New Platforms, Old Tactics

These drone videos were published by Ratnik2nd, a group that is largely based off of Telegram and ran by Mikhail Adrnonik, a member of the DNR’s Military Press Service. Despite the Russian government’s bungled attempts at blocking Telegram, it has become a very popular messaging application for newly-established information portals concerning the Russian-led “republics” in eastern Ukraine.

Recently, for example, Andronik’s Ratnik2nd channel published photographs on its Telegram channel of a homemade military vehicle in Donetsk created out of a Volkswagen van.

(Source: Telegram / Ratnik2nd)

A number of official, semi-official (like Ratnik2nd), and unofficial sources within Donetsk use Telegram as a messaging platform similar to ВКонтакте (Vkontakte) or Odnoklassniki — to spread either basic information or more political messaging. Some of these channels include:

There are dozens of other groups that concern either specific cities in occupied areas of eastern Ukraine, or the entire Donbas. But perhaps the most interesting development in the last year are start-ups who work on Telegram in a fashion similar to propaganda outlets like News-Front did in 2014 when emerging on YouTube.

Groups like the aforementioned Ratnik2nd and WarGonzo have a tremendous amount of access to military groups and commanders in occupied areas of the Donbas, and will often post exclusive — sometimes fascinating — photographs and videos from the front lines. Almost a year after it was established, WarGonzo operates a number of pages on various social networks (such as a Facebook page with about 500 followers, a YouTube channel with over over 70,000 subscribers, and a VK page with over 7,000 followers), but its Telegram channel, boasting nearly 30,000 subscribers, is the hub of its activity. Its YouTube channel, however, is more focused on detailing weapon systems rather than news or explicitly ideological content.

WarGonzo was started by Semyon Pegov, the former war correspondent of the notorious LifeNews channel. Perhaps the biggest scoop from this fledgling organization came in February of this year, when they published alleged recordings of soldiers in Syria during the battle between American forces and Wagner mercenaries. Four months later, the details around this incident are still murky, including how WarGonzo apparently received these recordings — if they are real. This “scoop” was widely covered in both American and Russian media.

With the outbreak of war in the Donbas, overnight media outlets emerged and fought on the front line of the information war, the most famous of which is likely News-Front. As Coda Story quotes the founder of News-Front, he sees his goal as fighting the information war on the side of Russia, but from the perspective of a defensive, rather than offensive, struggle. Like WarGonzo, News-Front gained popularity from being in the trenches of warfare and showing the conflict from a perspective that traditional journalists were not able to. Their most popular video on YouTube, for example, is a 24-minute clip during the Battle of Debaltseve, mostly filmed from the GoPro of someone standing alongside Russian/separatist forces.