Pro-Russian Telegram channels in the Balkans are an increasingly popular training ground for recruitment and disinformation

 

In less than a year and a half, the Telegram channel "Slovenski medvedi" has attracted more than 50,000 followers by publishing thousands of videos and tens of thousands of photos about events that are important for Russia for citizens of Serbia to know about.

 

This channel, created in January 2023, a year after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wants to be "the voice of Russia in Serbia and the voice of the Serbian people", and is one of the fastest growing pro-Russian Telegram channels.

 

In one of their recent posts to their more than 54,000 followers, they were raising money for the war in Ukraine.

 

"You can support the guys from the 4th Brigade and participate in the fund-raising campaign for the purchase of a quadcopter as part of the 'All for Victory' project from the People's Front," reads this post.

 

Members of the People's Front, a political coalition founded by Russian President Vladimir Putin, recently visited Republika Srpska and developed close ties with the mayor of Višegrad while paying tribute to Russian volunteers in the Republika Srpska Army.

 

In just over a year, the channel has published almost 30,000 photos and 8,000 video content, and is connected to another 65 similar channels that promote the Russian invasion and share content related to Republika Srpska, Kosovo and Russia.

 

In recent months, the content was cross-transmitted from the defunct channel "Permski Medvedi", whose administrator was Dario Ristić, BH. citizen who went to the battlefield in Ukraine, as Detektor discovered in a recent survey. Apart from him, that channel was managed by citizens of Serbia.

 

These channels are part of the increasingly popular trend of using the Telegram communication application, instead of social networks, to spread Russian disinformation and calls for recruitment in the Western Balkans, which Detektor journalists, following Russian Telegram channels, noticed. Although it is not a new phenomenon, the number of channels and the intensity of the announcements seem to be higher than the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Telegram has proven to be the most suitable platform for spreading various types of

disinformation, calling for support for Russia, sharing various media content from the battlefield and narratively mobilizing the citizens of the Western Balkan countries to join the "fight against the West" due to its weak content restrictions.

 

With the help of analytical tools such as Telemetrio and TGstat, Detektor journalists singled out the 23 most popular channels and analyzed their content and mutual interaction.

 

Some of these channels are founded in Russia, publish in Russian, or use Russian state media as their main sources of information, but are aimed at an audience from the Western Balkans.

 

Experts from Serbia, where the largest number of channels analyzed by Detektor were launched, explain how - regardless of their location of establishment - these Telegram channels are very much dedicated to BiH, especially to spreading influence in Republika Srpska.

 

Analyst and digital forensic expert Nataša Kilibarda tells Detektor that Telegram has become fertile ground for Russian influence in the Western Balkans, mostly through so-called information operations through influence, and their connection is not the result of coincidence.

 

"Administrators of the Telegram channel become literal influencers of propaganda and war-mongering activities," she says.

 

"The connection and mutual promotion of the channels is integrated, orchestrated and with a clearly formed narrative", explains Kilibarda and adds that the content is usually pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western, anti-LGBT, against the resolution in Srebrenica and on the issue of Kosovo.

 

 

1.149 / 5.000

This is precisely why she emphasizes that the influence of Telegram influencers should not be ignored as an almost clear issue of national security through radicalization and extremism.

 

Especially because in its ten years of existence, this platform, as stated by Kilibarda, has never once given the digital addresses and phone numbers of its users to researchers, even though this is stated in their privacy policy. They state this fact themselves in the part of the policy in which they claim that, in case of suspicion of terrorism, they would provide data on users to the police services - who request it.

 

While other social networks, such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram, are making efforts to cooperate with law enforcement agencies around the world to remove criminal activity from their platforms, Telegram has devoted only three sentences to the topic in its 15-page privacy policy.

 

"On the other hand, we are witnessing that Telegram is used as a means of communication and mobilization by numerous actors whose criminal activity - directly or indirectly, but to a large

extent and unprovable - has led to numerous harmful consequences for national or individual security," observes Kilibarda.

