‘We know where your family live’ – Ukraine fighters face death threats online
‘Hundreds of messages with threats’
“We were among the few civilians who tried to physically resist the Russian invasion of our city,” recalls Oleksiy from Berdyansk, a Ukrainian port city that has been occupied by Russian forces since the first days of the war.
“We knew the Russians would be looking for us,” says Anastasia. “We tried not to use our phones so we couldn’t be tracked. But when we turned them on, we saw hundreds of messages with threats from strangers saying they would hang us up Will burn with our own Molotov cocktail. “It was an absolute nightmare.”
Oleksiy and his wife Anastasia throw a Molotov cocktail at a Russian armored vehicle while passing through their town. They immediately hid.
Russian state TV reported the couple’s actions, and revealed their identities. On the same day his date of birth, home address, telephone number, tax information, social media account and even the number plate of his car were posted on Telegram in a pro-Kremlin channel called “Work, Brothers”. The account has over 46,000 customers.
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Telegram posts named Oleksiy, who used to be a member of the right-wing organization “Right Sector”, and Anastasia “Nazis”, an insult often thrown at Ukrainians by Russian state media.
The couple sometimes received over 1,000 objectionable messages in a day.
“All my social media accounts were full of abuse. I tried not to read them,” recalls Anastasia.
“Where are the pictures of your dead bodies?” Read one of the messages. Another said: “We know where you live.
“It was awful,” says Anastasia, “you can’t sleep when you go to bed because you’re hearing every noise, wondering if someone has come for you.”
After hiding for two months, they managed to escape into Ukrainian-controlled territory.
The BBC has found that the “Work, Brothers” channel and another pro-Russian channel – the “Tribunal” – shared personal data of nearly 300 Ukrainian activists, soldiers and their relatives to more than 120,000 subscribers.
Both channels were created on 1 March 2022; The sixth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As well as personal information, the channels regularly promote Russian propaganda and pro-Kremlin narratives.
Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier currently fighting on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, recalls how in August he learned that a video of his battalion destroying a Russian armored vehicle had been posted on Telegram, showing his date of birth, Had a phone number and email address.
The post was published in “Work, Brothers” and said that Alexander’s family was living in Nova Kakhovka, a town in the Kherson region that is occupied by Russian troops.
“In the texts I received, they called me a ‘bloody hollow’ [a derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians] and threatened to find and rape my mother and sister in Nova Kahovka,” Oleksandr said. His mother died in 2015 and his sister moved to Turkey seven years ago.
His home address was also published. Soon after, his flat was ransacked and his property stolen.
Olesya Orlenko, 41, from Moscow, describes herself as a historian and journalist. She was one of the founders of an online project called “Tribunals” which runs a website and Telegram channel that we are monitoring. In the past she has promoted this work on Russian state media.
Ms Orlenko claims she is no longer attached to the tribunal, but uses familiar Kremlin narratives when describing the project’s objectives.
“It was created to collect information about Ukrainian Nazis [a term used by Russian state media] who committed crimes during the conflict in the Donbass [in eastern Ukraine], so that this information would be used later. be done by Russian or international courts,” she said. ,
He denied that he had anything to do with the sharing of personal details of soldiers. However, she was still one of the people in charge of the tribunal when the docking started on its Telegram channel.
The BBC has also contacted an admin of the chat group associated with the channel “Work, Brothers”.
Tatyana is 39 years old and an office worker from Podolsk, Moscow Region. She told the BBC that she “volunteers as a volunteer to help ‘work, brothers'” in her spare time.
He denied seeing personal information and threats of Ukrainian soldiers on the channel. We sent Tatyana a profile of a Ukrainian soldier and a screenshot with her comments at the bottom of the post. He stopped answering us.
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‘We know where your family live’ – Ukraine fighters face death threats online
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