Durov’s arrest and the paradoxes of freedom
Both the mouthpieces of Russia’s rulers and most opposition voices in Moscow reacted surprisingly as one to the arrest in France of Russian Internet tsar, to defend freedom of expression and communication. This is a sign that the ultimate weapon of war is not the assault drone or the nuclear bomb, but ideologies that distort reality.
The most sensational event for Russia in recent days is not the possibility of Ukraine's victory in the war, trumpeted by President Volodymyr Zelensky following the Kursk offensive, but the arrest of Russian Internet tsar Pavel Durov, at a French airport.
Both mouthpieces for Russia’s rulers and most of the country’s opposition voices have reacted astonishingly in unison in defence of freedom of expression and communication.
Information warfare is in fact much more extensive and devastating than that on the ground, obviously not because of the number of dead and wounded or the extent of the destruction, but because of the actual feeling that power brings, or the consistency of the struggle against it.
The Telegram messaging platform, which Durov founded in 2013, is in fact the only space where Russian-speaking audiences can access political content without obstacles, interruptions, or sanctions, and this applies not only to Russia, but to many countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and Southeast Asia.
By contrast, in Western Europe, in particular in France, Telegram is often associated with drug trafficking, terrorism, computer piracy, and the dissemination of pornographic materials, including child porn.
St. Petersburg-born Pavel Durov, who will turn forty in October, has ruled social media in Russia since 2006, the dawn of the new communication age.
Together with his brother Nikolai, he founded VK (VKontakte, ВКонтакте, InContact"), an online social media and social networking service, which became immediately popular in Russia and many other former Soviet states, along with Odnoklassniki (Одноклассники, Classmates), another social networking service, which is also linked to Durov's system.
These first tools were left to the total control of the Kremlin after the start of the conflict with Ukraine in 2014, and the young digital tycoon claimed his freedom to spread any information, even criticising the government, and stayed at the helm of Telegram.
Durov officially left Russia, although he returns whenever he deems it necessary, moving to Dubai. He also holds citizenship in Kitts and Nevis, United Arab Emirates, and France. He tried to set up shop in the United States and Singapore, but "felt too much pressure", he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the only Western journalist loved by Russians.
Bypassing normal channels, he got a French passport after a few dinners with President Emmanuel Macron, who advised him to move his company’s headquarters to Paris.
A week after his arrest, he was released on bail with travel restrictions. In Russia his arrest has sparked a storm of reactions, raising numerous doubts about the real motives behind it.
Durov travelled to Paris on his private plane from Azerbaijan, where he reportedly had the opportunity to meet Vladimir Putin directly.
It seems unlikely that he was not aware of the risks of the trip, given his ties at the highest level, so the move remains a mystery, with unclear motives, unless it is a case of hubris of those who are arrogant enough to believe that they are above the law.
Russians suspect that Telegram’s boss went to hand over the keys to access crucial information on his messaging platform, to favour the West in the global war.
The platform is in fact widely used by Russian soldiers (and their Ukrainian adversaries) to communicate with each other, but it is not very credible that military commanders would use it to pass military plans. After all, the Telegram system has no real "access keys" since it is built on a castle of databases and servers that do not communicate with each other.
Beyond the actual technical-military significance of the story, its resonance shows the broader meaning of certain links in the world of communication; Russia, politically and economically isolated from the West and in search of a new dimension straddling worlds, cannot lose its place in the virtual global space.
Control over information is the main tool for imposing a certain narrative of events that favours one’s purposes. This is certainly nothing new. Manipulating facts was already one of the main objectives of ancient Roman historians, from Julius Caesar to Livy, Tacitus, and Sallust, an ideological weapon of empire.
Russians have known this since the medieval "Nestor Chronicle", which narrates the events of Kievan Rus', presenting the "new people" called to rewrite history, which inspired tsars and Soviet general secretaries, up to their current copycat in the Kremlin.
A 19th-century Russian writer and philosopher, Vladimir Odoyevsky, had even prophesied the birth of blogs and the Internet in his utopian novel "Year 4338", written in 1835.
In it he wrote that "magnetic telegraphs are established between houses, thanks to which those who live at great distances can converse with each other", even distributing "home newspapers, prepared by those who have more knowledge replacing the usual correspondence", which, in addition to informing about the internal life of families, offer "various reflections, observations, discoveries and proposals".
There are indeed many proposals on Telegram, and many of them raise real concerns.
In the past, Durov had to reluctantly bow to foreign states, as in 2022 when Germany accused him of not moderating content in accordance with German law, the same charge that led to his arrest in Paris.
Not long ago, the final version of the Digital Services Act, the EU Digital Services Regulation 2022/2065, came into effect across the European Union, which Telegram representatives swore to scrupulously uphold, blocking pirated content and not allowing banned channels like RT, Russkoe Televidenie, one of the Kremlin's main means of propaganda, to Europeans.
Although the European Commission reported no violations of these rules by Telegram, the French investigation is based on French law. Durov is accused of failing to cooperate with French police.
This raises a question that could affect the entire digital world, not only one boss in the ecosystem: how justifiable is controlling what is posted on the network? Where is the line between "moderation" and censorship?
If you want to protect yourself from cybercrimes, then the authorities should be able to monitor any exchange of content, and this happens often, laws notwithstanding.
This is in fact what Russia wants, even more than France or the United States, to control the thoughts and movements of the soul, and there is nothing like the virtual world to enter every secret department of people's inner lives.
This is why even in the most democratic countries there is far less trust in the authorities and their statements, and everyone tries to carve out a space to feel more or less one’s own, which is what Telegram tried to offer in more credible ways than many more popular social media.
Freedom of expression has always been an ambiguous concept, and it is becoming an even more confused and contradictory ideal.
Russia is fighting its war against the demon of “false liberalism"; for this reason, it is urging everyone in the world to move to the “pure world of traditional values", while invoking freedom for Durov and his very untraditional tools.
The ultimate weapon of war is not the assault drone or the nuclear bomb, it is the ideology that distorts reality, and turns a universal principle like personal freedom into an instrument of control and power.
If it is possible to discuss the legitimacy of allowing the Ukrainians to use Western missiles against Russia, or cutting ecclesiastical ties with Russian Orthodoxy, one cannot ignore a commitment to define the contents of freedom of thought, expression, and speech, on the Internet and everywhere, given the absence of geographical boundaries or zones of separation and non-belligerence.
In this sense, we are all Russians and French, we are all players on Telegram or any other system that carries words and images, which forces us to choose and decide in which reality we want to live.
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