The killing of 

Vladlen Tatarsky  has put a spotlight on the murky world of

Russia’s pro-invasion military bloggers and the outsized role they play in
Moscow’s propaganda machine.

Tatarsky – whose real name was Maxim Fomin – died on Sunday in

an explosion at a St. Petersburg cafe  where he was appearing as a guest of a
pro-war group. He was known for his support for the war on Ukraine and the
boss of the Wagner mercenary group Yevgeny Prigozhin  – as well as his
occasional but harsh criticism of Moscow’s battlefield failures.

While he was a prominent voice within the ‘milblogger’ universe – with more
than 500,000 subscribers to his Telegram channel – he was certainly not the
only one with influence.

Russia forced the closing of the last of its remaining independent media
shortly after invading Ukraine in February 2022. Any coverage of the conflict
on Russian state media is tightly controlled by the Kremlin. Foreign media is
blocked and most opposition journalists are either in jail or out of the country.

Pro-Kremlin commentators such as Tatarsky, who are sometimes called

“voenkory” for “war correspondents”, have filled some of this information
vacuum.

“Military bloggers in Russia today provide a very cloudy service but a service
nonetheless. They are really the only ones who are monitoring what’s
happening on the frontline,” Candace Rondeaux, the director of the Future
Frontlines program at the New America Foundation, told CNN.
Prominent Russian military blogger killed in St. Petersburg cafe blast

Many of Russia’s military bloggers have deep sources within the state’s armed
forces, the Wagner group or among pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine,
which gives them unparalleled access to information. Tatarsky himself was
born in Ukraine, reportedly fought with Russian separatists in the Donbas in
the east of the country and had close ties to Wagner. He also had a criminal
past: According to Russian media reports and his own admission, he served
time in jail for a bank robbery.

“Obviously, they have a very biased view of the war. But they are critical to
understanding what’s happening at least on one side of the flux,” Rondeaux
added.

Ruslan Trad, a resident fellow for security research at the Atlantic Council’s
Digital Forensic Research Lab, told CNN that the community of bloggers is
united among themselves, but it is also often associated with the Russian
defense ministry and other security agencies.

“These people know each other, often travel to the same destinations,
communicate and have a closed system. Tatarsky occupied a significant place
in this community,” he said.
“At the same time, he was also a critic of the Russian officer corps and the
upper echelon making decisions about military actions. Sometimes his …
analysis caused a wave of negative reactions among officers, because he, as a
staunch defender of Russia and its army, wanted to see this army more
successful than it actually was,” Trad added.

The correspondents also cross ethical lines: Tatarsky posted images of himself
carrying a weapon in the combat zone.

Ultranationalist origins
Many of the bloggers, including Tatarsky , have been operating for multiple
years, covering Russian and Wagner military operations in the Middle East
and Africa, and the Donbas conflict that started in 2014. They have been
instrumental in stoking support for the wider war on Ukraine.

“They have set a steady diet of pro-war, anti-West, anti-Ukrainian propaganda

to the hard right elements of Russia for many years now. And they have, in
many ways, popularized the Wagner group brand and the Russian way of war,”
Rondeaux said.

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The bloggers’ influence grew following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last
year and the subsequent crackdown on Western social media platforms such as
Twitter and Instagram in Russia.
“They all collectively started to move into Telegram and then their content
started to get picked up a lot more around April, May of last year, which is
when Russians started to experience a lot of military failures,” Kateryna
Stepanenko, Russia analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of
War, told CNN.

Russia tried, but failed, to block Telegram previously after its founders refused
to provide encryption keys to the FSB, a Russian security agency. It lifted the
official ban on the messaging platform in 2020.

Many of the most popular military blog Telegram channels have roots in
ultranationalist movements. The ideas they are spreading are not necessarily
new, but are now reaching many more people thanks to the technology.

Trad said a significant part of the bloggers’ audiences includes far-right

supporters, nationalists, pagans and extreme Orthodox Christians. “By many
criteria, the audience of (the military bloggers’) Telegram channels matches
those distributed in the United States by far-right groups and communities of
conspiracy theorists,” he said, adding that their audiences were not confined to
Russia. “People like Tatarsky served as propagandists and their admirers can
be found far in western and central Europe.”

Free to criticize
Unlike Russian state media, many of the most influential military bloggers
have not shied away from criticizing Moscow for its battlefield defeats
including the withdrawal from Kherson  in November or, most recently, the
stalling of the drawn-out fight for Bakhmut .

Stepanenko said that the Russians’ failure to cross the Siverskyi Donets river,
which caused their offensive in eastern Ukraine to falter last May, was a key
moment in the rise of these bloggers.

“The Russian Ministry of Defense did not acknowledge it, they did not talk
about it in their regular coverage, and (the bloggers) suddenly went from being
this small group that was covering nationalist topics and Russian conflicts
worldwide to becoming the source of information in Russia,” she said.

There is a stark difference between the way Russian authorities treat these
bloggers, however critical they are of the leadership, and anyone else who
dares to speak up against Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday that

thanks to Tatarsky and other military bloggers “the world sees truthful and
operational footage and learns information about what is happening in
Ukraine.”
Yet Russian authorities are also handing out harsh sentences to anyone
reporting on the atrocities allegedly committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.

In December, opposition activist and Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin  was convicted

of spreading “false information” about the Russian army after he reported on
the massacres in Bucha  and sent to prison for eight and a half years. Maria
Ponomarenko , another journalist, was sentenced to six years in prison for a
Telegram post about a Russian airstrike on a theater in Mariupol that killed
hundreds, and for which Russian authorities deny responsibility.