The GRU empire has taken off its masks. How anonymous Telegram channels work during the war

The network of anonymous Telegram channels continues to work for the benefit of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation - GR, transmitting messages about the "war lost by Ukraine" and the Zaluzhny-Zelensky conflict

A network of anonymous channels exposed by the Security Service of Ukraine as working for the GRU of the Russian Federation has increased the number of subscribers since the beginning of the war, restarted old regional projects and created about a hundred new ones.

"This GRU network lives in its dimension of laundering propaganda money that someone steals while sitting in Russia," said LIGA.net public relations consultant Andrey Kovalenko, who investigates propaganda on Telegram channels.

Telegram significantly complicates the process of exposing channel owners, Ilja Vitjuk, head of the SBU cyber security department, explains to LIGA.net. But in most cases, the management of destructive channels is carried out from Russia or from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

 

What has changed in the Ukrainian segment of Telegram, what kind of narratives are promoted by anonymous GRU channels after February 24, and what risks are posed by pseudo-news channels created by millionaires like Trukha.

 

"WE ARE WORKING ON THE PANIC FROM FEBRUARY 24"

 

Information special operations are an integral part of the Russian invasion. Subordination of Messenger Telegram is one of the key tasks of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Russia. After all, as sociological polls show, the majority of Ukrainians (59 percent) get news from social networks during the war, and 41 percent of this number is on Telegram.

Russian special services began an operation to monitor Ukraine's Telegram before the 2019 presidential election - by creating pseudo-Ukrainian channels that speak "from the inside" - from government offices.

In early 2020, LIGA.net conducted an extensive investigation into Ukrainian Telegram and found dozens of anonymous channels to be mass manipulation and pro-Kremlin narratives.

 

Some time later, the SBU exposed this network of 12 channels and admitted that they were under the surveillance of Russian intelligence services.

"The data available in the SBU indicate the direct involvement of the Russian special services: the FSB and the GRU," Vitjuk said.

The war showed the true face of these channels.

"Already on February 24, they tried to download the news program immediately. So that people who were woken up by the explosion would go to Telegram and see the news there," says Kovalenko.

During the night of February 24, the "Legitimni" channel lied about the "evacuation" of Zelensky to Poland. And at five in the morning they lied about the "expected destabilization and chaos" in the regional centers of Ukraine. The Russian landing, the GRU channel network wrote, is mostly almost finished in Zaporozhye and Odesa.

 

"On February 24, their task was to sow panic, make people flee the cities and block the roads for the passage of the Armed Forces," explains Kovalenko.

 

The Telegram network of the GRU began to publish a lot of news that is not at all characteristic of them. After all, before the invasion on February 24, there were up to five percent of such a day. And it was not classic news, but "schedules" about the upcoming conflicts in the Ukrainian government or the impoverishment of the people.

Subscriber dynamics of the 20 best pseudo-Ukrainian channels from September 2021 to September 2022 (infographic – Oleksandr Nadelnyuk/LIGA.net)

 

"The amount of content on online channels has increased. At the same time, there are almost no paid publications," says Kovalenko.

 

This may be due to the fact that one of the main customers who paid for the placement of material on the exposed channels were representatives of the banned OPZZ party.

"But sometimes you can see paid posts. Someone still lives in the pre-war paradigm," explains Kovalenko.

"This is an entire industry that 'spreads non-existent influence'. And it still lives (in Telegram. - Note. Ed.), - the adviser to the head of the President's Office, Mihail Podoljak, told LIGA.net. - It used to develop, especially, according to the testimony of our politicians who bought advertisements there for big money."

 

With the beginning of the war, Russian special services put a special emphasis on pseudo-Ukrainian regional channels with the names of cities: Obukhov, Balakleja, etc. About 200 of them were created, Kovalenko calculated, and at the beginning they were supported by as many bots.

"Such channels are designed to replace the voice of Ukraine in the conditions of the information ghetto created by the occupiers," Igor Solovej, director of the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, told LIGA.net.

In particular, the channel "Kievska Rus" spread the narratives of the Kremlin in the Kyiv region. There they published "reports" from the then still occupied village of Ivankov about "how Russian soldiers distribute bread and fight with drug addicts," says Kovalenko. After the de-occupation of Kyiv Oblast, the channel was empty for a month, but it started working again in May and now specializes in "all-Ukrainian topics".

