Every day for Over the past two years, thousands of Ukrainians have opened the official Covid-19 Telegram channel for the latest news about the pandemic. The @COVID19_Ukraine account shares daily data on cases, the number of people who have died and the latest government health advice. Millions read the channel during the global health crisis.
But as Russian troops marched toward Ukraine’s borders, the channel responded. Asked if members wanted updates on the latest “socio-political” news? People voted en masse for the change. Since then, the Telegram channel has been sharing the latest military news 24 hours a day – changing its screen name to @UkraineNOW – and has become the main source of verified information for Ukrainian citizens.
In the days after the war began, WIRED reviewed hundreds of Telegram posts from verified Ukrainian government accounts and politicians. Their messages help keep people safe, debunk potential Russian disinformation, and counter emerging threats. Wartime propaganda is mixed with practical safety advice. Among the demands to find Russian saboteurs are rebuttals of disinformation. And alleged videos of captured Russians sit alongside photos of babies born in air raid shelters. This all unfolds in real time, with accounts posting hundreds of messages a day.
“How to distinguish our equipment from the enemy’s?” UkraineNOW posted on Friday, sharing photos of Ukrainian and Russian tanks. On Saturday, three separate posts within just six minutes warned of impending airstrikes in Ukraine (“air alert: Lviv, Rivne ❗️❗️❗️”); Maps were shared showing the locations of air raid shelters. On Sunday, the channel advised on ways to safely pass through military checkpoints (“turn on the emergency light, no video”) and what to do if there are attacks on chemical processing plants (“close the windows and do not open them unnecessarily”).
With nearly 500,000 members before the Russian invasion, UkraineNOW was already one of the largest Telegram channels in the country. Now a million people rely on it for war updates. His posts, which are shared by other channels, receive about 8 million views per day. On February 26, UkraineNOW posted 139 times and forwarded another 54 messages from other Telegram accounts; before the invasion he posted three to five times a day. Its evolution and continued growth provides insight into how the social media app has helped keep citizens informed about Russia’s invasion with verified information at a time when platforms are struggling to cope with a deluge of misinformation and disinformation.
“From bomb shelters, on the road, in different parts of the country, day and night we are working to ensure that Ukraine and the world get correct information and fight Russian propaganda,” said one of the members of the Ukrainian team involved in the operation channel, in front of WIRED. They say the channel has quickly been “transformed into a powerful information ecosystem” to keep people informed.
The original Covid-19 channel was created by a Ukrainian technology agency, the Institute for Cognitive Modeling. The government quickly adopted it as the official Telegram pandemic service in March 2020. The agency still manages the channel as well as an associated Viber account. “We work together with the government, we publish only verified information,” said the person familiar with the channel’s work, adding that there are “working groups” for fact-checking publications. “If the information does not come from government agencies, we will definitely check it with several official sources in parallel before publishing it,” the person said. Channel staff do it on a schedule, and there’s an “approval hierarchy” that posts must go through before they go live.
While Ukrainian officials effectively use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, among others, to share war updates, boost morale, and draw international attention to Ukraine, the use of Telegram stands out. The hybrid structure of the application makes it a powerful tool for mass communication. Public or private channels, such as UkraineNOW, can have an unlimited number of members, while public and private groups allow up to 200,000 members. WhatsApp’s maximum group size is 256 members, while Signal’s groups exceed 1,000 people.
