Owen Matthews

Pavel Durov, Russian-born founder of the Telegram messaging and social media app, has been arrested in France for failing to comply with official demands to regulate content posted by users on his app. According to a warrant issued by France’s Ofmin – an office tasked with preventing violence against minors – Durov’s alleged offences include abetting fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime, child pornography and the promotion of terrorism. The arrest of the 39-year-old Durov – a French, Saint Kitts and Nevis and United Arab Emirates citizen – is set to become a battle royal between advocates of free speech and those who seek to regulate it. Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has been among the first to rush to Durov’s defence, tweeting ‘Liberte. Liberte!

When three of the four Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany were destroyed by unknown saboteurs in September 2022, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podolyak described the bombing as ‘a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.’ The attack – which knocked out the route through which Germany had previously received 30 per cent of its gas supplies – was designed to ‘destabilise the economic situation in Europe and cause panic before winter,’ Podolyak wrote on Twitter. But there was one crucial detail that Podolyak failed to mention: compelling evidence is emerging that it was not Russia, but Ukraine that organised the ‘terrorist’ attack.

I can well understand that joy and relief experienced by the supporters and families of the hostages released yesterday by Vladimir Putin. For I myself owe my life to a Cold War spy swap.  In October 1969, the British government exchanged Peter and Helen Kroger, two senior Soviet career spies nabbed for running a very real espionage ring, for Gerald Brooke, a British student who had served five years in a Russian jail for ‘anti-Soviet agitation'. The exchange was so unequal that Brezhnev’s Politburo agreed to throw in three Soviet citizens who wanted to marry Britons in as a makeweight. One was my mother, Lyudmila Bibikova.

The Crocus City Hall attack blindsided Putin’s vast security state. Employing nearly a million policemen, 340,000 national guards and over 100,000 spies, that apparatus has proved ruthlessly efficient at terrorising babushkas bringing flowers to Aleksei Navalny’s grave, tracking down lone bloggers and persecuting homosexuals. But as the Crocus attack demonstrated, the Kremlin’s securocrats are utterly incompetent at doing their actual job, which is to protect the lives of Russian citizens. Rather than keep a relentless watch for emerging threats from all over the region, Putin’s security chiefs have instead focused on only two tasks – repressing internal dissent, and stealing money.