PARIS (Reuters) – Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and chief executive of messaging app Telegram, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 and BFMTV reported, citing unnamed sources.
Durov was travelling on his private plane, TF1 said on its website, adding that he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
Both TF1 and BFM said the investigation focused on the lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered this situation to allow criminal activity to continue unchecked on the messaging app.
The encrypted Telegram app, which has nearly a billion users, has a particular influence in Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet republics. It is ranked as one of the main social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat.
Telegram did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. The French interior ministry and police had no comment.
Durov, who was born in Russia, founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his social media platform VKontakte, which he sold.
“I would rather be free than take orders from anyone,” Durov told American journalist Tucker Carlson in April, about leaving Russia and looking for a home for his company, which had included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became the primary source of unfiltered — and sometimes graphic and misleading — content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
The platform has become what some analysts call a “virtual battlefield” for the war, and is used extensively by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
Telegram, which allows users to evade official scrutiny, has become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased restrictions on independent media in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western NGOs to demand his release.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to give state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.
The move interrupted several third-party services, but had little impact on Telegram’s availability there. But the ban order sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
“neutral platform”
Dubai-based Durov was travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8pm (1800 GMT), TF1 said.
Durov, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $15.5 billion, said some governments have sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “geopolitical player.”
However, Telegram’s growing popularity has drawn scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, over concerns about security and data breaches.
Russia’s representative to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians on Sunday were quick to accuse France of acting like a dictatorship — the same criticism Moscow faced when it made demands of Durov in 2014 and tried to block Telegram in 2018.
“Some naive people still do not understand that if they play a more or less visible role in the international information sphere, it is not safe for them to visit countries that are moving towards much more inclusive societies,” Ulyanov wrote on X.
“It’s 2030 in Europe, and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said after reports of Durov’s arrest.
Several Russian bloggers called for protests to be held outside French embassies around the world on Sunday afternoon.
(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander and Gilles Guillaume in Paris, Lydia Kelly in Melbourne and Camille Renaud in Toronto; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by David Gregorio and Lincoln Feast)
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