Thursday Essay: What in the Actual Hell Is Going on in Russia?

Let's get this out of the way right at the start: I have questions but no answers. But, dang, are the questions head-scratchingly fascinating for what they very nearly almost reveal about wartime life in Russia and on the frontlines of the Russo-Ukraine War.

It all started, as so many things do these days, with a popular messaging platform. 

In Russia's case, the platform is Telegram, an end-to-end encrypted sharing platform that anyone can use — including soldiers on the battlefield. And this might shock you, but Russian strongman Vladimir Putin respects Telegram's power, and even feted some of its most popular users who just happen to be Russian nationalists unafraid to call Putin's generals to account.

Pretty much everything you get from Russia's official news outlets like RT and TASS reads like Rosy Scenario wrote it, but Telegram milbloggers provide raw, "authentic" updates — battlefield footage, casualty reports, and critiques of tactics — that build credibility with the public. 

In June of 2023, Putin held a high-profile powwow with several Telegram bloggers, where Putin heard their complaints and even acknowledged problems with the war effort — he rarely does anything remotely like that — and even defended high-profile bloggers against attacks from his own Ministry of Defense.

If you think "Putin" and then think "autocrat with a nasty habit of invading Russia's neighbors," you'd be on the mark. But what's often unappreciated in the West — and there I go, still wishing Russia were part of the West — is that under Putin, the Kremlin doesn't punish online speech nearly as often as, say, His Majesty's Government does in the U.K.

Granted, having been born and raised in an autocracy, the typical Russian is probably more circumspect about what they share online to begin with, but there's no getting around the fact that while Russia filed 264 new criminal prosecutions for "statements" (including online posts) in 2025, police in England and Wales made more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 alone. Punishment in Russia is far harsher, including long prison sentences in prisons best left to the imagination — if that. In Britain, "offenders" are far more likely to receive a "friendly" police visit and a quick trip to the local lockup, but not much else. 

Still, the amount of online speech tolerated by Moscow is probably shocking to Westerners accustomed to tales of totalitarian rule under the Communists. Intolerable to liberty-loving Americans, but there's a big difference to the locals between living under a totalitarian or a merely authoritarian regime. 

It's possible to overstate the importance of Telegram to Russia's frontline soldiers, but you'd have to work at it.

Let's walk through this on our way to today's Big Questions.

Looked at broadly, Telegram is a fascinating case study in how internet-savvy autocracies can channel online dissent to serve their own purposes without the kind of Soviet-style crackdowns that risk inspiring effective resistance to the regime. 

Specifically, regarding the Russo-Ukraine War, Russian Telegram channels like Rybar, WarGonzo, and others with millions of followers — we would have called them warbloggers 20 years ago — emerged bigly at the start of full-scale hostilities in 2022, filling in information gaps for military commanders, sharp analysis of the fighting, and even sharp criticism of the top brass. Criticism of Putin himself isn't tolerated, of course, or at least not enough to matter. 

Telegram chatter led to the sacking of Major General Ivan Popov (58th Combined Arms Army commander) in 2023, Colonel General Gennady Anashkin (South Forces Group commander) in 2023, and Lieutenant General Sukhrab Akhmedov (who served in various roles) last year. 

And Another Thing: A big tip of the hat for this week's essay to PJ Media's own Charlie Martin. He first spotted this story and thought I might be interested. His constant stream of updates helped make today's work a breeze to put together for you.

Colonel General (and Deputy Defence Minister) Mikhail Mizintsev (the "Butcher of Mariupol") was reportedly removed in 2023 after criticism from WarGonzo (Semyon Pegov), and others highlighted how his operations needlessly wasted Russian lives.

This company, PJ Media, the company I've worked for since 2005, was co-founded by a solo blogger who helped get Dan Rather fired for putting forged documents on the air to try to tip the 2004 presidential election, but in Russia, a guy calling himself WarGonzo helped get a deputy defense minister fired during an actual shooting war.

So, yeah, Telegram is kind of a big deal. Partly, it's a way to channel reliable battlefield information to higher-ups without (or at least with less) political influence — aka, lies. Partly, it's a safety valve for dissenters to blow off steam without doing anything to destabilize the regime. 

More than that, soldiers fighting in Ukraine actually use Telegram to target the enemy, and no, I'm not kidding. Maybe you go to X for breaking news (and come right back here to PJ Media for the sharp analysis!), but Russians go to Telegram to share location data on Ukrainian soldiers, directing fires from artillery, mortars, and drones in near-realtime. 

Even civilians get into the act. Volunteers coordinating logistics through Telegram are sometimes able to pass along urgent target info ("Ukrainian drone operator spotted at such-and-such location") to connected military chats.

It isn't perfect, of course. Ukraine is sometimes able to geolocate Russian soldiers based on their own shares, and then direct a friendly drone or three to their position. But overall, Telegram adds a dash of decentralization and accountability that the Russian military sorely lacks.

Russia's official milspec encrypted comms systems are neither the best, the most reliable, nor even always available. Telegram use quickly evolved in the chaotic early days of the war, when Russian troops found themselves stuck on or near Ukrainian roads, unable to advance any further due to collapsed logistical support and resistance that proved much stiffer than Kremlin war planners had accounted for. 

Telegram soon became the Russian military's semi-official workaround. It fills in the gaps and provides flexible, low-hierarchy coordination that traditional radio or command chains sometimes can't match on a drone-heavy battlefield. Also, the Russian military suffers from a notoriously inefficient top-down decision-making structure — examined in a previous Thursday essay — that Telegram allows soldiers to bypass.

