Pavel Durov

I'll be fine if they put me into prison for 20 years.

Which, let's be clear, it's not something that I think is realistic.

But let's just think about it as a hypothetical situation.

I would rather starve myself to death and die there, reboot the whole game, than do something stupid.

So when I got stuck in France, unable to leave the country for a few months,

I was offered to meet the head of state foreign intelligence services through a person I know quite well.

He's actually a well-known tech entrepreneur in France, and he's well-connected.

And he said, this guy wants to meet you.

I said, okay, fine.

Let's do that, but I'm not promising anything.

I took the meeting, and in this meeting, I was asked...

I don't know if you followed the whole saga with the Romanian elections.

They had a presidential elections last year.

The results got canceled.

Now Romania at that point when I had this meeting was preparing for a new presidential elections.

The conservative candidate was not somebody who the French government was supportive of.

So they asked me whether I would be shutting down, or ready to shut down, channels on Telegram that supported the conservative candidate.

or protest against the pro-European candidates, so they called the guy they liked.

I said, look, if there is no violation of the rules of Telegram, which are quite clear, you can't call to violence.

But if it's a peaceful demonstration, if it's a peaceful debate, we can't do this.