The ideas they are spreading are not necessarily new, but are now reaching many more people thanks to the technology. Many of the most popular military blog Telegram channels have roots in ultranationalist movements. It lifted the official ban on the messaging platform in 2020. Russia tried, but failed, to block Telegram previously after its founders refused to provide encryption keys to the FSB, a Russian security agency. “They all collectively started to move into Telegram and then their content started to get picked up a lot more around April, May of last year, which is when Russians started to experience a lot of military failures,” Kateryna Stepanenko, Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, told CNN. The bloggers’ influence grew following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year and the subsequent crackdown on Western social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram in Russia. Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Ukrainian soldiers firing artillery in the direction of Bakhmut, 21 March 2023. And they have, in many ways, popularized the Wagner group brand and the Russian way of war,” Rondeaux said. “They have set a steady diet of pro-war, anti-West, anti-Ukrainian propaganda to the hard right elements of Russia for many years now. They have been instrumental in stoking support for the wider war on Ukraine. Many of the bloggers, including Tatarsky, have been operating for multiple years, covering Russian and Wagner military operations in the Middle East and Africa, and the Donbas conflict that started in 2014. The correspondents also cross ethical lines: Tatarsky posted images of himself carrying a weapon in the combat zone. Sometimes his … analysis caused a wave of negative reactions among officers, because he, as a staunch defender of Russia and its army, wanted to see this army more successful than it actually was,” Trad added. “At the same time, he was also a critic of the Russian officer corps and the upper echelon making decisions about military actions. Tatarsky occupied a significant place in this community,” he said. “These people know each other, often travel to the same destinations, communicate and have a closed system. Ruslan Trad, a resident fellow for security research at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told CNN that the community of bloggers is united among themselves, but it is also often associated with the Russian defense ministry and other security agencies. But they are critical to understanding what’s happening at least on one side of the flux,” Rondeaux added. “Obviously, they have a very biased view of the war. He also had a criminal past: According to Russian media reports and his own admission, he served time in jail for a bank robbery. Tatarsky himself was born in Ukraine, reportedly fought with Russian separatists in the Donbas in the east of the country and had close ties to Wagner. Many of Russia’s military bloggers have deep sources within the state’s armed forces, the Wagner group or among pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, which gives them unparalleled access to information. Petersburg, according to Russian state news agency TASS. Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in an explosion at a cafe in St. They are really the only ones who are monitoring what’s happening on the frontline,” Candace Rondeaux, the director of the Future Frontlines program at the New America Foundation, told CNN. “Military bloggers in Russia today provide a very cloudy service but a service nonetheless. Pro-Kremlin commentators such as Tatarsky, who are sometimes called “voenkory” for “war correspondents”, have filled some of this information vacuum. Foreign media is blocked and most opposition journalists are either in jail or out of the country. Any coverage of the conflict on Russian state media is tightly controlled by the Kremlin. Russia forced the closing of the last of its remaining independent media shortly after invading Ukraine in February 2022. While he was a prominent voice within the ‘milblogger’ universe – with more than 500,000 subscribers to his Telegram channel – he was certainly not the only one with influence. He was known for his support for the war on Ukraine and the boss of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin – as well as his occasional but harsh criticism of Moscow’s battlefield failures. Petersburg cafe where he was appearing as a guest of a pro-war group. Tatarsky – whose real name was Maxim Fomin – died on Sunday in an explosion at a St. The killing of Vladlen Tatarsky has put a spotlight on the murky world of Russia’s pro-invasion military bloggers and the outsized role they play in Moscow’s propaganda machine.
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