Regional channels, which were exposed by the SBU in 2021 and stopped publishing posts in the fall of the same year, also continued to operate.

 

For example, the "Atypical Zaporozhye" channel has been dead since September 2021, and its last post was a repost from the "Legitimny" channel. In June 2022, the channel suddenly came to life and began to behave as a project for broadcasting Ukrainian news. He regularly publishes summaries of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and a video about how "our soldiers are chasing the Russians."

A similar evolution happened with the channels "Trempel Kharkiv" and "Nikolaev live". They continued their work in June-July 2022.

The "Kherson Live" channel has also been restarted. But, unlike his regional "colleagues", he stopped imitating the Ukrainian channel and behaves like a typical Kremlin propaganda spokesman, talking about the "Kiev Nazi regime" and agitating Kherson residents to get Russian passports.

From the media point of view, the idea of the Russians to create pseudo-local channels is understandable, says Kovalenko: "In this way, they tried to fill this niche, which was not too developed at the local level. The implementation of the

 

THE GOAL IS TO USE GREEN AND ZULUZ

 

The global narratives spread by the GRU's anonymous network have not changed, Iljuk says. The messages have changed.

 

"The key narrative that remains is that Ukraine is a failed state," says Ilyuk, stories that should show that the situation on the front is completely different and that everything was lost there a long time ago.

Another favorite story is about foreign policy. Iljuk specifically mentions the conspiracy theory that the USA and Great Britain are allegedly in conflict, which is why the USA bet on Zalužni, and Britain on Zelenski.

"Remember, Putin appealed to our army to lay down its arms?" Kovalenko continues relationships."

 

When the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Kherson region began, the channels rushed to spread the thesis that Ukraine was not ready for it, but the West ordered Zelensky to continue. The successful counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region is justified by the fact that "Russia has been at war for a long time not with Ukraine, but with NATO and Western weapons." Russian propagandists wrote the same.

"Actually, the channel network is doing what the Russian "military forces" are doing, but under the guise of Ukrainian media," explains Kovalenko.

After February 24, some pro-Russian channels added the words "News"/"War" to their headlines and began imitating traditional media.

"They take over 90 percent of the posts from traditional quality media. But they add a small key piece, which without systematic monitoring is almost impossible to see with the naked eye," explains Iljuk. "And an unprepared person can be caught. Even if, this person reads these channels knowing  that this is a pro-Russian network".

To legitimize the necessary messages, the network even uses foreign mass media. But in it is an usual form. In the fall of 2021, the MediaPost channel was created, which began to actively advertise on the pro-Russian network during the war. For example, the Resident channel has made more than 100 reposts from MediaPost since March.

MediaPost specializes in taking publications from foreign media and using them to support pro-Russian theses that Ukraine is allegedly dealing in arms.

 In most cases, this channel does not even provide a link to publish texts from foreign media, speculating on a paywall (paid access). Classic scheme: you take one sentence or part of the text, but do not display the entire text.

At the request of LIGA.net, the Security Service of Ukraine highlighted the following Russian information campaigns in Telegram:

 

- justification of the Russian Federation's military aggression against Ukraine;

- denial/justification of Putin's attacks on civilian objects in Ukraine;

- promotion of the narrative about the integration of the occupied territories of Ukraine into the socio-economic and political space of the Russian Federation;

- discrediting international support of Ukraine, diplomatic relations with partner countries;

- discrediting the highest military-political leadership of Ukraine, spreading rumors about the alleged conflict between the civilian command and the military command (especially since August. - Note Ed.);

- discrediting the Ukrainian armed forces, special services and law enforcement agencies of Ukraine.

 

HOW DANGEROUS IS THE TRUCK

 

There is no point in paying attention to the GRU's anonymous channels, LIGA.net assures Podoljak: "Today, this allegedly Russian network of channels has been completely discredited by absurd fakes, and the names of these channels are associated exclusively with Russian special services. "

"On every message you can find a channel with 100,000 subscribers and 50,000 views, and those will be bots - the kingdom of the dead, a show for one viewer, because some anonymous SMM is expanding the network of followers and advertisers," adds Podoljak.

