The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Kateryna Maikovska, whose focus is on the communication of Ukrainian and Russian policymakers on Telegram. Especially during times of war, such platforms can be used for both mobilisation and manipulation, but more research is still required to understand current patterns. Telegram is playing a key role in the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, of course, so this is the focus of this paper.
The paper examines the political communication of policymakers in both countries before and after the illegal full-scale invasion; it focusses on politicians who were in office during the invasion, finding 135 Ukrainian and 464 Russian channels. These are divided into Ukrainian and Russian-language channels for Ukraine, while all Russian channels post in Russian.
Posting rates increased substantially after the start of the invasion – more than three times for Ukraine, more than seven times for Russia. There was also a substantial increase in the number of active channels. In Russia, these overwhelmingly represented the ruling party; in Ukraine, both ruling party and government accounts increased their posting considerably. Russian-language posting in Ukraine peaked around the time of the invasion, but then declined substantially – in part because many accounts switched to using Ukrainian only.
Russian themes included news that were not related to the war, economy and finance, social issues and volunteering, and foreign crises; the war was not thematised a great deal at all, except by government channels. War as well as non-war news were very prominent in Ukraine, but other topics were also prominent. Russian-language Ukrainian channels also focussed strongly on the humanitarian consequences of the war, especially on government channels.
So, the full-scale invasion resulted in a major spike of activity on Telegram; this was driven by the ruling parties as well as (in Ukraine) government channels. Telegram was used as a site of resistance in Ukraine as well as Russia, but is also controversial: Ukrainian authorities are worried about the potential of security breaches, Russian authorities about the potential of public dissent on the site. In both countries, war discourse continued to be interwoven with other topics.
