Tracking the Wartime Discourse on Telegram: A Comparative Study of Ukrainian and Russian Policymakers’ Communication Before and After Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Over the past two decades, social media and messengers have become essential platforms for political communication (Severin-Nielsen, 2023), both among elites and the general public. These platforms have enabled new opportunities for political deliberation in digital public spheres (Schäfer, 2014), but they have also facilitated the diffusion of misleading information and hate speech, which damage healthy democratic debate (McKay & Tenove, 2020). These contrasting functions of social media, as spaces for democratic deliberation and as channels for disinformation and polarization, become even more pronounced during times of war. In wartime, political elites (e.g., policymakers) often turn to social media and messengers to mobilize support domestically and internationally, manipulate opinions, and crowd out critical views (Zeitzoff, 2017). However, the use of these platforms can vary greatly across contexts. Most recent wars involving countries with high internet penetration have been relatively short-term (e.g., the Russo-Georgian war) or constituted low-intensity counterinsurgency operations (e.g., the US-led invasion of Afghanistan). In contrast, more intense and prolonged wars have primarily occurred in the Global South (e.g., in Libya or Syria). As a result, there is limited empirical evidence on how political communication unfolds during wartime in socially mediated environments. Given the growing risk of wars returning to the Global North, there is an urgent need for such evidence to strengthen the resilience of democracies that are vulnerable to both informational and physical attacks, and to understand how autocracies, historically more prone to initiating wars (Tangerås, 2009), manage political communication during mass violence. In this study, we address this gap by examining elite-driven political communication on a hybrid social media/messenger platform, Telegram, in Ukraine and Russia. These two countries, with high levels of internet penetration, have been engaged in a war that has been ongoing since 2014 and intensified in 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is the first war on such a scale in Europe since the emergence of social media, which presents a critical context for understanding how platforms are adopted and used by political elites during today’s wars. To this end, we draw on a large-scale dataset of public posts from Telegram—the central war-related information platform in both countries (Bawa et al., 2025)—coming from all major legislative and executive actors in Ukraine and Russia from 2019 to 2024. We then analyse this dataset made of 1,178,231 Telegram public posts published from 2019 to 2024 to examine how the volume and content of political communication on Telegram, as well as individual actor engagement, changed following the full-scale invasion and evolved throughout the course of the war. For this aim, we combine descriptive statistics and computational text analysis; for the latter, we apply dynamic topic modelling using BERTopic.