's hands-off approach to content as complicity in terrorism, a charge that doubles as a rationale for steering the population towards an app the state can see into.

Durov has been here before, after a fashion. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to hand user data to the security services, and the government's two-year ban on Telegram, imposed in 2018, failed so completely that it was quietly abandoned.

The terrorism framing is not new either. Telegram's loose moderation has long drawn the accusation that it is friendly to terrorists, a criticism made by Western governments as often as by Moscow, and one the company answers by insisting it removes genuinely illegal content.

What the wanted-list move changes in practice is unclear. Durov holds French and Emirati citizenship and is not going to be handed to Moscow, so the charge works less as a route to a courtroom than as a signal, to Russians and to Telegram, of how far the state will go.

The restrictions have not emptied the app. Telegram remains among the most widely used services in Russia, which is part of what makes the standoff so pointed, since a clampdown that fails to move users leaves the state reaching instead for the man who built it.

For Durov, the legal map is now crowded. He is entangled in a French prosecution, wanted in Russia, and running a platform both governments treat as a problem, an awkward place for a founder who built his name on answering to no state at all.