Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

Four years ago I was scrolling a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Trukha. It is the biggest news channel in Ukraine. Over three million subscribers read it. It carries air-raid alerts, front-line clips, football, discount codes, the lot. And there, in among the news, I kept seeing a phrase: Kosovo i Metohija.Kosovo i Metohija is not a neutral name. It is the Serbian state’s irredentist name for Kosova, the name that says the territory can never be anything but Serbian. I know this because as a diplomat in the OSCE I often encountered the meme “Kosovo i Metohija” in the minutes of meetings. Often these minutes never revealed which country said what. However, whenever I saw the phrase “Kosovo i Metohija” I knew the speaker was speaking on behalf of Russia or Serbia - no other member state of the OSCE ever used that meme. Moscow loves that name. It is the frame Moscow borrows whenever it wants to say that borders are negotiable and that some nations do not really exist. And here it was, dressed as news, in the most-read channel of a country fighting for its own borders. I am not Ukrainian. I read the channel through a translator app. Even so, the meme stood out like a wrong note. That was my first sighting of what I have come to call a Trukha problem. Not just a problem with one channel. A problem with a form.This week the form became news itself.What happened this weekUkraine reshuffled its government, and its defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, left the post. Fedorov then said: that from the moment Trukha was bought by a new owner, the channel began working systematically against him, and he named the parliamentarian Danylo Hetmantsev as connected to the campaign (Detector Media, 16 July 2026: https://detector.media/infospace/article/251248/, and DSnews: https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/politics/fedorov-zvinuvativ-naybilshiy-telegram-kanal-ukrajini-u-zamovniy-kampaniji-proti-nogo-16072026-463553). The activist Serhii Sternenko had already published an investigation pointing to a Kharkiv crypto entrepreneur as the likely buyer, possibly holding a Russian passport. The channel’s previous owner was mobilised in June and blamed the minister personally.Claims like these are easy to make and easy to dismiss. Everyone in a political fight says the media is against them. So I did what the Disinfolklore method always asks: I measured.What the data showsTrukha’s flagship channel publishes its full history on the open web. I collected 35,135 posts, everything the channel published from 24 March 2024 to 17 July 2026, and counted every mention of Fedorov by name. There are 126 of them across twenty-eight months.For two years the channel liked him. As digital transformation minister he appears as a steady good-news figure: online marriages in the Diia app, cashback for buying Ukrainian, 5G tests. When he became defence minister in January 2026 the channel amplified his own framing, often verbatim: his plan for the war. His Ramstein results. Elon Musk replying that he was “glad to help” against Russian drones on Starlink. On 22 January the channel even reported, straight, that Sternenko had become his adviser on front-line drones. In twenty-six months of coverage there is no sustained hostile frame anywhere.Through May he is almost invisible, and when he appears, the channel praises him. On 18 May it credits him with Ukraine’s first domestically produced guided bomb (”per Fedorov, development took 17 months,” post 137723). On 28 May it reports neutrally on infantry pay talks. Two mentions in five weeks. Both friendly.Then comes the evening of 5 June, at 20:01. The channel posts this, in its own editorial voice (post 138911, https://t.me/truexanewsua/138911):“And tomorrow we will tell you about the corruption in drone procurement organised by pan Fedorov. Yes, that one. Don’t switch.”News channels do not talk like this about their news. Campaigns talk like this. It is a trailer. Someone had decided, before the facts were shown to the audience, that the minister was now a target, and was building appetite for the reveal.From that post forward, the channel mentions Fedorov twenty times in six weeks. Eighteen of the twenty carry a hostile frame against him, or defend the channel against the people investigating it. The only two exceptions simply report President Zelensky’s own words after the dismissal. On 13 June the channel platforms Hetmantsev, the very man Fedorov later named: “We thought Fedorov spent five months preparing a reform, but he spent five months preparing a website.” The full post list, with identifiers and timestamps, sits in my archive and any reader with a browser can verify every one against the channel’s public record.The most important move in the data is subtler than volume, and this is where the Disinfolklore method shows its power.The mechanism: real