• According to data provided to the

    New York Times

    by the data analysis company Sensor Tower, the Telegram application has been the most downloaded in Russia since the start of the war between it and Ukraine.

  • This encrypted messaging is one of the few social networks still accessible in Russia, the Kremlin having blocked Facebook, Instagram or Twitter last March.

  • A boon for the Ukrainian authorities who have massively invested in this communication channel to broadcast its narrative of the conflict to Russian-speaking Internet users.

For 84 days, Kyrylo, 21, has been juggling his two daily lives.

Ukrainian student in Master's degree at Sciences po Paris by day and cyber-soldier by night.

Since the start of the war between Russia and his country, the young man with youthful features and impeccable French has joined the army of digital fighters coordinated by kyiv.

His favorite battlefield?

Telegram encrypted messaging.

Popularized and used by the Ukrainian authorities during the Covid-19 epidemic, the “Ukraine NOW” group created on this network established itself, as of February 24, as one of the government’s main communication channels.

This news feed, which has more than a million subscribers and mixes self-help initiatives, news from the front and official press releases, has since grown.

“On February 29, we launched the Ukraine NOW French channel with one of my friends,” explains Kyrylo.

At the same time, an English version is born.

The objective is simple: to disseminate to a wider public opinion the Ukrainian narrative of the ongoing conflict.

The group, administered by the student, relies on a network of volunteers to translate and publish information from Ukrainian sources and media in French.

But the audience leveled off – just under 7,600 subscribers – and “very quickly, we realized that Russian propaganda did not have that much of a hold on French Internet users”, notes Kyrylo.

A Russian-language channel to counter propaganda

In connection with the team of the Minister of Digital Transformation, the millennial Mykhailo Fedorov, a sort of general-in-chief of the Ukrainian digital army, Kyrylo and his friend decide to launch a Russian-speaking version of Ukraine NOW.

“In Russia, Telegram is one of the few sources of information that the authorities have not blocked.

The idea was to attack Russian propaganda on its own channel”, launches the young administrator of the channel.

According to data communicated to the New York Times on April 16 by the data analysis company Sensor Tower, the Telegram application has been the most downloaded (4.4 million downloads) in Russia since the start of the war.

Exit the flop in VOSTFR, this time, the Russian-speaking franchise of Ukraine NOW works and brings together more than 848,000 people.

For Kyrylo and his friend, the administration of the page has become a job in its own right.

“We divided up time slots to feed the channel.

I have created an information verification format too.

I am a subscriber to several Russian media and I cross-check certain statements with other sources, Ukrainian or international sources”, develops the student specializing in marketing.

Unlike the national channel, which mainly targets Ukrainians, the Russian version publishes content likely to interest their neighbours.

The consequences of the strike that caused the sinking of the Russian ship "Moskva" in the Black Sea have, for example, been the subject of numerous posts,

An impossible discussion

The challenge for the Ukrainian government is as strategic as the military maneuvers on the ground, underlines the Franco-Ukrainian researcher, Valentyna Dymytrova.

“The country does not have an international news channel like France 24 or Russia Today – even if it was recently suspended in European Union countries.

Its continuous information relay therefore passes through social networks.

Telegram being massively used by the Russians, it is a fundamental channel of expression to counter disinformation”, develops the lecturer in information and communication sciences at the University of Lyon 3.

However, it is difficult to measure the real impact of the group, recognizes Kyrylo.

Opened when Ukraine NOW Russia was launched, comments were quickly closed by the team.

“Some content was the subject of thousands of messages coordinated by pro-Russian robots (bots).

Discussion was becoming impossible.

We used several technical tools to try to filter them, but that was not enough”, regrets the student.

Change of team

The team also has little quantified data on the profile of subscribers who follow the channel.

“We know that 94% of our subscribers use the application from a Russian-language interface, but we have nothing about their geographical location.

And even if Telegram would provide this kind of data, we know that a large majority of Russians use VPNs so it would not be relevant, ”he continues.

Our complete file on the conflict

A sign of the importance given to this group by the Ukrainian authorities, a professional team attached to the Ministry of Digital Transformation took over the reins of the channel this week.

“Even if we are considered fighters on the information front, we have been doing this on a voluntary basis for several months in parallel with our work or our studies.

There, the people who will animate the channel will be really specialized in this field”, greets Kyrylo.

This Thursday, the analysis of a Russian specialist in defense issues who expressed serious doubts about the victory of his country's army on the

Russia 1

channel was relayed to the group's hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Telegram .

In just a few hours, the post had already been seen by 49,000 people.

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  • War in Ukraine

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