(Reuters) – A senior ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Washington was behind the French arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the messaging platform Telegram, which plays a key role in communicating about the war in Ukraine.
Durov, the Russian-born entrepreneur, was arrested in France over the weekend as part of an investigation into crimes related to child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions on the platform, French prosecutors said on Monday.
Without providing any evidence, Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the Russian State Duma, said that the United States had tried to exert control over Telegram through France.
“Telegram is one of the few and largest internet platforms over which the United States has no influence,” Volodin said in a post.
“On the eve of the US presidential election, it is important for (President Joe) Biden to get Telegram under control.”
The White House has not commented on Durov’s arrest. French President Emmanuel Macron said the arrest was “in no way a political decision.”
The Kremlin said on Monday that it had not yet received any official French accusations against Durov.
The encrypted Telegram app, based in Dubai, has nearly a billion users and is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading – content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
Some analysts call the platform a “virtual battlefield” of war, used extensively by both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Michael Perry)
