MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/. Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said that he refused to ban channels of Romanian conservatives ahead the presidential election in that country as requested by French intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner.
"This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hotel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused. We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe," he wrote on his X page.
Earlier in the day, he said that a Western European government asked Telegram "to silence conservative voices in Romania" but he refused to do this.
Romania held runoff presidential election on May 18. These were repeat presidential elections. The planned election was interrupted at the end of last year by the Constitutional Court of Romania (CC) after nationalist candidate Calin Georgescu received the majority of votes in the first round on November 24, 2024. This was done under the pretext of illegal financing of Georgescu's campaign, hacker attacks on the digital infrastructure used in the electoral process, as well as alleged, but unproven, Russian interference.