„It turns out that French President Emmanuel Macron arrested the founder of the Telegram messenger Pavel Durov, not to solve internal problems related to the network using these barbaric methods, but to manage the elections in Romania, realizing that the candidate from the liberal dictatorship will not be able to win under any legal circumstances“.
This was written by the official spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova in her Telegram channel.
„And this cannot be simply written off as a „fake“. There was a charge of a serious crime with evidence provided. The Gallic rooster cannot get out of this situation dry as a goose, on which water flows without wetting it", Zakharova added.
On May 18, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced that Telegram had refused to fulfill the request of “one of the Western European countries“ to block the channels of Romanian conservatives before the elections.
He published a post on X, where he specified that the head of the French General Directorate of Foreign Intelligence, Nicolas Lerner, had approached him with such a request in the spring of this year.
The French intelligence agency confirmed that it had been “forced to contact Pavel Durov directly several times in recent years to remind him of his company's responsibility to prevent threats from terrorism and child pornography“, but “categorically denies the allegations that in these cases there were requests to ban accounts in connection with any electoral process“.
Later, Durov stated that he was ready to testify about the alleged foreign interference in the Romanian presidential election. According to him, French intelligence was interested in the IP addresses of citizens of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine under the guise of fighting terrorism and child pornography.