In our research paper “Conspiracy Ideological Positioning on the Ukraine War and the Role of RT DE on Telegram” we investigate how German conspiracy ideology actors perceived the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine during the first week of the war. For this purpose, we qualitatively analyzed the positioning on the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine within the 10 largest German-language conspiracy-ideological Telegram channels as well as conducted a domain analysis of a total of 118,193 posts with links from 3,521 different conspiracy-ideological Telegram channels and groups.

The results of our research underline that Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine played a significant role in the German-language conspiracy ideological milieu from the very beginning, with the majority of the channels positioning themselves pro-Russian. In particular, RT DE, the German-language offering of the Russian propaganda medium RT, played a major role in the reception of the events during the first week of the war: The domain analysis shows that RT DE was the most shared medium in the relevant Telegram channels and groups. With a total of 5,772 shared RT DE links, the content of the Kremlin propaganda medium was shared more than twice as much as the content of the Austrian alternative medium Report24, whose content was the second most shared with 2,229 shared links.

RT DE’s dominant prominence within conspiracy ideology Telegram channels and groups underscores the milieu’s pro-Russian positioning. Conspiracy ideologues partly disseminate unfiltered Kremlin propaganda and thus become, at least within the milieu, a grateful source of dissemination of Russian disinformation. Russia, for its part, provides conspiracy narratives, disinformation and supposedly suppressed perspectives through its media, which find appeal within the conspiracy ideology scene through their rejection of the official narrative.