Alexey Kovalev writes:

Late on May 11, the pro-war segment of Russian social media on the Telegram messaging service was abuzz with breaking news about the supposed commencement of the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. The reports were hysterical: Ukrainian armored columns are moving from Kharkiv toward the Russian border, proclaimed one. Ukrainians are using chemical weapons on Russian soldiers who are gasping for breath, said another. Some of these messages even made their way to Russia’s government-owned media, such as RT. It didn’t take long for the Russian Defense Ministry to declare it all fake news. There were definitely no armored columns advancing on the southern city of Belgorod, the ministry’s press office said later that day. There were no independently confirmed chemical attacks on Russian positions, nor, at that time, any signs of the grand counteroffensive operation that pro-war Russian Telegram had been anxiously anticipating for weeks.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago, such panic-mongering has mushroomed, forming a peculiar media subculture on the Telegram app. Over the course of 2022, Telegram almost doubled its subscriber base in Russia, with some 50 million Russians using it on a regular basis, according to the business newspaper Vedomosti.

Pro-war channels vary in popularity — from only a few dozen followers to hundreds of thousands or, sometimes, slightly north of a million subscribers. They are run by individuals collectively known as “voenkory,” a historic portmanteau of the Russian words “voenny korrespondent,” meaning “war reporter” (adding the “-y” makes the singular noun plural in Russian). Most of them are men; there are a handful of pro-war women bloggers and voenkors — like Nadana Fridrikhson and Irina Kuksenkova — though they lag behind their male counterparts in subscriber numbers.

These voenkors demand much more blood than the Kremlin can or may be willing to deliver. After the apparent attempted coup by the Russian mercenary Wagner Group on Saturday, their thirst may only intensify.

Traditionally, the term has carried cultural weight, and is used in the Russian language for writers like Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Jack London and John Steinbeck. The word evokes memories of the generation who built storied literary careers out of covering the most pivotal moments in the history of the 20th century, such as Boris Polevoy’s reports in Pravda from recently liberated Auschwitz, and his Nuremberg diaries, published in 1967.

But today’s usage of voenkor is a misnomer, something of a recent perversion of the original term. The Soviet war reporters were unanimous in their condemnation of war as the most horrific thing they witnessed in their lives, and they swore to protect peace at any cost. Indeed, while the Soviet Union was involved in quite a few proxy conflicts, as well as the failed invasion of Afghanistan, which ultimately contributed to its demise, the regime propaganda’s ostensibly pacifist messaging remained consistent throughout all of the post-WWII years.

Most genuine war reporters covering the invasion of Ukraine for independent Russian media outlets refuse to call themselves “voenkors.” Pavel Kanygin, who has covered the conflict from the outset in the spring of 2014, and has been abducted several times by Russian-armed “people’s militias,” tells New Lines that their experiences of the war are so far removed from each other that he and his fellow independent reporters would have nothing to talk about with today’s voenkors if they found themselves in the same room with them.

Conversely, today’s voenkors could be described as pro-war agitators. They profit from the war, celebrate it, downplay the severity of Russian losses and even openly cheer for war crimes. If they have one consistent criticism, it is that Russia is not waging as much war in Ukraine as they would like. [Continue reading…]