{"id":5646,"date":"2026-09-23T11:26:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/factcheck.lt\/?p=5646"},"modified":"2026-09-28T23:50:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T20:50:35","slug":"media_field_092026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/factcheck.lt\/eng\/news\/media_field_092026\/","title":{"rendered":"How Belarus's pro-regime media field changed in a year","raw":"How Belarus's pro-regime media field changed in a year"},"content":{"rendered":"

In fourteen months, pro-regime Telegram cut its output by 27% without changing its hierarchy or its roles. Russian state and pro-Kremlin sources are embedded in the core of this system as a permanent channel. Belarusian and Russian state agendas coincide on almost everything, except stories about Belarus’s own role. Our analysis draws on the FORESIGHT corpus, a forward graph, the Narrative Divergence Index and a TikTok sample.<\/p>\n

Output is contracting<\/strong><\/p>\n

We counted monthly posts from 60 pro-regime Telegram channels since 2020, 2.18 million documents in total, deduplicated by post URL. One channel previously on the roster was excluded as an opposition aggregator.<\/p>\n

The segment is born in August 2020, when output rises in a single month from 3,776 to 10,797 posts. The all-time high comes in March 2022, the start of the full-scale war, with 42,598 posts. Three years of plateau at 32,000\u201338,000 a month follow, with a last peak in June 2025 at 38,518 posts.<\/p>\n

Between June 2025 and August 2026, output fell by 27%, to 28,101 posts a month. The channel roster did not change over this period, so the decline reflects the channels’ own behaviour, not a change in the sample. The wartime maximum of March 2022 has not been matched in four and a half years.<\/p>\n

\"Monthly
Monthly output of 60 pro-regime Telegram channels, 2020\u20132026. September 2026 is incomplete.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The curve shows the segment’s production capacity, not its audience. The distinction matters, so we set it out separately.<\/p>\n

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Posts, views, reach<\/p>\n

In classical media measurement, reach is the share of a target audience that came into contact with a medium at least once during a period. It is a measure of people, and it can only be obtained through a panel: a sample of real people whose media consumption is recorded. In Belarus such a panel exists only for television: mediameter.by<\/a> measures the urban population and 12 TV channels.<\/p>\n

Platforms do not know people; they know technometrics: accounts, devices, sessions and IP addresses. One person can watch from several accounts and devices, one device can be shared, part of the views come from bots, and with widespread VPN use the user’s country cannot be determined. For Telegram, TikTok and YouTube, nobody measures reach in people today, the platforms included.<\/p>\n

We measure two other quantities. Posts show production: how much material the segment releases. Views show contacts: how many times that material was opened. One person may watch a video ten times; one post may be opened in several channels via forwards. Converting contacts into people is impossible without frequency data.<\/p>\n

The findings of this piece therefore concern production and contacts. Neither tells us how many Belarusians see this propaganda, or how that number has changed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The vertical does not move<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shrinking output could be read as a system coming apart. The forward graph shows the opposite.<\/p>\n

We took the personal channels of five propagandists (Azarenok, Tur, Gigin, Dzermant, Shpakovsky) and built a graph of their direct public forwards: who relays whom. The method is deliberately simple and does not depend on interpreting texts.<\/p>\n

The five made 47,173 forwards from 1,322 sources. The network looks wide, but if we keep only the nodes that all five forward without exception, 40 remain, and those 40 account for 72% of all forwards. This is the core of the system.<\/p>\n

At the top sits Pul Pervogo, the channel of the regime leader’s press service: 10,236 forwards from the five, more than any other node. It relays almost nothing itself: forwards make up 3.6% of its own posts. The agenda is produced here and distributed downwards.<\/p>\n

Below the apex are the state media: CTV | Novosti (4,780 forwards), ONT NEWS (3,902), NEWS.BY (1,429), BelTA (1,421). In the same row stands the anonymous channel Zheltye Slivy (Yellow Leaks) with 4,201 forwards, ahead of ONT: an anonymous channel built into the vertical on a par with state television. The next layer consists of state institutions and security services: the House of Representatives, Belorussky Silovik, the Interior Ministry’s internal troops and the Ministry of Defence.<\/p>\n

\"Core
Core of the forward graph of five pro-regime propagandists: nodes forwarded by all five. Figures are forwards from the five.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each propagandist’s share of forwards in their own output describes their function: Tur 66%, Azarenok 46%, Gigin 44%, Dzermant 36%, Shpakovsky 30%. The first are closer to relays; the last write more themselves. In July 2026 we obtained the same shares to within a percentage point. Output is falling, but the division of roles is unchanged.<\/p>\n

The graph is heavily weighted towards one participant: 28,308 of the 47,173 forwards were made by Azarenok. That is why the core is defined structurally, by a node’s presence across all five, not by volume.<\/p>\n

Russian sources in the core: a FIMI signal<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nine of the forty core nodes are Russian: Soloviev LIVE (253 forwards), the historian Alexander Dyukov (174), Sputnik Belarus (127), Igor Korotchenko (105), the main Sputnik feed (91), RT (59), RIA Novosti (48), TASS (24) and the military channel Mig41 (22).<\/p>\n

In volume this is modest: 903 forwards, 2.6% of the core. Its significance lies elsewhere. Each of these nine sources is forwarded by all five Belarusian propagandists without exception. Russian state and pro-Kremlin media make up almost a quarter of the core by composition and are present in every one of the five channels.<\/p>\n

This is a textbook case of foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in the form of sustained amplification. Russian content enters the Belarusian segment not through one-off campaigns but through permanent links inside the vertical, and by its place in the structure the foreign source is indistinguishable from the domestic one.<\/p>\n

Minsk and Moscow: one agenda, four exceptions<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Russian content is embedded this deeply, how far does the agenda itself coincide? To answer this we use the Narrative Divergence Index. Each month ten significant events are selected. For each event an axis between two opposing interpretations is defined from the corpus, and each media environment receives a position on that axis from 0 to 10. For the prisoner exchange, for example, the axis runs from “Belarus as a neutral humanitarian platform with an active peacemaking role” (0) to “Belarus as a technical transit corridor with no role of its own” (10). The direction of the axis differs from event to event, so what we compare is the gap between environments, not their positions.<\/p>\n

Thirty events were assessed for June, July and August 2026. In 24 of them both Belarusian and Russian state and pro-regime media took a position. In 17 of the 24 they differ by one point or less, in 19 by two points or less. The mean gap is 1.7 points. Between Belarusian state and independent media, the mean gap on the same events is 5.9 points, and in 22 of 25 cases it is five points or more. The dividing line in the media field runs between state and independent media, not between Minsk and Moscow.<\/p>\n

That makes the rare divergences all the more telling. A gap of four points or more appears in four events.<\/p>\n