Russian state television still says the war is going according to plan.
But if you read Russia’s Z-bloggers, the tone is very different.
Z-bloggers are the most loyal and fierce public supporters of the Russian army and its war in Ukraine. They live mostly on Telegram. They post battlefield updates, praise assault units, collect money for drones and military equipment, attack “traitors,” and speak to hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of followers.
In 2022, many of them believed the invasion would make them important. They thought they were becoming Russia’s new patriotic elite: the hard men, the truth-tellers, the people who understood war better than soft liberals, corrupt officials, and television generals.
They expected the state to silence their enemies and reward the “real patriots” who stood with the army.
But now they are beginning to discover something very Russian.
And the empire they imagined is not being run by heroic patriots. It is being run by bureaucrats, corrupt officials, frightened commanders, and men who often care more about their own wallets than about victory.
So what happens when Putin’s fiercest war supporters start realizing that the system they defended may betray them, too?
In the next posts, I’ll describe what’s going on in this part of the parallel universe called Russia.
