Who Runs One of the Most Popular Pro-War Telegram Channels

IStories reveal how an Airborne Forces officer, the son of a former deputy minister and possibly a General Staff officer make money from exclusive snuff videos from the war in Ukraine

An Airborne Forces special forces officer and the son of former Russian Deputy Agriculture Minister Stanislav Aleynik administer the pro-war Telegram channel Arkhangel Spetsnaza (translated as “Special Forces Archangel”, we will use this title further in the text), which earns money by publishing exclusive violent content from the war in Ukraine, IStories found out.

Together with the volunteer project UA Drone Forces, we verified the identities of military personnel and civilians related to the Special Forces Archangel.

The channel appeared in September 2021 and from the very beginning of the invasion of Ukraine has been carrying a detailed and exclusive chronicle of one of the main operations of the Russian Armed Forces in February 2022 — the landing at the Gostomel airfield near Kyiv.

Now Special Forces Archangel is one of the most popular pro-war channels in Telegram, it has almost 1.2 million subscribers. The channel has a total of eight authors: seven servicemen and one civilian, “working on the front line,” they call themselves participants of the “Gostomel landing” and “other battles.” The authors of the channel also stated in one of their posts that among them there are servicemen of the Rosgvardiya and “intelligence special forces.”

In addition to frontline reports, the channel publishes manuals for fighters and — as profile content — original snuff videos from the war, that is, scenes of real-life killings that have not been published anywhere before.

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“Dear subscribers, newcomers, I would like to tell you that we have tough content... we have no pity for the enemy, we respect him, but the dead are neither our friend nor our enemy, we have a tough presentation of information” — this is how the authors of the channel “welcomed” new subscribers in July 2022.

For example, on July 29, 2024 Archangel published a video of a man being murdered: in the footage, a half-dressed man walks along the road as if lost. After a while, he is fatally struck by an FPV drone with a charge of explosives.

IStories did a “reverse” search for videos and photos from the channel and found that the content was indeed published there for the first time.

The authors also publish footage of psychological violence, such as footage of children being interrogated in captured territories of Ukraine.

In July 2024, the Ukrainian “leaks” site Evocation published the personal data of several authors of Special Forces Archangel, which was allegedly disclosed by the former administrator of this Z-project with the call sign Yantar. We were able to verify this information via open data.

The creator and main administrator of Special Forces Archangel appears with the call sign Athlete. The only thing he provides about himself in the channel is his birthday, July 14. In the dating app Tinder, we found an account of a man with the nickname Athlete. In the photos, he stands in a military uniform and with a flag of the special forces of the Russian Airborne Forces. The caption states that the man’s name is Yevgeny, he is an officer and 26 years old.

With the help of Tinder photos and leaked data, we found out that the man’s name is Yevgeny Zhulidov and his nickname in Telegram is “Arno Brecker” (the chief sculptor of the Third Reich).

Zhulidov was born on July 14, 1998 (that is, he is now just 26 years old), he serves in the 45th Special Forces Brigade of the Russian Airborne Forces, which participated in the landing at the Gostomel airfield. It is the 45th brigade that the channel calls home, and its commander — Vadim Pankov — “father.”

Also in June 2022, the channel posted a link to a manual on how to apply a tourniquet when wounded. The link leads to a Yandex.Disk owned by “Yevgeny Korolevsky.” Zhulidov, according to the leaks, used an email address evgeniykorolevski.

A comparative analysis using Amazon’s artificial intelligence service Rekognition also confirmed that the soldier calling himself Athlete and Officer Yevgeny from Tinder are the same person.

In leaked databases, Zhulidov’s actual address since 2021 is listed as a three-story mansion of more than 600 square meters in the elite village of Nikolino on the Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway. The military unit 28337, in which Zhulidov served, is located half an hour’s drive from this village.

Another leader of the Archangel is referred to as a serviceman with the call sign Vnuk. He also hides his face; according to the Evocation portal, Vnuk’s name is actually Yevgeny Aleynik and he is 23 years old.

We found a man with the same first name, last name and date of birth — he is the son of Stanislav Aleynik, rector of Belgorod State Agrarian University and former deputy minister of agriculture of Russia. We found Yevgeny in a family photo.

A comparative analysis with the help of artificial intelligence showed that Yevgeny Aleynik is Vnuk from Special Forces Archangel. Where exactly Aleynik serves is unknown.

One of the Archangel’s authors may be related to the Eighth Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, responsible for the protection of state secrets in the troops. The authors of the channel emphasize that they publish manuals of their own production, and in the metadata of one of them — a memo on the use of cell phones — the creator is listed as Nikolai Chebrov, the full namesake of an officer in the military unit 31659, the same secret department of the General Staff.

There are several civilian chat administrators in the Special Forces Archangel team; they were also called by their names and “call signs” in the channel.

We identified the chat administrator nicknamed Tsvetochok as 41-year-old Yulia Matveeva from Sergiev Posad. She previously worked for the funeral company Monument-Studiya.

Publications with violence scenes are monetized by the channel’s authors through donations, sale of advertising, content and merchandise.

More than 58 thousand dollars (about 5.4 million rubles) have been received on the addresses of cryptocurrency wallets for donations specified in the channel since August 2023 (when they were first mentioned in the channel), IStories calculated. We do not have exact data on the volume of all funds passing through the accounts of administrators as income from the channel, but only in the last two months Special Forces Archangel reported on the purchase of drones totaling about 30 million rubles.

Fundraising for the channel used to be handled by Inga Kapichevskaya, 47, from Kursk. But in September 2022, the Archangel team reported that Kapichevskaya squandered more than 1.5 million rubles of readers’ donations to restaurant visits and a computer for her son.

Now the money from subscribers is being collected on the card of 32-year-old Svetlana Sbitneva from Vladimir. Sbitneva’s place of work in leaked databases is listed as the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations in the Vladimir Oblast, and in phone books she is signed as “Sveta OMON” (OMON is Special Purpose Mobile Unit — a system of military special police units within the Armed Forces of Russia). Ludmila Zhulidova, the mother of the creator of Special Forces Archangel, served in the Vladimir OMON, for example.

One advertising post in Special Forces Archangel costs 54 thousand rubles (the number of advertising posts could not be counted, they are not marked or deleted). Merch of this Z-channel was also previously sold in the store on the Wildberries marketplace.

In addition, the Archangel team earns money via paid subscription to the Archangel+ channel, which promises “more in-depth analytics and info, service tips, insider knowledge, thoughts and opinions.” The paid channel includes even more photos and videos of killed Ukrainian military personnel, as well as footage of their interrogations, which are also attended by the “archangels” themselves.

A monthly subscription to the paid channel costs from 500 to 1,000 rubles per month. Now the channel has a little over 800 subscribers, which means that they can bring in up to 800 thousand rubles a month.

Zhulidov responded to IStories via his personal Telegram account, claiming that he is not the one writing, but another person who is only involved in the production of the channel’s chevrons. He also claims that “Yevgeny Zhulidov and Yevgeny Aleynik have not administered the channel since the end of 2022. On the instructions of the unit, they were banned from conducting activities.” Instead of them, the channel is allegedly administered by the Airborne Forces Command.

We also sent a written request to Stanislav Aleynik.

Editor: Maria Zholobova