The motorist couldn’t believe his eyes. “Zhivoi?” (“Are you alive?”). Emerging from the canopy of trees separating the four-lane road leading to the small Russian town of Sudzha, in the Kursk region, a staggering figure stumbled in front of his windshield. Even in the twilight that partly obscured his features, the man, dressed as a Russian soldier, appeared seriously injured. His face and hands were bleeding.

On the other side of the trees, the driver’s GoPro camera captured a fireball. On August 7, Ukrainian forces, engaged in a large-scale offensive on Russian territory for the past 24 hours, used a drone to target the car of Yevgeny Poddubny, a well-known host of a pro-war Telegram channel in Russia. A month and a half later, on September 26, Vladimir Putin awarded the survivor the title of Hero of the Russian Federation, the highest honor, and notably the first ever granted at this level to a voenkor, or war correspondent.

Like Poddubny, thousands of “journalists,” military personnel, “experts” and enthusiasts have created channels on Telegram devoted entirely to the conflict. They’re known as the “Z channels,” a letter to which they constantly refer: Painted on the Russian tanks charging towards Kyiv on February 24, 2022, it has become the symbol of the invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the number of such channels has skyrocketed, to the point where it’s impossible to list them all. Originally emerging in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine at the start of the war in 2014, and funded, they claim, by donations and advertising, they have acquired incredible visibility 10 years on.

The best-known ones have well over a million subscribers, such as “Mir Sevodnia – c Yuri Podoliaka” (“the world today with Yuri Podolyaka”, over 3 million subscribers), “Operatsia Z: Voenkori Russkoy Viesny” (“Operation Z: War Correspondents of the Russian Spring,” over 1.6 million), “Rybar” (“The Fisherman,” over 1.3 million), “Dva Mayora” (“Two Majors”) and “War Gonzo” (over 1 million each).

The ‘turbopatriots’ ecosystem

They all report on the war daily, draw up maps of the front line, publish videos of the fighting, recount every event on the “enemy” side and mock their failures. On October 7, the BTR80 channel (“Fight, brothers!” with 149,000 subscribers) shared an image under the title “Track and Destroy,” showing FPV drones destroying what the caption described as a Bradley, a “Nazi American infantry fighting vehicle,” in the Pokrovsk region, a Ukrainian city currently under fire from nearby Russian forces. One fighter pilot, “Fighterbomber” (530,000 subscribers), has even specialized in filming bombs dropping on Ukrainian territory from his cockpit.

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