The account, "War on Fakes," was created on February 24, the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a "special military operation" and troops began invading Ukraine. The page is rife with disinformation, according to The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies digital extremism and published a report examining the channel. As the war in Ukraine rages, the messaging app Telegram has emerged as the go-to place for unfiltered live war updates for both Ukrainian refugees and increasingly isolated Russians alike. Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country.
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