Russia’s FSB says it detained 46 users of a Telegram dating bot, ages 12 to 22, whom Ukrainian intelligence recruited for sabotage. But the chats in the videos offered as proof are on a Russian app.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had detained 46 users of Leonardo Daivinchik, a popular Telegram dating bot. All of them are young Russians between the ages of 12 and 22, and all of them, the FSB claims, were recruited by Ukrainian intelligence services to commit crimes in Russia. As proof of this “recruitment,” security officials released videos that show the detainees weren’t corresponding on Telegram at all. That didn’t stop the security services from blaming Pavel Durov for everything and adding him to the list of terrorists and extremists kept by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service. Meduza explains what is known about Leonardo Daivinchik and how safe it is to use this bot and others like it.

What is Leonardo Daivinchik, and how popular is it?

The Leonardo Daivinchik entertainment community launched on VKontakte in April 2015, posting memes, jokes, funny videos, and unusual photos. That concept apparently hasn’t changed since.

In 2018, a Telegram dating bot called Daivinchik | Leo grew out of the community. It’s not clear exactly how many people used it in its early years, but most outlets reported that its popularity surged after Tinder and other international dating services pulled out of Russia.

The Telegram bot now has more than 13.6 million monthly users. Its VKontakte community and Telegram channel, which also carry entertainment content, count 13.3 million and 5.4 million subscribers, respectively. Daivinchik is present on the messenger MAX as well, but it hasn’t gained much traction there so far.

The bot itself is simple: users fill out a profile form with their age, gender, and city, then upload a photo or video. After that they can browse other users’ profiles and, as on a typical dating app, pick the ones they find interesting. Mutual likes open a chat inside Telegram.

The bot’s administrators do not verify any user data, including the ages people list. A warning to that effect appears at the very start of the chat:

It’s not known who originally launched the Leonardo Daivinchik community or who owns the Telegram bot. Its developers have stayed anonymous. Mash, a Telegram channel with ties to Russia’s security services, reported an alleged link between the Leonardo Daivinchik brand and a sole proprietor named Pavel Shcherbatov — a conclusion its authors reached after searching the records of Rospatent, Russia’s patent and trademark agency. Mash’s own website, however, lists a different name: someone identified only as Vitaly K., from the Perm region.

Mash also reported that the bot’s administrators may be based in Bulgaria, since the service’s commercial contacts are tied to Bulgarian phone numbers. “There also appears to be some connection to the United Kingdom,” the outlet wrote, without saying where that information came from.

Meduza confirmed that Rospatent’s database contains a trademark application with an image of the community attached. The application was filed by Vitaly Kamenskikh, but the agency rejected the registration in June 2026. Two more applications, for the Leonardo Daivinchik and Daivinchik brands, came from people Mash didn’t mention; both were rejected in 2024.

There is no confirmation, in any of these cases, that the applicants have anything to do with the dating service. Kamenskikh told the state-run news agency RIA Novosti that he knew nothing about the bot:

The anonymous owners of Daivinchik | Leo may earn as much as 2 billion rubles (about $25 million) a year, according to calculations by the Telegram channel Baza. The bot is free to use, but a paid premium subscription unlocks extra features — letting users view the profiles of people who have liked them, for example. The owners also run ads inside the bot and in the entertainment channels tied to it.

What exactly are Russian security officials accusing the Telegram bot of?

The FSB said on July 29 that it had uncovered “numerous instances” of Ukrainian intelligence services recruiting Russian citizens through the Daivinchik | Leo bot. The statement said 46 users of the service, ages 12 to 22, had been detained across 16 Russian regions since July 2025.

According to the FSB, the detainees attacked police officers, committed arson, and helped move money into Ukrainian accounts. All of it, the agency alleges, was done at the direction of Ukrainian intelligence officers using fake profiles on the bot.

By the Russian security services’ account, Ukrainian agents first befriended young people, then either asked them to share their location or sent them phishing links that supposedly led to payment pages for movie or concert tickets. The agents contacted the same targets again, this time posing as Russian law enforcement officers, and told them that the money had gone to fund Ukraine’s armed forces and that the coordinates they had shared would be used to strike Russian territory. They then pressured the young people into committing crimes under the pretext of “checking the counterterrorism protection of facilities.”

The FSB’s statement also noted that Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censorship agency, had added the Daivinchik | Leo bot to its registry of banned websites as early as December 23, 2025. The stated grounds were the alleged distribution of child pornography and “LGBT propaganda” on the service.

