On the VKontakte page of a certain Roman Koșelev, aged 29, there is a photo from the gym, and his status is a motivational quote: “Sport is life”. Every day, he posts about the progress of the “special operation” and about the “nazism” in Ukraine. Among the pages he is subscribed to are “Contract Service in the Ministry of Defense of Russia” and dozens of news channels from various regions.
Only that Roman… never existed. His photo was taken from a Telegram channel about sports supplements, and his profile – like thousands of others – was created to promote Russian propaganda on social networks.
With the help of the “Botnadzor” service, which tracks the activity of pro-Kremlin bots, the journalists of The Moscow Times analyzed how these fake accounts are used to simulate the support of the population in the occupied territories.
The first online bots of the Kremlin appeared long before the invasion of 2022. In 2013, the publication Novaia Gazeta described an office in St. Petersburg where “internet trolls” praised President Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. In 2017, after the US presidential election, RBC journalists investigated how these “digital activists” influenced the election results.
Both investigations linked these operations to structures controlled by Evgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, who died in August 2023.
Details, HERE