“He turned himself in”, behind the scenes of 007 –

The case of Pavel Durov “can be considered political, if France does not provide serious evidence of his guilt,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitir Peskov said, as reported by Russian media, referring to the arrest of the Telegram founder in Paris. Russia, he added, “is ready to provide the necessary help and assistance, but here the situation is complicated by the fact that Durov is also a French citizen.” Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the arrest “is not a political decision.”

The head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, said he was confident that the founder of Telegram will not disclose sensitive information to the West. This was reported by Tass. “I expect that he will not do so,” Naryshkin told the press. The speaker of the State Duma, Viacheslav Volodin, accused the US of being “behind the arrest” of Durov. Meanwhile, Moscow’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, pointed the finger at Paris: the French authorities arrested Durov “on someone’s advice, hoping to gain access to the encryption codes” of the messaging app.

The key to opening the app’s secret conversations is at the heart of a behind-the-scenes story published by Dagospia according to which Durov would have allowed himself to be captured voluntarily. But why? The site cites sources from the secret services who had been following him for some time with the suspicion that Durov “was an undercover Russian FSB agent”. “He turned himself in to French prisons for fear of being killed by Vladimir Putin, whose pressure (euphemism) to hand over the codes and personal data of Telegram users in order to decrypt the messages, would have become unsustainable”, we read in the reconstruction, .