Pavel Durov has secretly traveled to Russia more than 60 times between 2014 to 2021 – exclusive

In particular, on June 18, 2020, when Russia allegedly ended its ban of Telegram

Today, we have an important piece of the puzzle that we started to put together a year and a half ago about the nature of Pavel Durov's relationship with the Russian authorities. 

Original email was in russian, this is a Google Translated version on this screenshot

The quick version:

• In December 2023, the Kremlingram investigation team was anonymously sent an spreadsheet with the data on Pavel Durov's crossings of the Russian border in 2015-2021 which would contradict his official "pariah" narrative.
• We could not confirm the authenticity of this data for a long time
• This week, on August 26, 2024, Russian media Medusa.io wrote about the leak of a large FSB database, and that among them there is a record of Durov's crossing of the Russian border on August 5, 2015
• This completely coincides with one of the entries in the email we received, which contains a total of 125 entries of Pavel's entry and exit to Russia
• Both sources of the leaks are anonymous, we do not know their goals, but now we can very likely consider the data of the anonymous email to be authentic
• According to them, Pavel visited Russia many times from 2015 to 2021, while claiming to be in conflict with the authorities and an exile in the country where he was born
• His Instagram photos do not contradict the dates and locations of his trips and contain photos of many destinations other than Russia
• There are no records in the database from December 2017, when he left for Finland, until June 20, 2020
• As a reminder, Telegram was allegedly blocked in Russia on April 16, 2018, and allegedly unblocked on June 20, 2020, at 15:00. 
• The record of June 20, 2020, says that Durov took off from Russia at 19:13. There is no data on how he got to Russia before that (either it was not there or it was deleted from the database).
• After this text was written, but before it was published, the Russian publication Vazhnye Istorii published the news that, according to a database that became available recently, Durov crossed the border more than 50 times from 2015 to 2021. Their data fully coincides with our source, and the article contains many important details about the context of the Telegram founder's movements.

Conculsions:

• Durov concealed his visits to Russia in 2015-2021
• Despite the fact that "the FSB took Vkontakte away from Pavel in 2014", his relationship with the Russian authorities in 2015-2021 was good enough that he was not afraid of being detained while crossing the border
• In response to the publication about his possible ties to Russia, Durov deliberately deceived Ukrainians and the general public, claiming that he was an exile in Russia and that Telegram had "no ties" to Russia. 
• As proof of his lack of ties to Russia, Pavel claimed that he was no longer a Russian entrepreneur and had dual citizenship in France and the UAE. This is also a manipulation, because after his arrest in France and the statements of the Russian authorities, we know that he also has a valid Russian passport.  
• In the same response, Telegram insisted that he had no agreements with the Russian authorities. With the new information, it seems clear that this was not a unilateral decision by RosComNadzor, and that Pavel Durov was involved. As soon as the decision came into force, he left the territory of Russia.

A detailed version:

In March 2023, I realized that the silence about signs of Telegram's ties to the Kremlin in the second year of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine was deafening. It really looked like an "elephant in the room". Or a Trojan horse in a room. A Trojan horse in pockets of 70% of Ukrainians. 

I dropped everything and in one day gathered all the suspicious facts about Telegram, Pavel Durov, and the Russian authorities that I had been keeping in my notes for years. I re-read many publications on this topic, where even more interesting things surfaced, and published my findings in Ukrainian and English in columns on Ukrainska Pravda and Kyiv Independent.

The columns gained a lot of traction and led to the formation of a community of Ukrainian journalists and activists interested in the topic, as well as the creation of Kremlingram, a non-profit aiming to study and shed light on Telegram's ties to the Russian authorities. 

Telegram itself responded to this column by issuing a separate, alleged refutation of the facts - https://telegra.ph/Azhnyuk-Claims. However, their arguments were so unconvincing that they only made their situation worse, and I published a short analysis to show how manipulative their responses were. 

Subsequently, Telegram contacted me on behalf of Mike Radovnikas, a longtime colleague of Pavel Durov's and currently Telegram's Vice President of Communications. Mike said in a friendly tone that he understood how I could come to my conclusions with limited information, but that this was not the case. He offered to come to Dubai, meet with Pavel Durov, and discuss how to make Telegram safe for Ukrainians. When I politely suggested that we start with a Zoom call, Mike informed me that they do not practice Zoom calls, and that was the end of our communication. 

