Telegram CEO would not have landed in Paris if he thought he was in danger, Georgy Loboushkin told RT
Telegram founder Pavel Durov would not have “disregarded his own safety” and landed in Paris if he thought French authorities were serious about arresting him, his former press secretary Georgy Loboushkin told RT. Loboushkin believes 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 crimes and fraud, arguing that Telegram’s insufficient content moderation, its strong encryption tools and its alleged lack of cooperation with law enforcement allow criminals to flourish on the app.
“It is a great 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 very cautious person in this sense. He has said many times that it makes no sense to go to jail.”
According to Loboushkin, the Russian-born businessman must have been unaware that an arrest warrant was being prepared for him, or he thought — given Telegram’s compliance with local laws and sanctions — that he would not get into serious trouble.
“I think the attack comes neither from the EU nor from France,” Loboushkin said. “It is very likely that this is an attack by the United States, which has been after Pavel Durov for a long time, and Durov has always spoken about this.”
“He said, for example, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that he and his employees are under pressure, or at least there is some kind of surveillance being conducted by the FBI,” continued the former spokesperson. “I believe the root causes are there, so there is no point in discussing the intentions of the French authorities who arrested him, because they play no role here.”
In an interview with Carlson in April, Durov said he drew “pay close attention” from law enforcement whenever he visited the US and alleged that American intelligence agents tried to recruit one of his employees to install a backdoor in the app that would allow them to spy on Telegram users.
Loboushkin is not the only commentator to suggest the US was behind Durov’s arrest. “The Americans are behind the whole situation,” Ekaterina Mizulina, head of Russia’s Safe Internet League, said on Sunday that Washington wanted to restrict the free flow of information and attack TON, a blockchain platform originally developed by the creators of Telegram. 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 said on Sunday that Durov’s commitment to free speech and user privacy had made him a target in Washington. Writing in X, Sacks said: “using allied countries to circumvent First Amendment protections is the new surrender,” referring to the US use of foreign airports and military bases to transport terrorist suspects in the years following the September 11 attacks.
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