The interactive chart below shows the most referenced Russian Telegram channels involved in discussions about the Russia‑Ukraine war. It shows how only a handful of Russian-based Telegram accounts (10) dominate this information ecosystem and influence framing around the Russian-Ukraine war in Russia and beyond.

To create this chart, we analyzed over 300 million posts from more than 30,000 Telegram channels and groups that post content related to the war. The channels are ranked based on how frequently other channels mention or reference them, with the top rank held by @rian_ru (RIA Novosti / РИА Новости), a Russian state‑owned domestic ‘news’ agency.

As the data was collected over 3 years (Feb. 2022 – Feb. 2025), we are able to show how channel rankings have changed at 6-month intervals. While the top 8 channels have remained relatively stable, there’s more movement among channels ranked 9th and below. For example, the pseudo “fact-checking” channel @warfakes (Война с фейками) dropped from 12th in 2022 to 29th in 2025. In contrast, channels like @pul_1 (“Пул Первого”) based in Belarus and @dva_majors (Два майора), a military blogger channel with 1M+ subscribers, have rapidly increased in rank.