 

Calling and joining foreign military and paramilitary formations is prohibited by laws in BiH and Serbia, but a significant number of Telegram channels continue to encourage volunteers to fight in Ukraine. Dario Ristić from Modriča used Telegram to report on his journey to the front line in Ukraine.

 

Kilibarda explains that Telegram, along with Vkontakte, is the only social network whose use the Russian government has approved for the country's military.

 

"Taking all of that into account, it gives us at least an indication that the Kremlin entered the conversation on Telegram a long time ago, but also that as such, Telegram has long been a fertile ground for various types of abuse, including extremism and terrorist activities," she says.

 

First among equals: Berić and the rebels

 

Dejan Berić is one of the most famous Serbian volunteers in the Russian army, and his channel is the most visited pro-Russian Telegram in BiH, Serbia and Montenegro. He has more than 110,000 followers, publishes about 100 posts a day, and in 24 hours his content is viewed by 25,000 followers. This channel devotes the largest number of quotes to other pro-Russian channels such as "Bunt is a state of mind" and "Ocilo", and to Russian media outlets such as Sputnik.

 

Also, this is the most popular Telegram channel in the Serbian language.

 

Its reach is significantly greater than the number of followers. In January, February and March 2024, Berić's channel reached almost a million people through linking and sharing on other channels. In that period, the number of his followers increased by almost 5,000 people.

 

The most popular posts in the last few weeks, which have been viewed tens of thousands of times, are dedicated to the Serbian-Russian brotherhood, Orthodoxy, glorifying the Russian invasion of Ukraine and criticizing NATO.

 

Since 2020, the "Bunt" channel has been used to spread pro-Serbian and pro-Russian propaganda. Launched under the name "Rebellion of Montenegro", a year later it changed its name to the one it bears today.

 

The number of new members has grown rapidly since the start of the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when it grew by almost 30,000 in just a few weeks, and today has more than 85,000 followers.

 

Kilibarda says that a large number of pro-Russian channels appeared in the spring of 2022 and that a large part of their propaganda activity is directed precisely to the area of the Western Balkans.

 

"Now it's no secret that Telegram, as a platform, is becoming more and more popular among right-wingers, extremists, disinformation and conspiracy theorists," says Kilibarda.

 

Telegram is set to reach its first billion active users soon.

 

"That megalomaniac growth was achieved for at least three reasons: the migration of users from Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp, mistrust of the mainstream media, which is simultaneously accompanied by a great interest in global socio-political topics," adds Kilibarda.

 

Members of the "Bunt" channel share daily content related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a large part of the published content refers to the Republika Srpska and military officials during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, among whom Ratko Mladić, former commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, stands out, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the genocide in Srebrenica and other crimes in BiH.

 

The term "Bosnia and Herzegovina" is mentioned on the channel a total of 158 times, and at least 100 times in the last year.

 

Dejan Berić's channel, in addition to "Bunta", is also connected to the "Srpski vjesnik" channel, Detektor's analysis shows. Almost all the channels analyzed by Detektor are registered in Serbia.

 

In this country, Russian propaganda is felt at every step, says Sofija Todorović, program director of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia.

 

"We currently have ministers in the new government who are openly pro-Russian, so the question is how many narratives we can classify as propaganda that comes dominantly from outside, if such attitudes and views are represented and promoted by people in important state positions," she says.

 

He adds that many civil society organizations point to the harmfulness of Russian propaganda, especially because it "plays with the still open wounds of the region, using victims and hostilities in an extremely malicious way that lacks ethics and dignity."

 

The "Combat Effectiveness" channel is another fast-growing one, with 100 new followers per month and a total of more than 42,000. Created in 2018 under the name "God of War", "Combat Effectiveness" can reach a viewership and readership of more than 200,000 people per month, which has increased in recent months.

 

A significant share of the posts published in May 2024 was devoted to the Resolution on the genocide in Srebrenica.