Over the past year and a half, the Kremlegram community has published dozens of articles collecting and publishing dozens of circumstantial evidence regarding the cost of the service and sources of funding, the presence of employees in Russia and meetings between company representatives and Russian authorities, the lack of proper encryption of messages, the facts of access to user communications and blocking of opposition voices on the platform, and much more. Links to the most important materials can be found on https://kremlingram.org/.

Another interesting aspect of this project was that Kremlingram started receiving messages from insiders who had more information on the topic we were interested in. 

On November 10, 2023, we received an email with an alleged extract from the database of border crossings by Pavel Durov to and from Russia between 2016 and 2021 (61 entry and 64 exit records). See both the original and google-translated screenshots of the email is below, and as you can see, the author requests that the content not be published for a month from the date of receipt of the email. 

The author draws attention to two facts:

1. After the sale of Vkontakte, Pavel Durov repeatedly crossed the border. For those familiar with Durov's official position that he has become an exile and cannot return to his country, this fact alone should be interesting, as it probably means that Durov was not telling the truth about his conflict with the Russian authorities.
2. Pavel Durov flew out of Russia on June 18, 2020, the same day that Telegram was allegedly* unblocked after two years of alleged blocking, a few hours after the unblocking was announced on the RosKomNadzor website. This fact casts a shadow over Durov's thesis that he did not make any agreements with the Russian authorities

I say "allegedly" because Telegram was actually working just fine in Russia at the time, maybe with minor interruptions. And the fact that the central government tried to block it is not very convincing, because countries with less technological potential than Russia, such as Pakistan and Cuba, have successfully blocked the platform in their countries. Wikipedia's article on blocking Telegram lists 17 countries besides Russia where restrictions have been imposed. However, all Western media took this story at face value and reported that Telegram is such a powerful and secure messenger that even in the terrible Russia they failed to block it. This narrative persists in most Western media to this day, and almost no one questions the veracity of that blocking. 

Yes, it cannot be ruled out that the Russian authorities really wanted to and failed to block Telegram because of their incompetence. On the other hand, it's hard to think of a better advertising campaign for a messaging service that claims to be secure, encrypted, and independent than this story about the alleged blocking of Telegram in Russia. It is also hard to think of a better spying asset, than a service for allegedly secure messaging. And the history of Pavel Durov's relationship with the Russian authorities and Pavel's attempts to conceal this relationship suggest that such arrangements cannot be ruled out.

The data on the border crossing looked sensational. If true, this destroys Durov's narrative of an "exile" and shows that he has been publicly lying about his relationship with the Russian state. And if so, it raises the question "why did Durov lie to us?"

As requested by our anonymous informant, I shared the data with fellow journalists and activists in the Kremlingram Signal chat on January 10, 2024. It was obvious that they needed to be verified before publication, and thus, we needed to find independent confirmation from a second source. 

And here we ran into difficulties. Despite the efforts of investigative journalists, our requests to special services, and the use of contacts in Russia, the EU, and the United States, we were unable to obtain confirmation of these data. At some point, I began to assume that this letter could have been a piece of disinformation to provoke Kremlingram to publish unverified data and thus compromise the initiative. 

But now, it seems, such a second source emerged. 

The Russian media outlet Medusa, which positions itself as an opposition to the government, cited investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov as reporting an unprecedentedly large leak of the FSB's database of border crossings from 2014 to 2023. 

Medusa claims that as a confirmation that the data in the database is genuine, Zakharov published data on border crossings by Abramovich, Patrushev, Durov and Zakharov himself. But then, for some unknown reason, he deleted the screenshot with Durov, leaving the other three - https://t.me/zakharovchannel/1416. 

It is worth noting here that on his Twitter account, Zakharov defends Pavel Durov and demands his release from custody in France https://x.com/skazal_on. At this point, it is not clear whether it is a mere coincidence that this post by Zakharov about the leak appeared the day after Durov's arrest, nor why he posted and then deleted the screenshot with Durov's data.

However, Medusa managed to write down that Durov, according to this record, was supposed to leave for Finland by train via Vyborg on August 5, 2015. There is also evidence that the information about Durov was originally in the post in the comments to it. This is our puzzle. 

