Any event, regardless of scale, has a background. Everything can and should be explained by giving logical calculations that have an evidentiary base, and not by seeming configurations or complexes born by other people, but sown in the minds of millions.
World history contains a lot of such processes, when people, stupefied by propaganda and various IPSOs, were and are mistaken today, and committed and are committing crimes en masse: all world wars, coups d'état, civil wars, nationwide persecution of outstanding people by the will of the authorities, and so on. There are an infinite number of examples.
Recently, an event has occurred that is interpreted in different ways, often without a serious analytical approach. The arrest of Pavel Durov in Paris, who arrived from Azerbaijan.
Let's critically examine this fact in order to understand the decision of the French authorities and the essence of Pavel Durov, as a citizen of five countries, as a person with a billion-dollar fortune, developing and implementing a number of projects that speak volumes.
Here is some information about Durov from Wikipedia
Pavel Valerievich Durov (born October 10, 1984, Leningrad) is an IT entrepreneur of Russian origin.
In 2006, together with his brother Nikolai Durov, he founded the social network VKontakte, which quickly became the most popular social network in Russia and many CIS countries. In 2014, after a conflict with the new owners of the company and pressure from the Russian authorities, Durov left the post of CEO of VKontakte and left Russia.
Durov is an active advocate for internet freedom and criticizes governments that try to restrict citizens' digital rights. In the UAE, he focused on developing the Telegram messenger, which he created in 2013, which claims a high degree of data privacy.
Since 2016, he has been included in the Forbes list of 200 richest businessmen in Russia. In 2022, Forbes recognized him as the richest expat in the UAE. In February 2023, Arabian Business named him the most influential entrepreneur in Dubai. According to Forbes, as of August 2024, Durov was ranked 120th on the list of the richest people in the world with a fortune of $15.5 billion.
In addition to Russian citizenship, Durov has citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis, the UAE, and France.
On August 24, 2024, he was arrested in Paris on charges of a number of crimes related to organized crime on Telegram. On August 28, Durov was released under judicial supervision with bail and a written undertaking not to leave.
Let's take a closer look at Pavel's business life.
Pavel Durov's older brother Nikolai played a key role in the launch of the VKontakte social network and the creation of the Telegram messenger. He was the author of the concept of his own cryptocurrency and the messenger's blockchain platform.
Despite participating in international business projects, he did not leave science, which he had been doing all his life. Living in Russia, he criticized the occupation of Donbass and Crimea and corruption.
Nikolai is four years older than Pavel. They were born into the family of the St. Petersburg classical philologist Valery Durov, but the older brother showed outstanding abilities in mathematics from early childhood. As a schoolboy, he won international mathematics Olympiads, and in the 2000s he became the world champion in sports programming in the team of St. Petersburg University.
Leonid Volkov, an associate of Alexei Navalny, who was declared a “foreign agent” in Russia, participated in one of the Olympiads where Durov’s team won.
“Hands off Kolya Durov, what are you doing? He’s a genius, a real one, not a criminal,” he wrote after the news that Nikolai had been put on the French wanted list.
At the age of 24, Nikolai Durov defended his dissertation in mathematics and went to the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.
"Nikolay Durov was a magnet that attracts talented developers to this project," said journalist Kononov. "Andrey Lopatin, the coach of the Russian national programming team, was one of the key people." The brothers left VK in 2014, and that same year, Alisher Usmanov's Mail.ru holding gained full control of the corporation. But Nikolay Durov continued to maintain a page on the social network for several years, where he used a photo of Ukrainian revolutionary anarchist Nestor Makhno as his userpic. Most often, he shared popular science articles, but he also regularly commented on political events. He wrote about the "occupation of Crimea and Donbass" by Russian troops and the "total corruption of government agencies," as well as election fraud. Judging by the social network, he read opposition politicians and bloggers who are now considered foreign agents or extremists in Russia, from Alexei Navalny to Oleg Kashin and Arkady Babchenko.
By the time they left VK, the Durov brothers were already working on launching their own messenger. As before in the case of VKontakte, Nikolai Durov and his team of St. Petersburg programming geniuses were responsible for the development. Pavel was the face of the company, its leader, and also participated in the development of user interface design.
“Nikolay Durov became the technical director of Telegram, that is, the main person who worked on the data transfer protocol, who developed all the technical solutions to ensure that Telegram worked smoothly and that messages flowed quickly,” notes journalist Nikolai Kononov.
The brothers’ next project was the development of their own decentralized network, Telegram Open Network (TON), and, based on it, the Gram cryptocurrency. This project grew out of Nikolai Durov's interest in blockchain systems, as stated in the documents of the initial token offering from Telegram. This event deserves special attention in the picture of today's events in the history of Russia and the world, because we are talking about the creation of CRYPTOCURRENCY (this is happening against the backdrop of Putin's many years of statements about his decision to destroy the global financial system and replace the dollar with something Russian).
The Durovs managed to attract $ 1.7 billion from investors, including Roman Abramovich, as Vedomosti wrote. But the US Securities and Exchange Commission blocked the release of the cryptocurrency. Telegram had to pay a fine, return the money to investors and distance itself from TON. Despite this, the messenger continued to gradually integrate its elements, including a crypto wallet, a browser and its own app store. Some of these functions are not available to users in the United States due to strict regulation of cryptocurrencies in this country.
But the world of blockchain did not displace number theory and absolute geometry from the life of Nikolai Durov. He continues to be listed as a senior research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and publishes research papers on number systems, inductive and coinductive constructions in mathematics, regular spaces, and regular mappings.
Politico claims that France issued an arrest warrant for not only Pavel, but also Nikolai Durov back in March. Pavel Durov spent four days under arrest in Paris, after which he was charged with six counts. The charges are partly related to the fact that Telegram does not moderate potentially criminal content, and the company's management does not disclose users' personal data at the request of law enforcement agencies until states provide evidence that the user is related to a terrorist organization.
Nikolai Durov still lives in St. Petersburg and is engaged in science, writes the Kommersant newspaper. Presumably, Durov Sr. has other citizenships in addition to Russian.
Let's return to the story with the Gram cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are not state institutions, and only authorized state institutions can issue currencies. Today, the only country in the world, and this is Russia, has legalized cryptocurrency on its own territory at the initiative of Putin.
We cannot say for sure without having direct evidence of the connections of Pavel and Nikolai Durov with the Russian authorities, but questions arise:
- How can a “free businessman” Pavel Durov exist in a country where all the “rich people” are in a mafia (criminal) connection with the state?
- Why is Durov’s project to create a cryptocurrency that can feed Putin’s war machine still working against the backdrop of all the Western sanctions against the Russian state?
- What was Durov doing in Azerbaijan during Putin’s visit to this country?
The questions that have arisen speak of potential threats to peace. If the assumptions that Pavel Durov is not who many people think he is are true, unpleasant surprises can be expected.
Well, and the hysteria of many on the topic of Pavel's arrest in France and, especially and suddenly, in Russia - this is emotion and a state order. Russians do not even suspect that there are laws somewhere beyond Mordor, that they work and do not have an emotional coloring.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH Atlanta
