The Wild West of Ukraine’s information space — that may be the best way to describe Telegram, the messaging app used by millions of Ukrainians and deeply embedded in state communication, yet overflowing with anonymous channels.
Few digital platforms have sparked as much debate in Ukraine in recent years as Telegram. Experts warn about it, politicians argue over it, and researchers continue to study it. Yet the debate has done little to slow its growth: more than 70% of Ukrainians now get their news through Telegram. Concerns about the platform tend to centre on the same issues — its founder, Pavel Durov, the opaque structure behind the company, and the potential access Russian intelligence services could have to user data.
But the deeper problem with Telegram lies elsewhere. It operates without editorial standards, without verifying sources, and without any real accountability for the content it shares. That’s what makes it such fertile ground for anonymous channels that build millions-strong audiences — and for Russian propaganda, which finds it easy to take hold there.
In September 2024, Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) banned Telegram on official devices used by civil servants, the military, and critical infrastructure workers, citing a “threat to national security.” Kyrylo Budanov, then head of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), described it as a “digital training ground for information operations” and a key channel through which disinformation spreads in Ukraine. Cybersecurity experts, investigative journalists, and civil society groups have reached broadly similar conclusions about the platform.
In reality, this platform stopped being neutral a long time ago — if it ever truly was. Russians systematically use it to push fake news and anti-Ukrainian narratives through channels that consistently rank among the most popular with Ukrainian users. At the same time, not a single traditional media outlet appears among the top performers in terms of reach or views. In other words, Ukraine’s most widely used source of news is shaped not by editorial teams, but by anonymous actors and propaganda networks.
In these circumstances, the obvious step for the state would have been to leave the platform altogether and ban it. Yet nearly two years after the NSDC statement, Telegram is still widely used for official communication. The ban on its use on official devices and its continued presence in public life exist side by side, without really affecting each other. To understand the scale of the problem, it’s worth taking a closer look at what Ukrainian Telegram actually is, who sets the tone there — and where the state fits into all of this.
Platform that cannot be abandoned
To understand why the Ukrainian state became so dependent on Telegram, it helps to start with how it happened. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Telegram was known in Ukraine, but it was far from a mass platform: in 2019, only about 17% of Ukrainians used it, while Viber was ahead with more than 56%.
That shifted in February 2022. In the first days of the invasion, when official sources were often slow or silent, Telegram stepped into the gap. It became the place where volunteers, journalists, and ordinary people quickly organised themselves — sharing evacuation routes, reporting shelling, and posting real-time updates on where help was needed.
From there, its role only grew. During the war, Telegram turned into the main way many people get their news. According to a USAID–Internews study, 72% of Ukrainians used it for news in 2023, rising to 73% in 2024. Overall, more than 80% of Ukrainians were using the platform in 2024.
Leaving Telegram became almost impossible in practice. The state initially went onto the platform out of necessity, but stayed because there was no real alternative that could replace it.
The 2024 NSDC decision even added a clarification that effectively allowed continued use: the ban on Telegram does not apply in cases of “official necessity.” And what counts as “necessary” was left for each institution to decide. Some institutions did stop using Telegram, but more often than not their public channels kept running regardless. A full exit from the platform has become more the exception than the rule.
Who runs Ukrainian Telegram
If the state really set the tone on Ukrainian Telegram, the gap between what it says and what actually happens could at least be explained in practical terms. The idea is simple: it stays on the platform to reach people, with official channels essentially trying to outshout everyone else on their own turf. The problem is that the data — especially the rankings of the most popular Telegram channels — tells a very different story.
When you look at the most popular channels in Ukraine, based on data from two analytics services, Telemetrio and TGStat, it quickly becomes clear that neither official channels nor traditional media get much traction in the Telegram ecosystem. And this isn’t a one-off spike or an odd exception — it’s a steady, long-running pattern.
The only ranking where official channels manage to compete with unofficial ones — such as “Trukha,” “Lachen writes,” or “Nikolaev Vanyok” — as well as anonymous channels like “Times of Ukraine” and “INSIDER UA,” and Russia’s propaganda outlets such as “World Today with Yuriy Podolyaka” and Anatoliy Shariy’s channel, is TGStat’s citation ranking. In other words, official channels tend to be cited, while anonymous and semi-anonymous ones are actually read.
The study found that anonymous channels appeared in Telemetrio’s top 10 in 59.3% of cases, and if semi-anonymous ones are included, more than two-thirds of the most popular channels in this ranking are anonymous. A similar pattern emerges in TGStat’s subscriber rankings. Perhaps most strikingly, over four months of observation and analysis, not a single traditional media channel made it into any of the rankings at all. All of this suggests that the dominance of anonymous channels is not a response to specific high-profile events, but a structural feature of the Ukrainian Telegram ecosystem.
Among the channels that stayed in Telemetrio’s top 10 for all 14 consecutive weeks were “Real War,” “Real Kyiv,” “Ukraine Sech,” “Insider UA,” “Times of Ukraine,” and “Trukha Ukraine” — all of them anonymous platforms.
In TGStat’s reach rankings, two propaganda channels also stood out as particularly stable — “World Today with Yuriy Podolyaka” and Shariy’s channel, both openly promoting pro-Russian narratives. Another worrying detail is that propaganda channels ranked second in terms of reach, with a share of 19.3%. Even more telling is another figure: their average position within the top 10 is 2.2. In other words, propaganda channels consistently held second or third place in these rankings. “World Today with ‘Yuri Podolyaka’” and Shariy’s channel were present in the rankings for all 14 consecutive weeks.
