  In response to disinformation and propaganda from Russian online media
following the invasion of Ukraine, Russian media outlets such as Russia Today
and Sputnik News were banned throughout Europe. To maintain viewership, many of
these Russian outlets began to heavily promote their content on messaging
services like Telegram. In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets
interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. Leveraging
the foundational model MPNet, DP-means clustering, and Hawkes processes, we
trace how narratives spread between news sites and Telegram channels. We show
that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram but
that they source material from the messaging platform. For example, across the
websites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of
articles discussed content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram.
Finally, tracking the spread of individual topics, we measure the rate at which
news outlets and Telegram channels disseminate content within the Russian media
ecosystem, finding that websites like ura.news and Telegram channels such as
@genshab are the most effective at disseminating their content.
