What is InfoDefense?

InfoDefense is a 100% volunteer social media initiative started by popular Russian citizen journalist Yuri Podolyaka to get the truth out to the non-Russian speaking world about Russia and Ukraine.

A native of Eastern Ukraine (Sumy), Yuri has been reporting on Russian political developments since the first Ukraine crisis in 2014. He built a large following reporting on that crisis, and then on the war in Syria and the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. He has over 5 million followers across multiple social media platforms. Since the start of the current military conflict in Ukraine, he has been doing daily video updates on the military and political situation there. He is one of the most influential media voices speaking to Russians worldwide.

As of June 2022 he had 2.1 million followers on his Telegram channel. Yuri's largest platform used to be YouTube, where he had over 3 million subscribers, but his channels were banned there in early April 2022. Many smaller unaffiliated channels still post Yuri's videos on YouTube, so he still has a substantial audience there. Here are links to his various platforms in Russian: Telegram, Yandex Zen, and VK. He is currently negotiating a contract with the rapidly growing Russian YouTube alternative, Rutube.

Yuri's daily updates have become very popular among Russian speakers, including in Ukraine, because they are short, to the point, and truthful, and often include new information from military and intelligence sources not offered in the Russian mainstream media. He honestly informs about Russian setbacks, and criticizes Russian strategy when he thinks it important to do so. On Sundays, he does a week-in-review report. Yuri's daily broadcasts are usually 4-5 minutes, and his weekend review is never over 10 minutes. He typically will do 2 episodes per day - one dedicated to an update of the military situation, and a second discussing big-picture issues like the economy, infowars, patriotism, corruption, etc.

Very importantly, Yuri is the largest Telegram Channel in the Ukraine. This includes the territories liberated by Russia, so it does not reflect the size of his audience in Ukrainian-controlled territories, but one can assume that his audience there is also substantial.

Realizing that the truth about the Ukraine conflict was not reaching a Western audience, in April of 2022, Yuri appealed to his audience for English speaking volunteers to create a network of foreign language social media channels. Hundreds of English-speaking Russians in Russia, Ukraine, and around the world responded to his appeal, and are now operating 13 channels on Telegram, YouTube, and other platforms in 12 languages: English, German, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Serbian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese, and Bulgarian.

Here is the Telegram address for the directory of the various language channels on Telegram: @InfoDefenseLangBot. Here are links to the newly-formed YouTube channels: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian.

This first wave of Russian volunteers have built a foundation and are now looking for native English speakers to help them improve and grow. They have built groups dedicated to translation, media monitoring, video captioning, and much else.

Requirements for Volunteers

InfoDefense is seeking volunteers in translation, social media posting, meme hunting and creation, video editing and captioning, and Russian and foreign language media monitoring in the languages listed above. The #1 requirement is an ability to make a commitment of at least six months of sustained volunteering, as significant resources are spent on training volunteers. For posting and monitoring roles, minimum required time per day is 1 hour per day, 5 days a week. For translation roles, at least 3 hours a week, on any day, are required.

Native language ability is required for some of the posting and editing roles.

If you are seriously interested, please contact us at: infodefense-recruiter@yandex.ru, with as much information about yourself as you think would be helpful to help us understand how you can help, i.e. fluency, time available, which days, time zone, etc. We are mostly active on Telegram, so if you can include your Telegram user name it will be easier to contact you there.

Our coordinators are located in European Russia, so for the more active and involved editing and leadership roles, location in a time zone not too distant from Moscow time is a big advantage.