The next session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is on crisis, conflict, and war, and starts with a paper presented by Aytalina Kulichkina which focusses on Ukraine-Russia wartime discourse on Telegram. Social media platforms have of course become essential platforms for political communication, and the use of these platforms varies based on context; during wartime they are used for both domestic and international communication, mobilisation, and manipulation.
Most studies to date have taken qualitative approaches and deal with short-term conflicts, however; there is a lack of systematic and comparative assessment of such platform use during long-term wars. This paper focusses on Telegram, which has emerged as a central platform for political communication in both Ukraine and Russia; it became a space for both war witnessing, Ukrainian cyber-resistance, and Russian propaganda.
Telegram is a hybrid communication platform which combines features of messaging apps and social media; it emphasises privacy and security, is comparatively unmoderated, and has therefore been popular with alternative and far-right actors across Europe. It has also grown into a major platform with broader uses, however.
How has this platform been used both before and after the full-scale illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine? In particular, how have political elites in both countries used Telegram? Some third of major Ukrainian political actors, and two thirds of major Russian political actors, use Telegram, and their posts were gathered and analysed here.
Ukrainian actors used both Ukrainian and Russian, while Russian actors are almost universally posting in Russian rather than other minority languages; posts were clustered using topic modelling, and narratives in politial debate were identified.
The volume of communication increased substantially after the invasion (by a factor of 3 in Ukraine, and 7 in Russia); this was a general tendency and not just driven by a handful of actors. The number of active accounts also increased. The most pronounced increase in Russia was amongst actors affiliated with Putin’s United Russia party; in Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s party members similarly led the increase. In Ukraine, there was a decline in the proportion of Russian-language content following the invasion.
Russian actors tended to emphasise positive news about Russia other than the invasion; Ukrainian actors mostly addressed the war itself, though this has declined somewhat over time. All Russian parties focussed on topics not aligned with the war; Ukrainian actors across all parties addressed the war substantially.
Future work will focus also on the images and videos shared in these posts, and also compare these patterns with those for other platforms and actors.