In other words, Telegram is a social-media-platform-turned-encrypted-military-comms-channel that has the ability to make the typical Russian soldier more effective, and can even sometimes help call ineffective (or worse) senior commanders to account.

Now imagine switching it off.

And Another Thing (from that previous essay): When the unexpected happens to an army private trained on the Communist model still followed by Russia and China, the private asks his sergeant what to do, the sergeant asks the captain what to do, the captain sends the request up to his colonel, who then has to consult a general, who may or may not be able to issue an order without asking permission from a politician, or at least from his accompanying zampolit (political officer). In terms of his authority to exercise initiative, judgment, and battlefield authority, a low-ranking Western NCO is probably functionally equivalent to a Chinese or Russian colonel. Our junior officers and NCOs are expected — required — to act without waiting for permission.

"Against the backdrop of Russians daily learning through Telegram channels about the catastrophic losses of the Russian army on the Ukrainian fronts," including photos and video footage, open-source intel account Visioner posted this week, "Telegram is now being gradually and officially blocked in Russia," with the order made by Roskomnadzor, Moscow's official information and censorship agency.

Roskomnadzor publicly confirmed "phased restrictions" on Telegram earlier this week, citing boilerplate justifications — fraud, data protection, extremism — used by autocrats the world over, or even would-be autocrats right here in the U.S.

Andrey Gurulyov, army general and deputy of the Russian Duma, said, "Slowing down Telegram is our fight against NATO, and Russians will have to endure the created discomfort — we simply have no other way." I wish Gurulyov had gone into more detail because there are some fascinating implications to what he did say... but not enough for me to discern exactly why "slowing down Telegram" is part of the fight against NATO.

It's also fascinating that a high-level Russian official says his country is fighting NATO, but I digress — let's get to the battlefield implications.

Losing Telegram access, or even just having it throttled, comes right on the heels of Starlink shutting down access to unlicensed Russian military operators. Until last week, they used Elon Musk's satellite internet service to guide suicide drones — quite effectively, I might add — against the Ukrainian military's rear-area logistics. 

Europe-based NOELreports posted Wednesday that "State Duma Defense Committee head Andrey Kartapolov said Telegram’s slowdown will not affect the Russian military, claiming it is used minimally in combat operations. At the same time, Russian milbloggers are openly questioning if their command understands the real impact on Russian forces."

Dmitri Peskov, Vladimir Putin's spokesman, said, "I don't think it's possible to imagine frontline communications being provided via Telegram or some other messenger. It's difficult and impossible to imagine such a thing." But that's exactly the kind of happy talk — flying completely in the face of four years of costly battlefield experience — you'd expect from a government press hack.

"The particularly vile thing about Telegram's slowdown is that Telegram is used for communication on the front lines," one Russian nationalist account complained this week, adding that the "bottom line" is that "Starlink is gone and now Telegram. All of this already has a profoundly negative impact on military communications."

Or as military author and researcher ChrisO posted on X: "Russian warbloggers are outraged at the Russian government's view that blocking Telegram is no big deal for frontline troops. They say it's a catastrophe heaped on the disaster of losing Starlink and that anyone who says Telegram isn't needed is talking 'complete bull***t.'"

And Another Thing: I'm reminded more than a little of when the progressive-run social media platforms in this country conspired to bury the Hunter Biden Laptop from Hell story, and tip the 2020 election to Joe Biden — and how the same progressives howled bloody murder when Elon Musk bought Twitter and put a stop to that kind of speech suppression. Imagine how we conservatives would howl if a Democrat president in 2029 were to throttle X.

ISW reported on another milblogger who claimed "the throttling of Telegram will negatively impact interoperability among air defense units and maneuver groups that need to be able to cooperate in the face of Ukrainian drone strikes." The same daily report also noted that "Telegram slowdowns could exacerbate C2 [command and control] issues Russian forces are reportedly facing after SpaceX shut down Russian Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine."

Estonian-born, pro-West milblogger WarTranslated posted Tuesday that a Russian user called Romanov "effectively admits that the Russian authorities largely deceive the public, cover up crimes and mass military deaths for which no one is held accountable, and explains to his readers that Putin is blocking Telegram so Russians won’t learn about criminal commanders who 'zero out' their own soldiers."

"Zero out" is the current slang for shooting deserters or anyone unwilling to march forward into the meat grinder.

Russian milblogger Archangel of Special Forces complained that throttling Telegram “will set us back a couple of years," because “established communication channels will collapse. Against the backdrop of the lack of internet at the positions, the transfer of intelligence information will slow down.”

However, he added, “Alternative methods are already being devised, [but] the recovery will take a long time.“

How this all plays out is anyone's guess. Soldiers are remarkably adaptable creatures, and perhaps they'll find another workaround quicker than “Archangel” believes. And then maybe the Kremlin will throttle that, too. Who knows?

But it's the "Why?" that intrigues me, so without any further ado, here are today's Big Questions:

• Has Telegram lost its battlefield efficacy?
• Has Kyiv (or the West) turned Russian Telegram messaging to its own advantage?
• Is Putin no longer able to afford his generals being called to account?
• Are Russian losses now too high to allow public discussion?
• After four years, is "safety valve" dissent likely to go too far?
• Or perhaps is the reason for the Telegram shutdown something fairly innocuous?

Or as I asked in the headline, What in the actual hell is going on in Russia?

Last Thursday: One Pill, One Boy, 118 Months — an Entirely True Tall Tale