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As the war in Ukraine rages, Russia’s Internet, specifically the messaging app Telegram, remains a politically contested space, providing benefits both to the regime and to opposition and autonomous civic actors. The latter are stronger in terms of engagement and critically benefit from horizontal networking, while the former has the advantage in scale, mobilization, and the conversion of online attention into offline outcomes. Recently, the regime launched a campaign to block Telegram entirely, replacing it with a state-controlled alternative—a move that reveals the Kremlin’s preference for political control over operational efficiency, even at the cost of its own wartime governance infrastructure.
The Role of the Internet in Wartime
Russia’s wartime Internet is often described as a space where, after Kremlin repression destroyed or weakened many formal organizations, opposition and autonomous civic actors continue to survive. That is true, but it is only half the story: Since 2022, Telegram, along with the wider Internet, has become an important tool of regime communication, patriotic mobilization, burden-sharing, and everyday administration.
In Russia, Telegram is not just a messaging app, but also a news source, a social-media platform, and a means for coordinating and organizing. As of early 2025, Telegram had 90.6 million users in Russia (12 years and older), who spent an average of 13 hours each month on the app. Nearly 80 percent of users in the 12–24 age group accessed Telegram daily as of early 2024. In the same period, trust in state television declined to 42 percent, while trust in Telegram channels rose to 18 percent, according to Levada Center polling data. A separate Mediascope measure shows that as of September 2024, 28 percent of Russians reported receiving news from Telegram. The two figures measure different things—trust versus news consumption—but together they show that Telegram has become a widely used and trusted source of political information.
Throughout this memo, “Telegram” refers specifically to the messaging app and its channels and chats, while “the Internet” refers more broadly to digital platforms and online spaces, including Telegram, that remain accessible to Russian users despite wartime repression. Since Telegram has become Russia’s dominant platform for news consumption, political communication, and civic coordination, to study it is effectively to study the politically relevant Internet in wartime Russia.
How the Internet Helps the Regime
The wartime Telegram ecosystem is dominated by large prowar and pro-regime channels, which scale the regime’s propaganda. As of late 2025, eight of the top 10 most popular Telegram channels in Russia were devoted to news or politics. Among them and representing prominent examples of the prowar Telegram ecosystem are WarGonzo and Rybar, prominent military bloggers (voenkory) who provide frontline reporting and analysis; as well as Readovka, a large pro-regime news aggregator. WarGonzo (@wargonzo) had roughly 1.3 million subscribers; Rybar’ (@rybar) about 1.1 million; and Readovka (@readovkanews) roughly 1.7 to 2.3 million. In this dataset, pro-Kremlin channels outnumbered anti-Kremlin ones, 404 versus 114, with over 4.1 million posts versus 1.1 million posts, respectively. The regime thus dominates the information environment in sheer volume.
Another benefit Telegram provides to the wartime regime is facilitating routine communication with the population. Government officials use Telegram directly and routinely to communicate with citizens and among themselves about things like mobilization, regional administration, social-welfare claims, and war-related announcements. A study found that the number of Russian policymakers actively posting on Telegram rose from 137 before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to 452 after it. The total number of posts rose from 92,849 to 712,219, with the median number of posts per user increasing from 200 to 922. Telegram has thus become part of the state’s wartime communication infrastructure. At the same time, this makes the regime operationally dependent on a platform it does not control.
Telegram is part of Russia’s wartime military infrastructure as well, with soldiers, voenkory, and volunteer networks relying on it for unit communication, intelligence sharing, drone coordination, fundraising, and supply delivery.
A third benefit is that Telegram helps the regime to convert patriotic sentiment online into deeds offline. That is enabled by patriotic media outlets, volunteer networks, charities, and the state-affiliated Civic Chamber, an agency that coordinates civic and patriotic initiatives. In 2022, more than 15,000 civic leaders and representatives of registered nonprofits signed a public appeal—coordinated and amplified via pro-regime Telegram channels—in support of the military operation in Ukraine. In 2023, 18 percent of Russians said they had donated money for Ukraine war soldiers, while 56 percent said they had provided direct help to military personnel or their families. These offline behaviors are enabled and scaled by Telegram-based volunteer networks and the Civic Chamber’s own digital resources, which channel donations and requests. For example, a volunteer-run hotline for soldiers, veterans, and their families reportedly had processed 8,968 inquiries as of December 2024.
