Russia Wants Its Pro-war Bloggers To Identify Themselves By 2025. Only About 10% Of Its Top Channels Are Complying, Analysis Says.

Russian military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk, pictured here, runs the Telegram account Rybar.

Francesca Ebel/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• Russia has been trying to get its big social media accounts to register with the government.
• But Kremlin-affiliated and pro-war accounts aren't playing ball, independent Russian media reported.
• A new analysis found that only 10 of the top 82 political pro-government Telegram channels had registered.

Nearly 90% of Russia's top pro-war Telegram channels have been ignoring a government directive to identify themselves in an official registry, per an analysis by independent media outlet Vertska.

The findings come four months after Russian leader Vladimir Putin signed a decree on August 8 for all owners of social media channels with 10,000 or more subscribers to disclose their data to the federal telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor.

Should they fail to do so by January 1, 2025, the law says these channels will be blocked from advertising or raising funds from subscribers. The decree came into effect on November 1.

Vertska reported on Monday that it analyzed the top 100 Russian political channels on Telegram and found 82 of them that were pro-government.

According to Vertska, of those 82 pro-government channels, 72 had not registered with Roskomnadzor less than a month before the deadline.

These include the Kremlin-affiliated blogger Rybar, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, and Operation Z, a group of war correspondents and bloggers.

Politicians such as Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council, and Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow's mayor, were also among the top 100 political channels but have not registered, per Vertska.

Notably, the Russian Defense Ministry's channel is also not registered, per Vertska.

In an analysis published on Monday, the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War wrote that these pro-war channels may have failed to register "possibly because they are already Kremlin-aligned and do not threaten the Kremlin's deserved control over public discourse in Russia."

But the move was originally unpopular with pro-Kremlin military bloggers, who often maintain anonymity and sometimes post analyses and criticism of Russian war leaders.

Some top voices said the decision would dull Russian analyses on Telegram, while others complained of "draconian" censorship and a possible decrease in war news shared via the platform.

"Russian Telegram will become censored and uninteresting," wrote Two Majors, a popular channel with nearly 1.2 million subscribers.

Still, Vertska reported that several popular bloggers have registered with Roskomnadzor, including Boris Rozhin, who runs the channel "Colonel Cassad," and Dmitry Nikotin.

Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia's State Duma, runs the most popular registered channel. He is the country's eighth-most popular channel that discusses politics.

Another Vertska analysis of the 32 top Telegram channels posting solely about the Ukraine war found that only eight, or a quarter of the total, were registered.

Roskomnadzor did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

Putin's decree on popular channels, which applies to platforms like VKontakte, Telegram, and TikTok, comes as Moscow has sought to exercise more control over mass communications channels since the onset of the Ukraine war.

Russia has already blocked Western platforms like Facebook and X and has repeatedly been reported to have throttled connectivity to YouTube.

In October, it also blocked the messaging and call platform Discord, sparking outcry from commentators who said the gaming comms tool was used by Russian units to coordinate drone operations in Ukraine.