US orchestrated Durov arrest – former spokesman

The Telegram CEO wouldn’t have landed in Paris if he thought he was in danger, Georgy Loboushkin has told RT

Telegram founder Pavel Durov wouldn’t have “disregarded his own safety” and landed in Paris if he thought the French authorities were serious about arresting him, his former press secretary Georgy Loboushkin has told RT. Loboushkin believes that the order to detain Durov likely came from Washington.

Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday, immediately after arriving from Azerbaijan by private jet. According to French media, prosecutors in Paris plan to charge the 39-year-old with complicity in drug trafficking, pedophilia offenses, and fraud, arguing that Telegram’s insufficient content moderation, its strong encryption tools, and its alleged lack of cooperation with police allow criminals to flourish on the app.

“It’s  a big mystery why he disregarded his own safety and decided to land in Paris,” Loboushkin told RT on Sunday. “He has shown throughout his history that he is a pretty cautious person in that sense. He has said many times that there is no point in going to jail.”

According to Loboushkin, the Russian-born businessman must have been unaware that a warrant was being prepared for his arrest, or thought – given Telegram’s compliance with local laws and sanctions – that he wouldn’t be in serious trouble.

“I think the attack is coming neither from the EU nor from France,” Loboushkin said. “It’s most likely an attack from the United States, which has been after Pavel Durov for a long time, and Durov has always talked about it.”

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“He said, for example in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that he and his employees are under pressure, or at least there’s some kind of surveillance conducted by the FBI,” the former spokesman continued. “I think the root causes are there, so it doesn’t make any sense to discuss the intentions of the French authorities who arrested him, because they don’t play any role here at all.”

In an interview with Carlson in April, Durov said that he drew “too much attention” from law enforcement any time he visited the US, and claimed that American intelligence agents had attempted to recruit one of his employees to install a backdoor in the app that would have allowed them to spy on Telegram users.

Loboushkin is not the only commentator to suggest that the US was behind Durov’s arrest. “The Americans are behind the situation as a whole,” Ekaterina Mizulina, the head of Russia’s Safe Internet League, said on Sunday, alleging that Washington wanted both to restrict the free flow of information and attack TON, a blockchain platform originally developed by Telegram’s creators. With major Russian companies investing in TON, the arrest is essentially “a continuation of the US’ sanctions policy,” Mizulina wrote on Telegram.

American investor David Sacks claimed on Sunday that Durov’s commitment to free speech and user privacy made him a target in Washington. Writing on X, Sacks declared that “using allied countries to circumvent First Amendment protections is the new Rendition,” referring to the US’ use of foreign airports and military bases to transport terror suspects in the years following the September 11 attacks.