Soon after the FSB’s announcement, the Russian state propaganda channel RT published several videos meant to prove that Russians were being recruited through Daivinchik. Several news organizations, including the independent Russian investigative site The Insider, pointed out that judging by the interface visible in the videos, the exchanges had taken place in VK Messenger, not Telegram.

The discrepancy didn’t stop Russia’s security services from charging Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, with facilitating terrorism under Article 205.1, Part 1.1, of Russia’s Criminal Code, on the grounds that the messaging app’s administrators do not remove channels and bots allegedly used to coordinate terrorist attacks and sabotage in Russia. A day later, Rosfinmonitoring added him to its list of terrorists and extremists.

Durov himself spoke about the case back in February 2026. He hasn’t yet commented on the latest developments, including Russia’s plan to place him on an international wanted list. He has, however, changed his profile picture to his own face superimposed on a photo of an Islamic State militant — a reference to an old meme.

Do the FSB’s claims hold up? And have other countries raised concerns about Daivinchik?

Russian authorities weren’t the first to take issue with the Telegram bot. In October 2025, the Almaty prosecutor’s office demanded that the dating service be banned in Kazakhstan, arguing that Daivinchik has no age restrictions and therefore endangers minors. No decision on that request appears to have been made yet.

On July 24, Ukrainian law enforcement described recruitment through the same Telegram bot. Valerii Yefremov, head of the criminal police in the Zaporizhzhia region, said Russian security service officers use fake profiles posing as young women to befriend young Ukrainians. The same officers then get back in touch, this time claiming to be from Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), and tell the targets that the woman they met is a saboteur. They then ask for help detaining her “handler.” It then “turns out” that the handler has barricaded himself inside a particular building — which, the target is told, has to be set on fire.

Ukrainian media estimated that about 400,000 users in Ukraine had registered on Daivinchik by mid-2023. Meduza could not determine whether anyone in Ukraine has called for the bot to be banned, though local outlets urge caution and point readers toward other services.

Reports of Russians being recruited through the bot had surfaced in Russia before, according to Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet. Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the Safe Internet League, wrote about such reports on her Telegram channel in November 2025. Even so, Mediazona could not find a single published court ruling that mentioned the bot and involved Ukraine.

David Frenkel, a journalist at Mediazona, told Meduza that Daivinchik turns up mainly in cases about ordinary crime:

How dangerous is it to use Daivinchik and other Telegram bots?

For now, the restrictions apply only to the Telegram bot. Russian security officials apparently have no complaints about the Leonardo Daivinchik entertainment community or its counterpart on Telegram. Neither has been added to any Roskomnadzor list, and simply following them is unlikely to carry any risk.

That could change, though. The Russian state controls VK, so no VK service can be trusted by default.

The Daivinchik | Leo bot raises a broader question: how safe is it to use Telegram bots at all, especially when there’s no telling who built them?

The absence of any verification does make it easy to create fake profiles, which leaves enormous room for fraud — a problem for every service of this kind, not just Daivinchik. The basic rules of internet hygiene apply: don’t follow links, particularly from someone you’ve never met in person; don’t transfer money; and don’t send digital gifts. Sharing your location is a bad idea, too.

The creators’ anonymity is another worrying sign. There’s no official confirmation that Durov shares information about users with Russian security officials — but with anonymous developers, there’s no way to know how they handle personal data, or how much of it they can see in any given case.

Finally, Russian security officials don’t need technical tricks to reach users’ messages. Under pressure, detainees may simply give investigators access to their devices and everything on them. The FSB may not know in advance that someone is registered on Daivinchik, but once it finds out, the registration can make things worse for them.

The hardest question is what will become of Telegram as a whole now that Durov is on Russia’s list of terrorists and extremists.

On the one hand, there’s the Meta precedent: after the war began, a Russian court designated the company an “extremist organization,” and several of its social networks were blocked. The restrictions were selective — Facebook and Instagram were banned, but WhatsApp kept working, at least until mid-2025.

That was when Russian authorities imposed “partial restrictions” on WhatsApp and threatened to block it entirely, again under the pretext of fighting terrorism. None of these measures have hit ordinary users directly. Yes, using Meta’s platforms in Russia requires a VPN, but so far people aren’t prosecuted merely for posting or messaging on those networks — though they can be, for what they say.

On the other hand, the steady, years-long campaign against Durov only confirms that Russian authorities intend to get rid of Telegram altogether — or to press its creator into cooperating. So there’s no guarantee they’ll follow the Meta playbook, or that they’ll go easy on Telegram’s users.