It all boils down to this: propaganda sources have become part of the everyday information diet for a significant share of Ukrainians. That adds to the argument that Telegram isn’t just a neutral platform, but helps hostile narratives spread.
State as accomplice
The state’s behaviour looks deeply paradoxical. Despite knowing that Ukrainians overwhelmingly consume information from anonymous and propaganda-leaning sources, state institutions are not pulling back from the platform — quite the opposite. They continue to invest resources into it. A separate study of the communication practices of 29 central and local government bodies found that only five do not run their own Telegram channels: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Veterans Affairs, the Ministry of Strategic Industries, the Cabinet of Ministers, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine — although individual military commanders do maintain their own channels.
The rest of the central government is not only present on the platform but actively so. The Ministry of Defence and the Verkhovna Rada publish around 20 posts a day on average, the Ministry for Regional Development 18, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs 15. Across all the institutions analysed, the average posting rate stands at 7.7 posts per day.
Some institutions also rely on Telegram bots — tools designed for two-way communication with citizens. These include the Office of the President, the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (HUR), the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the Ministry of Digital Transformation. The issue is that some of these bots lack verification badges and are not even listed on official websites. If you search for “SBU,” the platform returns three different bots — and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the authentic one.
This practice doesn’t just sit uneasily alongside the state’s own warnings — it actively helps legitimise the platform in the eyes of the public. When the president, the government, and security services publish dozens of updates on Telegram every day, it sends a very clear message: the platform is safe and functions as an official communication channel. Against that backdrop, the ban on official devices starts to look more like a formality than a meaningful restriction.
No-rules environment
The popularity of anonymous channels cannot be explained by a lack of moderation alone. The key point is that these channels have learned to speak the language of anxiety — the emotion that dominates society in wartime. Official channels stick to formal, institutional language, while anonymous ones sound just like ordinary people who are afraid of what is happening, too. Telegram only amplifies this advantage: there are no editorial filters, no approval process, no accountability for accuracy, and, crucially, no content-ranking algorithms.
Any anonymous channel can push out unverified “insider” claims within minutes of an event — and a reader, who is not necessarily looking for precision but for a sense of control over what’s happening, will gravitate towards exactly that source. Official institutions and traditional media, bound by verification standards, are simply not built for that kind of speed.
It is precisely this logic that Russian propaganda exploits. Pro-Russian propaganda channels such as “World Today with Yuriy Podolyaka” or resources linked to Anatoliy Shariy operate under the same rules as anonymous channels — but with a clear purpose and, evidently, with solid backing and financial resources behind them. They don’t try to present themselves as official sources. Instead, they position themselves as “one of us” — simple, easy to grasp, and seemingly candid.
But the information threat is only one layer of the problem. The absence of rules on Telegram also carries a very real, tangible cost. An investigation by The Kyiv Independent, published in April 2026, described a support programme for the “Yellow Ribbon” resistance movement in the occupied territories, where recruitment was carried out via an unencrypted Telegram bot. The bot only offered general safety guidance and made it clear it wasn’t responsible for what might happen next — like users being exposed or arrested by the Russian occupation authorities.
Moreover, this interaction took place on Telegram, a platform which Western intelligence services have long suspected of maintaining close ties to the FSB. User data, message metadata, geolocation — all of it could have been potentially accessible to those against whom these activists were operating. According to the investigation, members of the resistance were arrested, tortured, and killed.
This recruitment case is not an exception, nor an isolated mistake. It is a logical consequence of operating in an environment that treats everyone who plays by different rules in much the same way. Traditional media enter this space with their core assets — credibility, verification, institutional responsibility — only to find that none of these really carry weight here. A channel with no name and no editorial team can build a million-strong audience faster than a publication with a twenty-year history. And the cost of that isn’t borne by the platform or the channel administrators, but by real people.
Fixing Ukraine’s Telegram problem
Data from two studies paints a fairly clear picture. The Ukrainian Telegram space is dominated by anonymous sources, with propaganda holding a steady foothold. Traditional media are pushed to the margins, while official state channels are present but don’t set the agenda, consistently losing out to anonymous actors across the board — except when it comes to citation metrics. The state has effectively boxed itself into a choice it made. It can’t leave Telegram because so many ordinary people rely on it. Nevertheless, by staying, the government ends up giving legitimacy to a platform it also sees as a threat to national security — and it does so openly, through daily posts from the president, the government, and security agencies.
Getting out of this trap cannot be half-measures. The NSDC decision to ban Telegram on official devices does not touch the core of the problem. Millions of Ukrainians receive daily information from channels about which nothing is known — who runs them, who funds them, and what aims they pursue. Some of these channels openly operate in the interest of the enemy. The state is fully aware of this — and still continues to invest in the very platform where such channels flourish.
Verified media need more than financial support. They also require structural measures that make credible reporting competitive in an environment that was never designed for it. That should be part of the state’s broader approach to Telegram, rather than something left to media grants alone.
Another step Ukraine could take to clean up the Telegram space is tighter regulation of media activity. Anonymous channels with millions of subscribers should not exist entirely outside any form of oversight. In wartime, it matters who owns a media outlet, how it is funded, and what editorial standards it follows — basic requirements for any media organisation, but ones Telegram still allows many channels to sidestep.
Ukraine is fighting an information war on terrain where the rules are largely set by its opponents. And as long as the state continues to legitimise Telegram simply by using it — without demanding greater transparency from the platform or higher standards from itself — anonymous channels and propaganda will continue to shape Ukraine’s information space.
