On the night of Friday June 23 to Saturday June 24, Perviy Kanal, the first Russian television channel, interrupts its programs with an urgent bulletin. The irremovable star presenter, Ekaterina Andreïeva, lapidarily announces the unthinkable: a mutiny is underway, triggered by the founder of the Wagner Group, Evgueni Prigozhin, and “President Vladimir Putin is informed of the situation”.
Four hours earlier, the warlord launched his first threatening message on his Telegram channel (Press-sloujba Prigojina, the official account of his company Concord), and since then social networks have been in turmoil.
At 12:12 a.m. (Moscow time, 11:12 p.m. in France), when the warlord announced his intention to march towards Moscow and recommended to anyone “not to oppose resistance”the AP Wagner Telegram account sends this signal: “Natchinaiem” (“Let’s go”). One word, just one, which garners nearly half a million views and triggers incredible excitement.
Double the ordinary traffic
In the space of 24 hours, on Saturday, marked by the advance of Prigozhin’s troops on Russian territory, then their abrupt renunciation a few hours later, Russian-speaking Telegram channels recorded 11 billion views, i.e. double ordinary traffic, according to TGstats, an analysis site based on data made public by Telegram. At the same time, on the same day, subscriptions to these same channels reached the record figure of 11 million, ten times more than in ordinary times.
On Saturday, Yevgeny Prigojine’s media, social networks and news agency Riafan.ru were blocked in Russia, but his messages, duplicated by others, slipped through the cracks. At 7.25 p.m., his last diatribe, in which he announced the withdrawal of the Wagners to prevent the “Russian blood is flowing”, still attracts 9.3 million views – not counting the thousands of reshoots. Next door, Russian national television pales in comparison.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the intensification of repression, and ever-tighter surveillance of the Internet, Russians eager to learn have learned to circumvent obstacles. And in the last accessible square, the free Telegram application, born in Russia in 1993 – its founder in exile, Pavel Durov, obtained a French passport – imposed itself at the forefront with more than 600,000 channels.
The “visibility” of the “king of trolls” and campaigns on the Internet, another area in which Yevgeny Prigojine specialized, contrasts with the noticeable absence of pillars of Kremlin propaganda throughout the crisis. . Mute for 24 hours, Margarita Simonian, boss of the RT and Sputnik agencies, reappeared on television on Sunday to try to explain that she was sailing the day before on the Volga, without a connection.