Good evening and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily political dispatch. It’s foreign policy Tuesday and I’m your host, Julia Ioffe.

I don’t know about you, but between The Debate, the NATO Summit, the exit of Joe Biden, and the ascent of Kamala Harris, I can’t remember another D.C. summer as utterly insane and chaotic, at least in my 12 years living in This Town. Like you, I am looking forward to some power naps over Labor Day weekend to recharge ahead of the sprint to November. (The Best & The Brightest will also take a pause after Sunday, but return on Tuesday and run through the end of the week.)

🎧 In case you missed it, Tara hosted The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins this week on Somebody’s Gotta Win, where they discussed his recent reporting on Donald Trump’s peculiar relationship with evangelical voters, the prayer rituals before his rallies, and the contradictions of being on the religious right and supporting a less-than-righteous candidate. (Listen here or here.) Plus, Abby Livingston dropped by The Powers That Be with Peter Hamby to unpack all the angles surrounding R.F.K. Jr.’s exit from the presidential race, and whether his Trump endorsement will move the needle. (You can find that one here.)

Tonight, my reporting on the arrest of Pavel Durov, founder of the popular messaging app Telegram, why he’s become such a cause célèbre among the Russian opposition, and how the news is being processed in the Kremlin…

The outcry was immediate, from free speech absolutists and fellow tech moguls like Musk to propagandists and cryptofascists like Tucker Carlson. But the protest was especially loud from Russians, with opposition to Durov’s arrest uniting both people aligned with the Kremlin and those who have spent their lives fighting it. For me, this has been the most remarkable development of all, revealing not only a solipsistic Russian worldview, but also how widely that mentality is shared among people who claim to have such radically different visions for Russia’s future. It also helps to explain, in part, why Russia is doomed to stay on its trajectory under Vladimir Putin.

“Liberal dictatorships don’t tolerate individuals who fight for freedom and don’t play by the rules,” wrote Alexey Pushkov, a hawkish Russian MP (on Telegram, of course). “The arrest of Pavel Durov is indubitably the last nail in the coffin of ‘freedom of speech and expression of opinion’ in the West,” wrote another Russian MP, Konstantin Dolgov, also on Telegram. Tatiana Moskalkova, the Kremlin’s human rights ombudswoman (yes, Putin has one of those), wrote that “it’s completely obvious that the real reason for Pavel Durov’s arrest is an attempt to close down Telegram, an internet platform where one can find out the truth about what’s happening in the world. This elicits protest from everyone who is striving for freedom of speech and the building of a multipolar world.”

This is all deeply cynical, of course, considering that the Kremlin has spent years trying to block Telegram in Russia. In fact, the Kremlin is trying to throttle access to the app right now, along with access to YouTube and other platforms popular with the opposition. Durov himself hasn’t lived in Russia for a decade, ever since he was forced to give up control of the first internet company he founded, VKontakte (a Facebook knock-off), and because the Russian government was trying to get him to cooperate with the F.S.B. Meanwhile, as the Kremlin has struggled to block Telegram in Russia, it has also been flooding the app with loyalist, pro-Kremlin, pro-war voices. Indeed, the successful effort to co-opt Telegram has made it perhaps the Kremlin’s most effective means of spreading propaganda and disinformation, both at home and abroad.

But that’s not the argument that many opposition figures are making now. They are not pointing out that France’s targeting of Telegram endangers their livelihoods, their ability to reach Russians still inside the country, or their ability to organize. Instead, they’re making the same arguments as the Kremlin: that Durov’s arrest is an attack on free speech, a manifestation of anti-Russian bias and of Western hypocrisy. Still others are saying that Durov’s arrest is “stupid, and a gift to the Kremlin and its propaganda”—as if everything Western countries do internally revolves around this calculation, or should.

Georgy Alburov, one of Alexey Navalny’s earliest hires for his investigative unit, wrote that Durov’s arrest was “hellishly unfair” and “a huge hit to freedom of speech.” Alexey Pivovarov, an independent Russian journalist, wrote that it shows “Paris is not that far from Moscow and Beijing” in “its desire to censor the internet.” Pivovarov went on to claim that “a Russian businessman, no matter what passports he gets and no matter how well he learns English, … will never be able to convince the world that he is not a Russian businessman.” Dmitry Zair-Bek, a lawyer who has represented many a Russian freedom fighter, declared that “the arrest of Pavel Durov is a hit against the freedoms of all people all over the world.”

