The Insider maps a Kremlin-run Telegram network posing as "angry Latvians"

TLDR

• The Insider mapped Latvia's Telegram ecosystem and found roughly a third of socio-political channels, and 65% of Russian-language ones, are run by Kremlin-aligned operators posing as ordinary Latvians.
• The investigation is a repost-network analysis: 72 channels, 353,000 posts since January 2025, 93,000 reposts traced back to their origin.
• Three-quarters of shared content traces to Russian state media, government channels, military bloggers, or "Z-channels," not organic Latvian sourcing.
• None of the five largest channels' operators have actually lived in Latvia recently; most run them from Russia or Belarus.

A repost graph, not a leak, exposed the network

The Insider didn't get inside access, it built a graph. Analysts pulled 353,000 posts from 72 Latvian socio-political Telegram channels going back to January 2025, then traced the 93,000 reposts among them to their origin.¹ Of those, 30.3% were channels reposting each other, and 43.7% came directly from Russian state media, official government accounts, military bloggers, or pro-war "Z-channels," together accounting for three-quarters of everything shared across the network.¹ A stratified sample of over 12,000 posts was then hand-checked for pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian narratives, which turned up in 65 of the 72 channels.¹

The narratives are consistent across the network: Russian speakers are being persecuted, Nazism is rising in the Baltics, ordinary Latvians are getting poorer because of aid to Ukraine, even a report of falling grocery prices got framed as an insult to the poor.¹

Why it matters: this is Telegram filling the gap left when Latvia banned Russian federal TV, and the operators aren't hiding well once someone builds the network map. The Insider identifies specific people running the three largest channels by name: Aleksejs Rosļikovs, a former Latvian MP who relocated to Belarus and made his channel private in September; Baltnews, run out of Moscow by RT-linked editorial staff; and "Baltic Antifascists," whose leader Sergejs Vasiļjevs faces a Latvian criminal case for allegedly gathering intelligence for the FSB.¹

Driving the news:

• 65 of Latvia's 221 tracked political Telegram channels are assessed as pro-Russian, with audiences of 30,000 to 100,000 each.¹
• At least one of the channels in the network was previously part of the disinformation operation run by the late Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.¹