(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 the CEO of the Telegram messaging platform that plays a key role communicating 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 evidence, Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s State Duma lower house of parliament, said that the United States, through France, attempted to exert control over Telegram.
“Telegram is one of the few and at the same time the largest Internet platforms over which the United States has no influence,” Volodin said in a post.
“On the eve of the U.S. presidential election, it is important for (President Joe) Biden to take Telegram under control.”
The White House has not commented on Durov’s arrest. French President Emmanuel Macron has said that the arrest was “in no way a political decision.”
The Kremlin on Monday said it had yet to see any official French accusations against Durov.
The encrypted Telegram app, based in Dubai, has close to 1 billion users and is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
After Russia launched its 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.
The platform has become what some analysts call “a virtual battlefield” for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Michael Perry)
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