I didn't know a lot of this. I thought Telegram was mostly funded through Durov's Bitcoin and VK money? It feels strange that he'd be so "in bed" with the Russian govt when the whole reason he left was because of his staunch opposition to taking down Navalny's VK page.
But I haven't done extensive reading on this.
Durov was indeed an opposition to Russian govt for some time and TG was banned in Russia for some time.
But then “SEC-incident” happened. He and his brother wanted to build TON and fund it by kind of ICO (without naming it ICO). SEC decides enough is enough and blocked launch of TON with charging Durov for selling unregistered securities.
At the end, issue was settled, Durov returned all money and settle the deal with SEC, but it shrinks his finance by a lot and he ran out of money for TG.
Then he was seen in Russia and issued bonds for $1 bln. According to Russian financial press [1], bonds were underwritten by Russian banks closely affiliated with government or directly stated-owned (all of them are in sanctions list now), and even some money was invested by Russian Fund of Direct Investments [2]. Last summer he again issued bonds for TG for $270 mln.
You can buy TG bonds at SPB stock exchange where they were listed 2 weeks after the issuing [3].
Surprisingly (repeating my comment below), around same time, Russian govt withdrew all their claims to Telegram and started to use as the official communication channel.
Not to say that other “transformations” happened like Duriv publicly denounce US declaring it is a “police state” [4]
Durov personally blocked Navalny channels in Telegram during 2021 elections - https://www.rferl.org/a/telegram-navalny-smart-voting/314662... even though "technically" as a foreign legal entity they had no obligation to follow orders of Russian censorship agencies. Also, if you look up the results of court decisions in Russia, Telegram leads by a significant margin among other messengers. Yes, of course, it is the most popular messenger in Russia, but it is designed from the ground up to tie and control the circle of communication to specific people as precisely as possible.
