$TON info Pavel Durov

A maneuver to escape the Russian regime?

Arrested and placed in police custody Saturday evening, the Franco-Russian was perfectly aware of what he was risking by landing on French soil. His arrival on the tarmac at Le Bourget therefore gave rise to the theory of a voluntary arrest. "I see two hypotheses in the arrest of Pavel Durov […] The contact, direct or indirect, with Putin went badly. Aware of an imminent threat, he voluntarily went to France to be arrested. It is better to be in the hands of the French justice system and therefore under its protection than "soon to be dead", analyses Baptiste Robert, a French cybersecurity researcher and hacker, on X. It must be said that the 39-year-old billionaire does not seem to have very good relations with Moscow. Since he launched VKontakte (VK), the Russian equivalent of Facebook, in 2006, the entrepreneur has been under pressure from the Russian government, which wanted to collect data from the site's users. Pressure that led him to leave the management of his company and then flee Russia in 2014. Only a year after the launch of another platform: Telegram, a free encrypted messaging service that now has nearly a billion users.