Telegram channels covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a comparative analysis of large multilingual corpora

Telegram channels are essential in covering Russia’s war in Ukraine. The article compares the war coverage by voenkory, military bloggers in Ukraine and Russia, with war-related news items disseminated by legacy media, both print and electronic (TV, online news portals). A corpus of political and media discourses about the war during its first year was content analyzed using a custom-built Ukrainian-Russian-English-French “dictionary of war.” The corpus contains sources from five countries: Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, including the twenty most popular Telegram channels about the war in Ukraine and Russia (119 million words). The study demonstrates the potential of semi-supervised methods of content analysis for studying highly heterogeneous multi-language corpora. It shows how digital propaganda works in the case of war reporting. Military bloggers, actors of white propaganda, appear to outperform bots and throlls. The article also adds a comparative dimension to studies of social media. On the one hand, digital war reporting is compared with war reporting in legacy media. Russian voenkory discussed the invasion in greater technical detail than in national legacy media, whereas Ukrainian voenkory emphasized its ideological dimension more. On the other hand, the comparison extends to include several countries and periods. As the war unfolded, Ukrainian military bloggers’ coverage became less ideological and more technical, too.