Ksenia Rundin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Statecraft and Strategic Communication at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research interests are situated at the confluence of marketing communication and sociohistorical propaganda analysis, specifically focusing on unravelling the complexities of propaganda in the digital era through social media platforms. Rundin’s postdoctoral research seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the changing dynamics of the propaganda techniques, originally developed during the Cold War era and now enhanced by the unpredictable power of social media development.

Personal profile (Axson Johnson Institute)

Personal profile (HHS)

Prof. Dr. Nina Khairova is a professor of computer and applied linguistics at the Faculty of Computer Science, Umeå University (Sweden), where she is currently a visiting professor.  Her research focuses on machine learning for text analysis, large language models (LLMs), disinformation detection, and responsible AI. She leads and contributes to international projects on disinformation and the credibility of public information. Currently, she coordinates “AI Approaches to Disinformation Detection in News Coverage of the Russia–Ukraine War” and participates in “Building Trust in Social Media: Assessing the Credibility of Public Information on Ukrainian Migration to Europe.”

Personal profile

Jonas Colliander is an associate professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. His research revolves around human responses to digital communication, particularly in social media. Some issues he focuses on in his research are: what is it that shapes our views of social media, and how should companies treat this new phenomenon for marketing purposes? How do consumers respond to marketing through these channels? How are political messages received in social media. This extends to both traditional campaigns as well political communication and deliberate desinformation. He is also interested in the link between social media and e-commerce.

Personal profile

War blogging is not a new phenomenon, but in the context of the war in Ukraine, it has taken on a transformed strategic role. Unlike the early 2000s “warblogs” that emerged during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—valued for their subjectivity, immediacy, and independence from institutional journalism (Matheson & Allan 2007)—today’s Russian war bloggers (voenkory) operate within a hybrid media ecosystem that blends grassroots communication, state signaling, and emotional persuasion. Rising at the intersection of digital propaganda, narrative warfare, and cyber-enabled soft power (DFRLab 2024), the phenomenon reflects a broader shift in the communicative architecture of conflict. Using the affordances of platforms like Telegram, war bloggers offer real-time distribution, symbolic visibility, and participatory interaction (Hoskins & Shchelin 2022).

This paper investigates the function of Russian war bloggers in the information ecosystem surrounding the war in Ukraine, asking: What strategic narratives do they construct? How do these narratives align with, reinforce, or deviate from official Kremlin discourse? What kind of communicative and symbolic power do these actors exercise in shaping public understanding of the war?

Methodologically, the study employs a comparative narrative analysis of Telegram posts from 300 Russian war bloggers and contemporaneous RIA Novosti coverage (2022–2024), focusing on shared and divergent symbolic frames. This is supported by large language models (LLM)–assisted thematic analysis (Stammbach et al. 2024) to surface rhetorical patterns, emotional tones, and implicit alignments at scale, including visual cues, metaphors, and the affective structure of posts (Miskimmon et al. 2013; Crilley 2015).

War bloggers occupy a strategic grey zone: simultaneously amplifying Kremlin messaging and offering quasi-independent critique, especially in moments of military failure or scandal (DFRLab 2024). Although they appear to be informal communicators at first glance, they contribute to normalizing Russian occupation through emotional storytelling and influencer tactics (Reevell 2025). Thus, they become affective brokers who mediate between state messaging, battlefield realities, and the ideological expectations of online publics. Their activities complicate the traditional boundaries of state propaganda, influencer culture, and digital sovereignty—posing new challenges for how cyberspace is governed, contested, and re-ordered.