The team of one of the most important Russian pro-war bloggers, who publishes under the name “Rybar”, spent the past few days in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, where, in the area of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the RS entity, held a kind of “education” on how to manage channels on the Russian Telegram network.
According to their announcement on Twitter, the education included students, journalists, politicians and academics.
“Our team spent the whole of last week in Serbia and Republika Srpska. We educated and explained how to create and manage Telegram channels, organize them into networks, distribute the right content and fight against misinformation,” the publication stated.
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As they added, the goal is to show that it is possible to manage without Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram.
“That the Russian experience in the information battle can and should be taken into account. Telegram is a platform that allows us to do that. Over 500 people attended Mihail Zvinchuk’s closed lectures; ▪️Rybar’s team took on more than 10 great and promising projects with personal support. Achieved are agreements on holding regular face-to-face master courses with the participation of the authors of Russian Telegram channels,” added Rybar.
At the end, they added that “they have long studied the approaches of the West in conducting information warfare.”
“We have long studied the approaches of the West in waging an information war against us. Now is the moment to apply our knowledge and teach our associates the right approaches and include them in Telegram. The Balkans is just the beginning.”
The Rybar channel on Telegram was created by Mihailo Zvinchuk and Denis Shchukin, a programmer from Moscow. The creators remained anonymous until journalists revealed their identity in November 2022. At first, the channel was independent, but at some point Zvinchuk started to cooperate with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Agency for Internet Research. During the cooperation, Prigozhin allocated funds to the Telegram channel, and a permanent part of the channel was published on the website of the Internet Research Agency from June 2020 to August 2021. The cooperation is completed in 2021 or 2022.
In an interview with RTVI in 2022, Zvinchuk stated that the channel has about 40 full-time employees, and the monthly budget is 4 million rubles (about 40,000 euros). According to Zvinčuk, the channel is funded by donations. The channel published criticism of the actions of the Russian Ministry of Defense during the war in Ukraine. In October 2022, the Telegram channel Mash reported that Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, asked Roskomnadzor to check the channel for “fake” news and “discrediting” the Russian military. At the same time, according to The Bell, three days before the announcement of the check, the channel published three messages advertising the mobilization, Klix.ba reports.