This entry matches exactly one of the entries in the database previously sent to us by an unknown informant. 

The public version of the dataset can be found here.

Is it possible that both the data in the letter and the data in the leaked database are fabricated? In theory, yes, but in practice, such an assumption sounds like some kind of incredible conspiracy. What is more likely is that this data is true and has now been confirmed by what looks like two independent sources. 

Therefore, we can assume that all the data from the letter we received about Durov's crossings of the Russian border are true. 

This data includes:

• 24 entries and exits in 2015 (from May 25 to December 28)
• 39 records for 2016 (from January to December)
• 39 records for 2017 (from January to December)
• The last record for 2017 is a departure on December 26, 2017, by train from St. Petersburg to Finland in Helsinki.
• There are no records for 2018 and 2019. 
• 15 entries for 2020, starting from June 18, 2020
• 8 entries for 2021

Let me remind you that on April 16, 2018, Roskomnadzor began blocking IP addresses used by Telegram.

Also, in May 2020, Pavel sadly announced that due to a US court decision, after 2.5 years he was stopping the development of the TON cryptocurrency (which he later continued). At the time, TON was the main bet for Telegram to start making any money. According to our estimate, from 2013 to 2020, at least $688M was spent on Telegram, including $220M in 2020 alone. According to publicly available data, Telegram had no revenue until at least mid-2021. Durov has repeatedly expressed his disappointment with this decision and the American political system in general.

The next entry is dated June 18, 2020, 19:13:47, again departure, by plane from Pulkovo-1 airport (St. Petersburg) to Serbia, Belgrade. What is interesting here is that between 2017 and 2020, the database does not contain any data on how Durov re-entered Russia. This means that either his entry was made in a way that did not reflect this in the databases, or part of the data on Durov's entries and exits in 2018-2020 was erased from the database.

But even more interestingly, as our anonymous correspondent pointed out, it was on June 18, 2020, at 15.00 Moscow time, that a message appeared on the RosKomNadzor website about the "unblocking" of Telegram in Russia. De facto, it did not change anything, because he was already working there, and his audience has doubled over the past two years, according to Durov himself, who wrote a post about unblocking Telegram in Russia on June 22, 2020 https://t.me/durov/117.

Source

If we compare the dates, locations, and captions of the photos on Poltava Durov's Instagram with the data obtained on his movements, there are no contradictions. The only noteworthy fact is that there are plenty of photos from the United States, France, Maldives, Finland, and other places, but none from Russia – despite more than 60 trips. As with the rest of his public communication, Pavel concealed his trips to Russia, maintaining his image as an exile.

After this text was written, but before it was published, the Russian publication Vazhnye Istori published the news that, according to a database that became available recently, Durov crossed the border more than 50 times between 2015 and 2021. Their data fully coincides with our source, and the article contains many important details about the context of the Telegram founder's movements.

Conculsions:

• Durov concealed his visits to Russia in 2015-2021
• Despite the fact that "the FSB took Vkontakte away from Pavel in 2014", his relationship with the Russian authorities in 2015-2021 was good enough that he was not afraid of being detained while crossing the border
• In response to the publication about his possible ties to Russia, Durov deliberately deceived Ukrainians and the general public, claiming that he was an exile in Russia and that Telegram had "no ties" to Russia. 
• As proof of his lack of ties to Russia, Pavel claimed that he was no longer a Russian entrepreneur and had dual citizenship in France and the UAE. This is also a manipulation, because after his arrest in France and the statements of the Russian authorities, we know that he also has a valid Russian passport.  
• In the same response, Telegram insisted that he had no agreements with the Russian authorities. With the new information, it seems clear that this was not a unilateral decision by RosComNadzor, and that Pavel Durov was involved. As soon as the decision came into force, he left the territory of Russia.

In view of all this, I once again draw the attention of Ukrainian society and the authorities to the fact that in the context of a full-scale war with Russia, we cannot continue to rely on the use of Telegram for 70% of Ukrainians who use it for news and correspondence. 

I also draw the attention of Telegram users around the world - given these facts, you should reconsider how much you are willing to rely on the "encryption and privacy" of a service whose founder hides his visits to Russia. 

***

Thanks to Maksym Savanevsky and Nazar Tokar for proofreading earlier versions of this text, the Kremlegram community for their volunteer work, as well as our anonymous sources.