Pavel Durov refused to hand Russia's security service the personal data of 39 Ukrainian protest organizers in 2013. He lost his company and left the country within months. Today that same agency charged him with aiding terrorism and put him on an international wanted list. The case is not new. Russian state newspapers reported the investigation in late February, and Durov confirmed it within days. What landed today is the formal charge, filed under Article 205.1 of the criminal code, which The Moscow Times reports carries up to 15 years. The FSB says Telegram failed to remove channels, chats and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence and extremist groups to coordinate attacks inside Russia. Durov denies wrongdoing. Russian regulators cut off voice calls on Telegram and WhatsApp in August 2025. A month later, a new law required a state-backed messenger called MAX to come preinstalled on every phone and tablet sold in Russia. WhatsApp went dark completely in February 2026, cutting off around 100 million users. Telegram was slowed the same month until images and voice notes stopped loading, then blocked almost entirely by mid-March. About 95% of connection attempts fail without a workaround. MAX is built by VK, the social network Durov founded in 2006 and was pushed out of in 2014. It is now owned through a subsidiary of the state gas company. The app Russians are being moved onto is run by the business he lost. Moving them has not worked. MAX reports over 107 million registered accounts, though signing up and using it daily are different things. Telegram still has more than 94 million Russian users, according to audience measurement firm Mediascope. Durov said in April that over 50 million of them send at least one message a day. Russia tried this before. In April 2018, regulators ordered internet providers to block nearly 20 million internet addresses, most belonging to Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Online banking, shopping and flight booking broke nationwide. Telegram stayed up. By June 2020 the regulator gave up and lifted the ban, and Telegram never handed over the keys that would have let the agency read people's messages. The warrant has the same problem. Durov holds French and Emirati citizenship and lives in Dubai. French law bars extraditing French nationals, and the Russia-UAE extradition treaty excludes each country's own citizens. Since March 2022, Russia cannot post alerts straight into Interpol's system; every request routes through headquarters in France for review. Terrorism charges are among the few that usually clear it. In the first quarter of 2026, as the full block came down, Telegram's Russian user base shrank about 1.5%. That is roughly 1.4 million people, out of more than 94 million who stayed.