The same trend appears in the digital space. The Telegram channel Operatsiya Z Voyenkory Russkoy Vesny (@rvvoenkor) raised RUB13.29 million in an 11-day crowdfunding drive in August 2024 for FPV drones, tactical gear, and medical kits, and then posted delivery confirmations from the front line. In Buryatia, a grassroots volunteer group—not government-run but coordinated primarily through Telegram—was equipping about 40 mobilized soldiers and contract servicemembers per month as of late 2023. These publicly known examples illustrate how online patriotic engagement can translate into supplies and services, reducing the state’s obligations through burden-sharing and addressing shortcomings—particularly in equipping mobilized soldiers, supporting soldiers’ families, and supplying frontline units with goods (e.g., drones, medical kits, vehicles) that the regular military procurement system has failed to deliver.
A fourth benefit: The regime is empowered to channel resources to preferred patriotic activity. State support for patriotism-themed projects—primarily publicly funded, with some private and corporate involvement—increased sharply after the invasion. Estimates put it at roughly $70 million in 2022, which then is thought to have ballooned about sixfold to $430 million in 2023, before climbing further to approximately $700 million in 2025. This includes the budget for patriotic education and youth mobilization, like the Movement of the First youth organization, war veterans visiting schools, and volunteer supplies initiatives. In other words, the regime gains from the use of the Internet by state-backed civic structures: Telegram channels promote these programs, recruit participants, and showcase deliverables, turning state spending into visible patriotic activity.
How the Internet Helps Opposition and Autonomous Civic Actors
Digital platforms likewise provide benefits to the antiwar opposition and other autonomous civic actors against the backdrop of the war. By “opposition and autonomous civic actors,” we mean not only the organized political opposition to the Putin regime, but also rights defenders, independent journalists, soldiers’ relatives, volunteer networks, and other actors whose public claims the regime treats as politically threatening once they become autonomous or rights based, regardless of the stated intentions behind them.
The first benefit is engagement. In a dataset covering December 2020 to April 2023, anti-Kremlin Telegram channels generally outperformed their pro-Kremlin peers on average views and forwards, along with an array of other engagement measures. Average views per post rose from 25,346 to 104,778 on anti-Kremlin channels, versus 15,929 to 67,442 on pro-Kremlin channels. Average reactions per post also rose more sharply on the anti-Kremlin side. This suggests that opposition and independent actors generally generate more intense attention, even though they do not predominate in terms of numbers.
The second benefit has to do with horizontal coordination. Telegram, along with other digital tools, allows opposition groups, lawyers, journalists, volunteers, and activists to create communities that would be much harder to sustain offline given the intensified repression. Examples include legal-aid networks such as OVD-Info, which provides advice for detainees and their families; volunteer communities sharing information about emigration, evacuation from Russia, and mutual aid; and independent journalism collectives that are engaged in the distribution of reporting and maintain audience contact, since many formal media organizations have been closed, blocked, or forced into exile. Thus, for opposition and autonomous civic actors, the Internet is a space of survival and connection, not just news and analysis.
The regime is keen to limit these benefits. It can raise the cost of online activity by arresting and otherwise pressuring opponents, through degraded legal statuses, surveillance, administrative measures, and the threat of criminal prosecution. This applies even to groups that are not oppositional in any broad sense—as soon as patriotic or socially oriented actors attempt to use Telegram or other social media to make critical public claims toward the government, they start to face pressure.
The regime is not only against pro-democracy activity, it is against politicization as such. It welcomes circumscribed patriotic activity and often benefits from it; however, as noted above, it will move against the same activity when it deems a certain line has been crossed. A good example is the Telegram channel Put’ Domoy (“Way Home”; @pyty_domoy), representing wives and mothers of mobilized soldiers. The regime permitted these women to have the public frame of suffering, caring loved ones, worthy of sympathy—until they started using Telegram and other online means to demand rotation for their husbands and sons, benefits, and accountability, after which content about them was deleted, followed by police raids and arrests. Olga Tsukanova, a coordinator of soldiers’ mothers’ groups, was detained in January 2023 after publicizing information about failures by commanders and delayed payments to soldiers. In addition, reports by monitoring organizations note pressure on groups weaving camouflage nets and family-support networks after they wrote complaints related to the war.
