Propaganda on Telegram: A comparative analysis of pro-Russian digital media stratification
Propaganda on Telegram: A comparative analysis of pro-Russian digital media stratification
This memo examines how pro-war Russian-language Telegram channels framed the war in Ukraine and Western actors during peace negotiations over six months after the Anchorage summit of August 2025. Drawing on a corpus of over 500,000 posts from 117 channels, the study moves beyond treating pro-war Telegram as a single propagandistic bloc and instead examines how framing varies across distinct categories of channels. We find that the Telegram ecosystem is stratified along multiple dimensions that do not always align. The channels that produced the strongest political framing of Western actors were not the channels that reached the largest audiences, and different categories favored different rhetoric. Mass-audience news outlets frequently engaged in consistent delegitimization of the West, while independent commentators advanced moral and conspiratorial framing, and military bloggers often used enemy-based language. Across the corpus, the United States and President Trump emerged as central objects of attention, invoked more frequently than either Russian or Ukrainian leadership. The study adds an account of how pro-Western hostility is distributed across forms and categories of propagandistic Telegram messages. We argue that this internal structure has direct implications for how Western governments might contest the Russian information space.