On Saturday, French border officials and military police arrested 39-year-old French-Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram, while in transit at Paris’ Le Bourget airport. Durov was detained because he was a flight risk and charged with 12 offenses, including drug trafficking, child pornography, organized crime and providing unauthorized cryptographic services.
French President Emmanuel Macron defended the arrest on Twitter yesterday and warned against “misinformation” about Durov’s arrest. He claimed: “The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place in the context of an ongoing judicial investigation. It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on this matter.”
In reality, Durov’s arrest and detention is blatantly politically motivated and reactionary, and lacks any sound legal basis. It is aimed at aiding NATO powers in their war against Russia in Ukraine and paving the way for escalating attacks on democratic rights, including privacy and freedom of information online, in the countries where Telegram’s 900 million users are located, primarily in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and India.
In particular, representatives of the NATO governments and the far-right Ukrainian regime have repeatedly called for a ban on the app, which is very popular in Ukraine, accusing it of being a channel for “Russian propaganda” that questions their war against Russia.
Durov is a Russian citizen who left Russia in 2014 to live in Dubai and took French citizenship after running afoul of the Kremlin over his refusal to share information from the social network VKontakte with Russian state authorities. He was arrested at Le Bourget airport on Saturday, accompanied by his bodyguard and assistant Yulia Vavilova, both of whom were released.
The 12 charges he faces stem from an initial investigation secretly launched against Durov by the French Office for Violence against Minors (Ofmin). None of the charges are directed against Durov’s own conduct, but argue that Durov is personally responsible for alleged criminal activities by other users of the Telegram app. This contrived legal argument has led to what The World was a “world first” in terms of the arrest of executives of major social media companies.
Immediately after the arrest, a French police investigator boasted to TF1 News: “(Durov) messed up tonight. We don’t know why. … Was he just passing through France? Whatever, now we have him in our pocket.”
Another said that Durov would not be allowed to leave prison even after his pre-trial detention ends tomorrow: “Pavel Durov will end up in pre-trial detention, that’s for sure. On his platform, he has allowed people to commit an incalculable number of crimes and offenses without trying to mitigate them or cooperate with us.”
However, coverage in Russian and pro-NATO media makes it clear that the arrest is linked to NATO’s war against Russia and its attempts to contain popular opposition to the war both in Ukraine and around the world.
Russian media openly fear that the arrest and detention of Durov could have a devastating impact on the operations of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, which use Telegram extensively. “Telegram could become a tool of NATO if Pavel Durov is forced to obey the French secret services,” Moskovsky Komsomolets explained. “Telegram chats contain a huge amount of vital, strategic information. … If Telegram crashes, how will (our army) fight?”
Marielle Wijermars, a professor at Maastricht University, told France24: “Telegram is widely used for communication in the army and the political establishment. And it is obvious that many Russian officials must fear that France will put pressure on the Telegram boss to gain access to their communications data.”
Moreover, since the beginning of the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has proven to be a source of information and footage about the war that went unfiltered by NATO and Ukrainian media, especially about the massive losses of Ukrainian troops and NATO equipment. The availability of this information, which refuted false official narratives of the Ukrainian army’s alleged victories against Russia, soon attracted hostility from NATO governments and pro-NATO media.
“As the war rages in Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has emerged as the go-to source for unfiltered, live updates on the war,” US National Public Radio noted in 2022, complaining that the app risked fuelling opposition to the NATO war. “Telegram, which has little control over its content, has also become a hub for Russian propaganda and disinformation. Many pro-Kremlin channels have become popular…”
Faced with growing opposition to the war among the Ukrainian population, representatives of the far-right regime in Kyiv this year called for Telegram to be silenced. Ultimately, Ukrainian officials did not dare to take this step, as 72 percent of the Ukrainian population uses the app. However, they repeatedly made it clear that they see the app as a critical domestic political threat, especially if Durov did not agree to censor Russian sources on Telegram.
Ukrainian military intelligence official Andriy Yusov told Deutsche Welle (DW) that Telegram poses a threat to Ukraine’s “information and not only information security.” Ukrainian officials have repeatedly complained that Telegram’s anonymity and privacy mean their intelligence services, notorious for their brutal repression of political dissidents, are unable to identify and track down the identities of people posting materials they dislike.
Ukrainian parliamentarian Yaroslav Yurchyshin told DW that he could support a ban on Telegram “if cooperation with Telegram does not work out,” because “the price of such gaps in information security, which allow Russian propaganda to easily penetrate Ukrainian information products, is very high in our country. For our citizens, this is a matter of life and death.”
The reason for Durov’s arrest is not fabricated charges of alleged complicity in child pornography, but the war waged by NATO powers against Russian forces in Ukraine and their attempt to censor news about that war in order to curb resistance in Ukraine and NATO countries. The arrest is not only directed against resistance to the war in Ukraine, but also against resistance in the imperialist NATO countries. Macron’s call to send troops to Ukraine to wage war against Russia is also extremely unpopular, facing almost 90 percent opposition in both Western Europe and the United States.
French and NATO officials also intend to arrest a Russian billionaire in an effort to undermine support for the war and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime among Russia’s ruling capitalist oligarchy, which emerged from the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Recently, Ukraine invaded Russia near Kursk – a sign that, despite military setbacks by the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime, NATO intends to escalate the conflict and force Russia to surrender.
By arresting Durov, France and its imperialist NATO allies are warning Russia’s corrupt ruling elites that their wealth abroad and their lives are not safe unless they submit to NATO policies and plans to dismember and plunder Russia.
This makes it clear that completely reactionary political forces are behind Durov’s arrest and that this arrest will lead to further attacks on Internet freedom.
