How to Interpret the War in Ukraine: Military Blogger Dashboard

This dashboard displays outputs from Telegram channels linked to influential Russian military bloggers. These channels are not directly affiliated with the Russian government, and it would therefore be incorrect to, without further analysis, label anyone or anything that appears on the dashboard as being connected to state-backed propaganda.

Note—The dashboard uses natural language processing and other machine learning and auto-translation tools to extract key information from the data. Although highly accurate, automated systems are imperfect. We urge all those reporting on the dashboard to confirm their findings with ASD.

How often is the dashboard updated?

The dashboard updates several times per day, meaning that recent Telegram posts may or may not be included in the dashboard’s data. The default setting displays data from the previous seven days, but users can filter data by any date range.

What channels are included?

The dashboard displays aggregate results from Telegram channels linked to influential Russian military bloggers. Each channel included has more than 5,000 subscribers. These channels are meant to provide a representative sample of the Russian military blogging community. Click here for the full list of channels.  

Posts

This chart displays the posts made by monitored Telegram channels over a specified time. The chart allows users to filter between the top 10 posts in views, replies, forwards, and reactions. It also allows users to see all of the posts in a given timeframe and sort them by the metrics listed above. Non-English posts are displayed in English using Microsoft’s Translator API. Engagement metrics are determined using Telegram’s public API. Posts within the last five days are updated during each refresh — historical tweets (those older than five days) are not updated regularly.

Tracked Channels

This chart displays the monitored Telegram channels with the most subscribers, views, reactions, and forwards over a given period of time. This information is useful in interpreting results on the rest of the dashboard. For example, the most viewed channels will affect the top 10 results more than channels that are viewed less, regardless of those channels’ number of subscribers. Channel information and subscriber statistics are updated each weekend.

Key phrases

We use Microsoft’s Cognitive Services to translate non-English Tweets and to extract key phrases. Non-relevant or non-specific key phrases (e.g., verbs, common nouns, etc.) are filtered out to remove noise from the results. We extract key phrases instead of key words to link together related words (e.g., “INF Treaty” or “Barack Obama”). It is possible, however, for two or more related nouns to appear as multiple entries in search results. For example, “Putin,” “Vladimir,” and “President Putin” may appear as three unique phrases.

Mentioned countries

We use key phrase extraction to determine the most mentioned countries. In addition, special territories and regions (e.g., Hong Kong and the EU) are included as individual entities in the country data. The chart lists all mentions of a country, including alternative country names, under that country’s official name (e.g., mentions of US, USA, U.S., and America are all included in tabulations for the United States of America).

Note: Mentions of the State of Georgia will likely be mistaken for the country of Georgia. As with all key phrase extraction, other false positives are possible.

Mentioned channels

This chart displays Telegram handles most frequently included in posts made by monitored channels. These results include all mentions of (also known as tags), replies to, and retweets of a specific channel. Channels that mention themselves are filtered out, and therefore are NOT included.

URLs

This chart displays the hyperlinks most shared by monitored channels in a specified time period. Shortened links have been expanded to display the full URL. Channels monitored on the dashboard are filtered out of these URLS.

WARNING: The dashboard does not screen links for malware, phishing content, spam, or any other undesired content. Click on the links at your own risk.