Authors

Discussion

Russia’s war on Ukraine has been accompanied by a crackdown on independent and social media that has helped the messaging app Telegram to double its users to 40 million. Given the most popular Russian language channels are pro-war, Telegram is a useful tool for understanding Russian support for the invasion, especially forms or statements of support that are not necessarily state-directed. Relying on original critical discourse analysis of 74,853 messages from sixteen channels, varied in terms of perspective, this paper examines three key topics – the depiction of Ukrainians, the depiction of the Russian military, and the depiction of West – during the first three months of the war. Using a combination of inductive and deductive coding, it compares narratives and presentation style to track how the war is mediated to audiences.

The findings show that state-affiliated channels’ content largely discourages active opposition and active mobilisation in support of the war, promoting instead passive support, consolidated loyalty and demobilised opposition. The analytical model applied here is a variation of the spectrum of allies model used by pressure groups, albeit adapted to the political conditions of the Russian Federation. However, non-state-affiliated channels use messaging that is more consistently mobilisational (for opposition and/or support). The paper concludes by asking how state-affiliated channels might manage this competition.