 

More than 80 percent of the posts referring to the Republika Srpska, which include the glorification of war criminals, were published after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, as well as more than 90 percent of the posts mentioning Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

For the past two years, the detector has been monitoring several dozen Telegram channels whose content is predominantly pro-Russian. Their activity and popularity have grown significantly in the last few months, so Detektor, using the analytical tools Telemetrio and TGstat, paid attention to the 23 largest channels and analyzed when they were created and how quickly they developed, what content they publish most often and how interconnected they are, i.e. connected.

 

Both sides of the Drina

 

The "Army of the Republika Srpska" channel is dedicated to "patriots and veterans of the Army of the Republika Srpska" and has seen a great increase in popularity in recent months. In just one month, he gained several hundred new followers, and in the first five months of 2024, the number jumped by more than 2,000 people.

 

It was created two days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine under the name "debeljača1" (fatty girl1). The YouTube channel with the same name and link has more than 50,000 followers, and the content is mainly dedicated to the Army of the Republika Srpska.

 

The channel publishes more than 40 posts a day, and the largest number of shares of this channel's content is recorded on other pro-Russian channels such as "Kaizer Soze", "Srpski svijet" and "Srpska sparta - Info".

 

The most read posts on the "Army of the Republika Srpska" channel are aimed at affirming the Russian invasion of Ukraine and glorifying convicted war criminals.

 

On the channel "Republika Srpska" the description says "Republika Srpska, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Montenegro". Conceptually similar to "The Discovery of History", it was created in April 2022 with a Latin name, but soon changed the script to Cyrillic.

 

On the channel, it is easy to find war footage from the Ukrainian battlefield from the perspective of the Russian army and its interests, as well as the content of service information about the work of officials from Republika Srpska and the anniversary of the martyrdom. The content from the channel was shared the most on the channels "Srpski svijet" and "Srpska Sparta-Info".

 

Since its creation in May 2023, "Srpska Sparta-Info" has attracted 12,000 subscribers, of which more than 70 percent are men. The type of posts is focused on events in Serbia and Kosovo, and Republika Srpska was also continuously covered as a topic.

 

In addition, the channel often publishes pro-Russian content, highlighting the brotherhood that exists between Russians and Serbs. The power of this channel's reach is illustrated by the fact that with the help of republication, through channels such as "Republika Srpska" and "Army of the Republika Srpska", messages reach up to 300,000 people, which was the case in February 2024.

 

About Republika Srpska and Serbia in Russian

 

"Balkanist" - one of the more popular Telegram channels, where the official language of communication is Russian - was created in 2019 and is dedicated to Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. Republika Srpska. Since February 2021 and the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, "Balkanist" has expanded its activities to Yandex, the Russian version of a search engine like Google, introduced a YouTube channel and created an official internet portal and podcast.

 

One of the donors of this channel, whose number of followers has tripled in a year, is Platon Besedin, a Ukrainian-Russian writer known to the public as a pro-Russian propagandist, and at the same time, the "Balkanist" channel broadcasts his content in most cases.

 

The most popular content on the channel "Istok info" refers to the activities of the Russian army in Ukraine. The channel was created a few weeks after the start of the Russian invasion, and the content is most often shared in similar channels - "Serbian Herald", "Eastern Front", "Republika Srpska" and "Serbian World".

 

"Serbski vestnik", launched in September 2021, is primarily dedicated to the Russian audience and created in the Russian language, but it brings news about Serbia and the Balkans.

 

As the description of the channel says, the most common contents they share are related to Serbia, and quite often the posts are dedicated to events in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is often about certain anniversaries, especially from the war, and only the term "Republika Srpska" was mentioned in 76 posts during May 2024. Due to mutual content sharing, the reach of this channel's posts in May was 1.8 million users.

 

The largest number of posts shared by "Serbski vestnik" are actually news from the Russian state media RT.

 

Todorović notes that RT publishes articles that present the work of certain civil society organizations in a very negative way, such as, for example, the Youth Initiative.

 

"Telegram channels are one of the very active means of spreading Russian propaganda, and there are also various online portals that present themselves as media but are not actually registered as such anywhere, so it is very difficult for them to be held legally responsible for their actions," claims Todorović.

