See my other comment but Durov later admitted to basically all of that (he does travel freely in Russia, he did keep his Russian passport, the border crossing list was accurate). The signal - telegram debate has always come down to some variation of “If you trust Telegram to not allow MitM access to their servers and if the non-standard encryption they choose is secure and if you enabled the secure chat feature, it’s probably fine. Signal uses standard encryption and the messages are always encrypted so there’s no need to trust anyone.”
Which is likely why Signal is banned in Russia and Telegram is freely available.
See my other comment but Durov later admitted to basically all of that (he does travel freely in Russia, he did keep his Russian passport, the border crossing list was accurate). The signal - telegram debate has always come down to some variation of “If you trust Telegram to not allow MitM access to their servers and if the non-standard encryption they choose is secure and if you enabled the secure chat feature, it’s probably fine. Signal uses standard encryption and the messages are always encrypted so there’s no need to trust anyone.”
Which is likely why Signal is banned in Russia and Telegram is freely available.