ISTANBUL

Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Sunday accused France of asking him to remove some Moldovan channels from the social media platform ahead of the country’s presidential election last year.

In a statement on the Dubai-headquartered company, Durov claimed that the French intelligence services asked him “through an intermediary” to help the Moldovan government to censor “certain Telegram channels” before the vote on Oct. 20, in which incumbent President Maia Sandu secured a second term in office following a runoff held on Nov. 3.

He said a few channels were identified to have violated Telegram’s rules following reviews of the channels concerned and were subsequently removed.

“The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would ‘say good things’ about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year,” Durov said, describing this as “unacceptable on several levels.”

“If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania,” he further said.

Durov also said that Telegram later received a second list of "Moldovan channels," which he noted were “legitimate and fully compliant with our rules,” unlike the initial list.

“Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments. We refused to act on this request,” he went on to say, adding that Telegram is “committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons.”

“After Romania, Moldova. @durov likes making accusations while elections are ongoing,” the French Foreign Ministry, through its official response account, wrote on the US social media company X, in reference to similar accusations he made during Romania’s presidential election in May.

Durov was arrested in a Paris airport in August 2024 and later charged on multiple counts, including "complicity" in the spread of child abuse images and in drug trafficking.

Durov denied any guilt and defined the accusations as "legally and logically absurd." He was released on the day of his arrest on €5 million (about $5.4 million) bail under judicial supervision.

The statement comes as Moldova is holding a crucial parliamentary election, defined by Sandu as the “most consequential” in the country’s history, which is expected to not only decide the balance of power in parliament but also shape Chisinau’s bid for EU membership.