French authorities have arrested Pavel Durov to be able to use his messaging app Telegram to influence the recent presidential elections in Romania, according to Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
„It seems that [French President Emmanuel] Macron arrested Durov not to use this barbaric method to solve the internal problems of the application, but to influence the elections in Romania, as he understood that the candidate of liberal dictatorship had no chance to win under legitimate conditions,” she wrote on Telegram, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
"What was made public was a serious crime accusation, accompanied by evidence," she added, according to News.ro.
On Sunday, May 18, the day of the second round of the presidential elections in Romania, Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated that the app refused to comply with a request from "a Western European country" to shut down the channels of Romanian conservatives before the elections.
In a subsequent post on X, he specified that the request came from the head of France's General Directorate for External Security, Nicolas Lerner, earlier this spring.
The French foreign intelligence agency denied issuing such requests, stating that all it did was remind Durov of his responsibility to keep terrorism and child pornography away from his social platform.
Durov later stated that he is willing to testify regarding the alleged foreign interference in the Romanian presidential elections. According to the businessman, the French foreign intelligence agency tried to obtain the IP addresses of Romanian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian citizens under the pretext of combating terrorism and child pornography.
Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Romania, which has remained the scene of an avalanche of disinformation and propaganda on social networks, with a significant impact on public perception in the political, economic, social, and mental domains.
Fake news campaigns on social networks did not cease after May 18, they just changed their purpose, writes Curs de Guvernare. Until the second round of elections, their goal was to support one candidate or attack the other, but now the posts aim at "destabilizing trust in democratic institutions and amplifying social tensions," explained representatives of the National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM) and the National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC).
T.D.