I find these arguments both stunningly stupid and classically, solipsistically Russian. First of all, Durov is not quite the hero of free speech everyone is suddenly making him out to be. As much as he has taken up the mantle rhetorically and resisted the Kremlin’s control, he has also made strategic concessions to Putin’s government. For example, during the nationwide elections of 2021, his platform blocked bots set up by Navalny to help anti-Kremlin Russians all over the country choose candidates who would maximize their protest vote. Telegram has also caved to demands from pro-war, pro-Kremlin activists to censor groups like “The Way Home,” a loose organization of wives and mothers who are petitioning the Russian government to bring their men home from the war in Ukraine.

Second, the Russian opposition’s fixation on the idea that this is about freedom is incredibly telling. As fighters against an autocratic, dictatorial regime, everything is, naturally, about freedom. But because they have spent their entire lives boiling in that increasingly hot cauldron, their vision of freedom and of the kind of society in which they’d like to live has become more radical over time. A decade or two ago, when things weren’t so bad yet, they wanted Russia to be a “normal”—that is, Western, classically liberal—country. Over the years, their ideal Russia became increasingly libertarian. Now, it’s more like an anarchist fantasy, where any arrest of anyone, no matter the charges, is immoral and immediately suspect—especially if the victim is an ally.

It speaks to the decades of Putin—and before him, the Soviet system—making an absurdist mockery of ideals like the rule of law and the equal application of justice. To an opposition-minded Russian, the tools of the courts—gathering evidence, questioning suspects, impaneling juries, making arrests—are, instinctively, the evil tools of an evil state. In Russian society, the only things that can truly determine who is good and who is bad are personal networks and connections. And if you’re on my team, you must be defended from the law—and from consequence—at any cost.

This worldview was on clear display in late 2022, when TV Rain fired one of its anchors for mistakenly implying on air that the independent Russian TV channel, then operating in exile in Latvia, was sending money and supplies to Russian soldiers in Ukraine. It was a dangerous and costly slip-up that jeopardized the channel’s foreign funding and ended up getting it booted from Latvia. But the Russian opposition’s anger was directed not at the anchor, but at his bosses for firing him. Why? He was one of ours. And you don’t punish people on your own team.

One former member of TV Rain’s leadership confessed to me at the time how wrong he thought the firing was. You’re in exile, you’re one team, in one boat out at sea, this person explained. Even if one of you fucks up, you can’t just toss him overboard. You’re on the same team. Similarly, I remember my Americanized parents arguing with their Moscow friends about Maria Sharapova’s temporary ban from tennis after the Grand Slam winner tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. My parents, after 30 years in America, didn’t see the problem: She broke the rules, she must bear the punishment. Their Moscow friends were horrified. But she’s ours! they protested. And she’s one of the good ones!

But the rule of law, for which liberals like Navalny had always advocated, is the most puzzling and infuriating concept for many of these Russians to grasp: the idea that the law applies to everyone equally, even if they are on your team. The idea that Durov, a French citizen, was arrested on French soil for not cooperating with a French investigation into the crimes that Durov proudly allows to proliferate on his platform, doesn’t compute as something that could be remotely legitimate. Maria Pevchikh, the head of Navalny’s investigations team, called it “wild” that Durov could be personally implicated in weapons trafficking or child pornography. Which, of course, isn’t really the charge. The idea is not that Durov is sitting around sending nudes of kids or ordering AK-47s in bulk for Colombian guerillas. It’s that he has not curbed such abuses on the platform he owns and operates. The inability to see that distinction is also telling of the deep desire to vindicate, at all costs, someone that is “one of ours.”

To Russians who view Durov’s arrest—and most everything—through the lens of “Will this hurt or help Putin?” all the world is Russia, or just like it. If an arrest in Russia means you must be a victim of persecution, the same must be true in the West. If an arrest in Russia means a court will, according to the statistics, find you guilty no matter the evidence, no matter the presumption of innocence, no matter how good your lawyers, it must be also true in the West. In this, they are not far from Putin’s own view that America and the West, for all their freedom- and democracy-loving rhetoric, are just like Russia, a country ruled by the diktat, attributed to the Peruvian fascist Benavides, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Russia, as a culture and a country, has spent decades brutalizing itself and its people, such that when anti-Kremlin Russians encounter in real life those concepts which they ostensibly espouse, they find them unrecognizable and unfair. They have become infantilized adherents of the very system they claim to be fighting. It is proof, if any were needed, that Putin is not a conquering alien who has imposed himself on an unwilling Russia, but a natural product of the society he continues to rule. And it makes me incredibly pessimistic that, in the infinitesimally small chance that the Russian opposition ever comes to power, they would build a system as different as they claim.

Julia