 

The channel "About Serbia in Russian" is also connected with Russian media. It was created in 2017 under the name RuSerbia.com, which is the official website of the media of the same name registered in the Russian Federation.

 

"Our goal is to quickly inform Russian-speaking users about events in Serbia and other countries of the Balkan region, to strengthen cultural and economic cooperation," says the description of the RuSerbia.com website.

 

The channel has 11,300 followers, and the most quoted are other pro-Russian channels such as "Serbski Vestnik", "Balkanska Spletnica" and "Russie Z".

 

The words "Bosnia and Herzegovina" are mentioned more than 900 times on the channel, 250 of them in just the last 12 months. Although "Republika Srpska" has been mentioned more than 1,300 times in the last seven years of the channel's existence, in the last 12 months it has been mentioned more frequently and has been recorded as many as 500 times.

 

Live war and denial of genocide

 

Another channel that promotes the Russian-Serbian world and similar efforts "Evil Eagles" was created a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The author of this channel, Aleksandar Lisov, director of the "Russian-Serbian Center Orlovi" - which was registered in Saint Petersburg in November 2017 - according to Radio Free Europe's research, maintains contacts with representatives of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, and also met with Arno Guyon, former a member of the French extreme right-wing group "Identity Generation", whose activity was banned by the French authorities in 2021. Today, Gujon is the director of the Directorate for Cooperation with the Diaspora and Serbs in the Region at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.

 

"Rat Uživo", a channel whose name is decorated with the flags of Russia and Ukraine, is one of the channels in Serbia and the primary language is Serbian. With more than 21,000 followers, this channel can boast that it has almost doubled its audience in the last year.

 

The channel was created in October 2022. He has been spreading pro-Russian and pro-Serbian propaganda in recent weeks by writing about protests in Georgia against the Russian-inspired Foreign Agents Law and news about the Srebrenica Genocide Resolution.

 

The most popular post concerns Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and in it they celebrate the fighters of the infamous Russian military formation "Espanol", which fights in Ukraine and whose members are modeled on the "Tigers", the paramilitary unit of Željko Ražnatović Arkan from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

The content of the "Eastern Front" channel, which was also created a few days before Russia's general invasion of Ukraine, is shared by other visited channels whose authors are from Serbia

or the region, and among them is the channel dedicated to the party "We, Strength of the People", a Serbian politician and theoretician. the conspiracy of Branimir Nestorović.

 

Kilibarda says that earlier analyzes by digital forensics show that networks of channels with the same names are also formed.

 

"It has been shown that, for example, the 'InforDefSerbian' network works very successfully in the Serbian language as well, spreading digital propaganda, misinformation and misleading content," she says.

 

"InfoDefenseSERBIA" is the propaganda channel of the most famous Russian military blogger Yuri Podoljak. He is an ethnic Ukrainian who was sentenced to 15 years in absentia in Ukraine for spreading Russian propaganda. The channel was founded in October 2022 and today has more than 14,000 members and all the content that is transmitted has been translated from Russian and Ukrainian to Serbian.

 

The most popular content was published on May 15, when there was a major military operation by the Russian army in the east of Ukraine, which was practically reported live from the scene.

 

These channels seem to be becoming increasingly important to the Russian authorities and their intermediaries. Recently, the Russian Telegram channel "Rybar", with more than a million followers, boasted that it held trainings in Serbia and Republika Srpska on running Telegram channels and their networking for 500 participants, including students, journalists, politicians and academics.

 

This channel was founded by a former employee of the Public Relations Office of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Mikhail Sergeevich Zvinchuk, who was put on the sanctions list by Ukraine and the EU. In an interview for RTVI in 2022, he said that 40 permanent employees manage the channel.

 

"Rybar" stated in its publication that Zvinchuk himself held closed training sessions on how to use Telegram and avoid X, Facebook and Instagram. They added that they have chosen ten promising projects and arranged new live training sessions.