Overall, opposition and autonomous civic actors can use the Internet to connect, criticize, and ultimately survive, but unlike the regime, they cannot turn these benefits into stable organizational and political power.
The Telegram Crackdown: Political Control Overrides Practical Gain
The Kremlin has tried to shut down Telegram before. A 2018–2020 ban attempt, launched after Telegram founder Pavel Durov refused to hand over encryption keys to the FSB, failed for a lack of technological capability and was eventually abandoned altogether. The current effort is more serious because Telegram has since become embedded in both governance and wartime military communication. Thus, blocking it imposes costs on the regime itself.
The current campaign to shut down Telegram has been rolled out in phases: voice and video calls were blocked in summer 2025; Roskomnadzor began throttling download speeds in February 2026; and the app had largely stopped working as of mid-March, ahead of a previously reported April 1 date for a full block to take effect. Throughout this period, the state promoted, as a replacement, Max, a messenger developed by VK, which is integrated with government digital services and comes preinstalled on all new devices in Russia starting from September 2025. As of this writing, Max had fewer than 75 million monthly active users, versus Telegram’s nearly 100 million monthly active users, and has been widely criticized as unreliable and a potential surveillance tool.
The Kremlin has thus been depriving itself of the operational lifeblood of patriotic volunteering and fundraising networks, voenkory, and even frontline communication—troops have been ordered to delete the Telegram app, with noncompliance potentially resulting in transfer to assault units staffed by convicts. Against this backdrop, pushbacks have come from the wartime regime’s base. For example, prowar bloggers have warned they would be unable to raise money and coordinate activities. One popular prowar channel reported receiving multiple videos from concerned soldiers within a day of the Telegram throttling.
The discontent has cut across political lines in a way that few wartime issues have. In March 2026, Ilya Remeslo, a lawyer and former member of a Kremlin-controlled advisory body, published a manifesto on his 90,000-subscriber Telegram channel titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin,” denouncing Putin for prosecuting a failing war, wrecking the economy, and calling for his resignation and criminal prosecution. Within 48 hours, he was placed in a psychiatric facility. In addition, demonstrations were attempted in nearly a dozen regions, suppressed with the help of pretexts like COVID-19 restrictions and even scheduled “tree inspections.”
Conclusion
Telegram, in the Russian context, is a strategic conundrum for the wartime regime. For most of the war, the Kremlin has benefited from it as a tool for communication, mobilization, fundraising, and burden-sharing. Opposition and autonomous civic actors have made use of it as well, and the Internet more broadly, to connect, criticize, and simply survive. They have stronger information engagement and critically benefit from horizontal networking, while the regime has the advantage in scale, mobilization, and the conversion of online attention into offline outcomes.
The current campaign against Telegram shows that the Kremlin now believes this important, popular platform is too risky to leave outside of state control. It is ultimately an attempt to rein in the regime-fueled grassroots nationalist momentum, which has made the Kremlin’s prowar narratives credible but is increasingly skirting centralized control. It likely portends continued regime domination of the Internet, but under less stable and efficient conditions.
Russia’s wartime Internet is neither a zone of opposition freedom nor a space fully controlled by the state. It remains a contested arena, but one that continues to be dominated by the Kremlin. Foreign policymakers should thus not assume that an open digital space in Russia will benefit opposition and autonomous civic actors more than it will the Kremlin. To have the best effect, they should strengthen secure communication capabilities and support legal defense and independent reporting networks that can survive regime surveillance, pressure, and disruption.
Figure 1. Dimensions of Russia’s Wartime Internet: Regime vs. Opposition and Autonomous Civic Actors
Irina Busygina is a research associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Mikhail Filippov is a professor of political science at Binghamton University (SUNY). Their research focuses on civil society, authoritarian governance, and state–society relations in Russia. Their most recent book is Non-Democratic Federalism and Decentralization: The Lessons from the Post-Soviet States (Routledge, 2024).
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