"The GRU network is completely marginalized and lives in its dimension of laundering propaganda money," Kovalenko believes.

Iljuk agrees with that, but it's embarrassing how much anonymous news has grown in the past six months. An example is Trukha, which has become the most popular Telegram channel in Ukraine.

On February 24, 233,000 users subscribed to the Trukha channel. In less than a week of the war, there were more than 500,000 of them, and on September 15, there were more than 2.3 million.

What is this growth related to?

 

"Trukha and similar news gatherers immediately spread information about the war, which official authorized persons had no right to publish so quickly," explains Iljuk. "And people go there to satisfy their desire to know everything."

Most of such news is anonymous, Iljuk emphasizes.

"We don't know who is leading them. Either a Ukrainian is sitting there, or a fellow major who opened the second series of nets".

 

And now, according to Iljuk, the same kind of legitimization is happening with these channels that once happened with the GRU network.

"Traditional media quote them. Even on the air of the national broadcaster, they show a video on which the logo of these channels is clearly visible. Because usually the channels mark them," says Iljuk.

Kovalenko believes that it is useful for these channels to remain anonymous to the public in order to continue working with publicists. The latter supposedly know the end users and understand "who pays for PR".

 

WHAT TO DO WITH TELEGRAM

 

Is it possible to close enemy Telegram channels? This question remains unanswered throughout the existence of these channels.

"Companies that are part of the Telegram group are not registered in Ukraine and do not have their representatives on the territory of our country. Therefore, their activity in the Ukrainian information space is unregulated," says Vityuk.

From time to time, Telegram "cleans" bots, but you can find out about this only if you study the dynamics of subscribers, says Iljuk. And you can respond to any remote bot by purchasing new ones.

Some Telegram channels may be hidden in the search, that is, it will not be possible to find them in the messenger. This is a so-called "shadow ban" for channels that, according to the Telegram administration, abuse bots.

"Resident" and MediaKiller, which are part of the GRU network, cannot be found in the search. In November 2021, Telemetr service marked "Resident", "Spletnitsa", "Black Quarter", "Atypical Zaporozhye", "Odessa Brother" and "Dnipro Live" as bot channels.

But there are no official statements from Telegram about the existence of a "shadow ban".

"Currently, channels are blocked after the platform administration considers user complaints about the content," says Vityjuk. "Together with IT volunteers, we are making every effort to identify destructive Telegram channels and appeal."

The SBU constantly monitors Telegram channels for the spread of destructive content. This allows the resources through which information is collected to be disclosed to the detriment of defense capability.

"For example, if it concerns the deployment or movement of Ukrainian military units; data that can be used to adjust fire, personal data of soldiers, etc., Vitjuk continues.

 

Telegram founder, former director of Russian VKontakte Pavel Durov said on February 27 that channels are increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related to the war in Ukraine.

"In the event of an escalation of the situation, we will consider the possibility of partially or completely limiting the work of the Telegram channel in the countries involved for the duration of the conflict," said Durov.

But on the same day, Durov changed his decision. Many users reportedly approached him and "asked them not to limit Telegram."

The SBU told LIGA.net that the department "works within the framework of existing legislation and takes Telegram's corporate ethics into account."

With the start of the war, a number of news platforms joined forces with the Ministry of Digital Affairs to put pressure on Meta (the company that owns Facebook) to combat Russian disinformation, Iljuk says.

"Yes, the dialogue (with Facebook. - Editor's note) is complicated, but it exists. It has nothing to do with the Telegram administration. We tried to contact them, but we did not receive any response. Durov continues to claim that Telegram is a place of freedom," says Detektor Media analyst Iljuk.

Blocking the Telegram application so that it cannot be used on the territory of Ukraine is not an option, according to experts.

"Everyone will suffer from being blocked. After all, Telegram is one of the main sources of information for people using smartphones," Kovalenko explains.

Given that it is not possible to reach an agreement with the owners of the messenger, it is necessary to create a quality Ukrainian alternative. And, of course, media education is important: people should be taught to recognize the harmful influence of the media themselves and not to believe them.