Gregory Davis, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, said: “We are concerned, given reporting of prior Russian attempts to recruit groups of people in the UK willing to carry out criminal acts here, that this network is designed to recruit people to carry out acts of violence, and that they may already be in the process of grooming people for it.
Other evidence includes the use of Cyrillic script in some messages, suggesting that they were translated from Russian, and two of the users most active in forwarding messages from the network to other British chat groups have also made Russian language posts in pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine Telegram chats.
Evidence linking the groups to Russia include an admin account on one of the channels sharing a screenshot from X that revealed that the X account in question had its language set to Russian, and was set to GMT+3, a time zone used in Russia and Belarus.
An administrative account for one of the groups had posted an anti-Ukraine message, using a Russian language slur for Ukrainian people, on 19 November, but a few weeks later was attempting to pay someone in Sheffield or Rotherham to perform an unspecified task in exchange for payment.
A dossier on the channels and their apparent Russian links has been passed to counter-terrorism police and the Home Office by the campaign group Hope Not Hate, which says it is worried that the network poses a much greater threat than the incitement to violence routinely found on other extreme-right Telegram chats.
