From the moment Pavel Durov was arrested in France in August, anger erupted in the Russian public space. Depending on who you ask, France has launched an attack on free speech; the Russophobic harassment of one of the country's biggest businessmen or a NATO-led intelligence operation aimed at penetrating Russian military command and control in Ukraine.

Others concluded the opposite: the reaction in Moscow proves that Durov is actually a Kremlin agent; his appearance as a persecuted supporter of free speech is only a front; his "safe" app is just a spying tool, writes The Telegraph.

What does Durov know? And will he hand NATO the keys to the Russian war in Ukraine? The truth is covered with several layers of fog. Matters of intelligence and national security are shrouded in the usual mystery; it is not easy to distinguish real concerns from paranoia and propaganda; and then there is war, with all the proverbial implications for truth.

"I think the Kremlin is worried because it knows a lot and because Western intelligence can get a lot of insight into Russian warfare," John Foreman, a former British military envoy to Moscow, said when asked about Russia's reaction to his arrest. .

But is this a well-founded concern or simply the paranoia of the Russian security services and the continued belief in an insidious Western plot to overthrow Russia? An intelligence conspiracy seems unlikely, Foreman points out, but the issue is murky: "There's a lot more going on here than is being suggested. It seems Russia is afraid the West will crack secrets and stop disinformation."

Durov (39) became famous in Russia for founding Vkontakte, a social network modeled on Facebook. He lost control of the company after refusing to hand over information on Ukrainian protesters and fled Russia in 2014, saying he would never return.

He then launched Telegram, the instant messaging app he launched in 2013, which has become wildly popular in Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East both for private communication and as a source of uncensored news. Today it is used by Russian and Ukrainian war propagandists as well as for battlefield communication.

This was at the root of concerns in Russia when he was arrested at Le Bourget airport near Paris on August 24. French authorities accused him of allowing the app to be used for a range of illegal activities, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking. He denies the charges, which his lawyer called absurd.

Durov was released on bail but was banned from leaving the country. In his first public appearance on Friday, he said he personally should not be a target and warned authorities not to harass social media "innovators".

"No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they could be personally liable for the potential misuse of those tools," Durov said. Neither he nor the French authorities said anything to suggest the arrest was for espionage.

But the doubts will not go away. And to understand why, we have to go back to his recent run-in with the censorship regulator.

"The biggest mystery surrounding Durov these days is what actually happened in 2018 and 2020, when Telegram was blocked in Russia, and then for some mysterious reason the ban was lifted," said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist in exile.

The Kremlin then asked Durov for two things. The first request from Roskomnadzor, the state media regulatory body and censor, to be more proactive in removing illegal, harmful and extremist content.

For free speech activists, this was questionable because Russia's law on extremism could extend to legitimate political criticism of the government. Durov resisted.

"But there was another request, directly from the FSB, and it was about providing encrypted keys to access Telegram," Soldatov said.

The FBI wanted to read private messages sent through the app. That would be in line with Russian cyber surveillance doctrine, which says authorities must have covert access to all communications on Russian soil.

A tacit agreement

Durov replied that this is impossible: the keys for each conversation are unique, they are generated randomly when the conversation starts and are stored on users' mobile phones, not on Telegram servers. There was simply no "key" that he could hand over even if he wanted to. But the FSB officers are not stupid, says Soldatov, they would know very well that they are looking for something that does not exist: "Given what I know about the FSB, they probably used this as a form of pressure to receive any other concession. ".

In 2020, Roskomnadzor lifted the ban on Telegram (which was easily circumvented and never worked) after an agreement was reached to limit some harmful content. Pragmatism seemed to have won.

The assumption among some Russian activists — though no one could fully prove it — was that another hush-hush deal had been made to give the FSB access to the messages. Telegram and Durov still insist they haven't handed over the keys. This may explain the agitation of Russian military bloggers.

If he could open the door to the FSB, he could open it to the French.