This was Russia today Friday, February 27, 2026
Howdy, folks. Today, two stories about what happens when Russia makes you a deal. A pro-war blogger who spent years amplifying the Kremlin’s line has been arrested for allegedly stealing $13 million meant to buy drones — discovering, too late, that patriotism doesn’t buy protection. Plus, an investigation by T-invariant finds that Russia’s military is pressuring university students to enlist with promises of short contracts, safe distances, and big payouts that lawyers say are legally meaningless. Yours, Kevin.
The embezzlement case against Alexey Kostylev is the latest reminder of what you risk chasing government money and media clout in Russia
Russian authorities have long struggled to tolerate, let alone encourage, grassroots initiatives — even those driven by a civic spirit ostensibly serving the state. That tense relationship has been on public display throughout the full-scale war in Ukraine as officials collaborate and clash with so-called Z-bloggers and fellow travelers who campaign online and crowdfund to equip Russia’s troops. More than four years in, pro-war social media has become a vehicle for big money and high-stakes politics. This week, Moscow police arrested Alexey Kostylev, the founder of the pro-war Telegram channel Readovka, on charges of embezzling 1 billion rubles (nearly $13 million) from Defense Ministry contracts meant to supply Russia’s military with drones.
Bad shape: Kostylev arrived in court in poor health. After a quad-bike accident in 2024, he underwent brain surgery and two other major operations, leaving him reliant on caregivers for basic needs, including personal hygiene. Despite a defense attorney’s request to keep Kostylev under house arrest, where he could receive care, a judge ordered him detained pending trial.
Readovka, the outlet Kostylev launched in 2011, said the embezzlement case “has no relation” to its editorial operations and thanked Kostylev for his “contribution to forming a patriotic agenda in the Russian media landscape.” What began as a regional news outlet covering Kostylev’s hometown of Smolensk has become a prominent amplifier of the war in Ukraine, surging past 1 million Telegram subscribers early in the invasion and eventually topping 2 million.
Business time: That growth also drew the channel into the Kremlin’s orbit: A 2023 joint investigation by Meduza and The Bell found Readovka had been taking editorial guidance from ANO Dialog, a state-linked Internet propaganda outfit. Kostylev’s dealings with the Defense Ministry date back to that same period. He attended ministry meetings in the spring of 2022 and volunteered to supply winter jackets to troops — an effort that collapsed when China began blocking the export of military-colored outerwear to Russia under pressure from international sanctions. In 2025, Kostylev sold Readovka to Andrey Tkachenko, a figure tied to a subsidiary of ANO Dialog. Tkachenko described the deal as commercial and declined to disclose the price, but the anonymous Telegram channel Yozh Lab reported that Kostylev agreed to the transfer only under pressure from police investigating his alleged misuse of public funds. In retrospect, it was an early signal that Kostylev was already in serious legal trouble.
The state of the field: A string of prosecutions and designations across the Z-media ecosystem has revealed what happens when Russia’s wartime patriotism becomes an industry. Roman Alyokhin, a pro-war blogger and former adviser to the governor of Kursk, was designated a “foreign agent” in September 2025 — days after footage surfaced showing him discussing a kickback scheme involving medical supplies for troops. Tatyana Montyan, a Ukrainian-born RT columnist, was added to Russia’s terrorism and extremism registry in October 2025 amid a public feud with rival propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. Yegor Guzenko, the veteran milblogger known as “Trinadtsaty,” was arrested in October 2024 for assaulting a police officer. He ultimately returned to the front as part of an assault unit, taking advantage of wartime legislation that allows contract soldiers to suspend criminal prosecutions while on active duty.
Because of his severe injuries, Kostylev cannot exploit that same loophole to avoid prosecution. Instead, his case makes plain where money and politics in Russia’s pro-war blogosphere lead. In the end, the state decides when the partnership is over.
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Russia’s military is promising university students one-year contracts, safe distances from the front, and millions of rubles. Lawyers say it’s a trap.
The Russian military has a new pitch for college students: sign a one-year contract, fly drones from a safe distance behind the front lines, pocket millions of rubles, and return to class when it’s over. But lawyers who have examined the contracts say the terms are unenforceable. An investigation by T-invariant — an independent outlet run by scientists and science journalists — finds that the Defense Ministry’s promises are part of an increasingly coercive campaign to recruit educated soldiers for Russia’s 21st-century air war in Ukraine.
Offers to students began at elite technical schools, where recruiters emphasized cash bonuses and the relative safety of drone warfare (operators work “20 kilometers from the front,” they were told) and dangled the prospect of serving in units affiliated with their universities. As further enticements, schools added their own bonuses on top of standard government payments.
Getting desperate: By January 2026, recruiters shifted their focus to a more vulnerable pool: students on the verge of flunking out. At the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, administrators began sending recruitment letters to students who had failed their winter exams. At Bauman Moscow State Technical University, administrators summoned students with two or more failing grades and told them they could not take academic leave, transfer to other institutions, or retake exams on any reasonable timeline — a squeeze, one student said, designed to push them into the army.
The campaign has expanded to students across virtually every discipline, from architecture to pediatric medicine. In Volgograd, an instructor visited an architecture school to promote drone warfare to future builders. In Stavropol, the head of the medical university addressed more than 300 students training to be doctors and dentists.
Not exactly ironclad: Lawyers who have reviewed students’ enlistment contracts say the military is deceiving them on nearly every point. The “one-year” term has no basis in law: under a presidential decree on “partial mobilization,” all military contracts are open-ended, and the Defense Ministry determines where soldiers serve, regardless of what any addendum says. Attorneys compare the assurances written into students’ contracts to the informal — and ultimately meaningless — “letters of understanding” issued to former mercenaries after the dissolution of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group.
The mask slipped most visibly in Novosibirsk, where a college director, frustrated by students’ refusal to enlist, summoned the school’s seniors and berated them. “You’re all cowards,” she told them. “You sit here afraid for your lives, but you’re not afraid to do drugs or whatever else.” She insisted she had no recruitment quota and that the meeting was her own idea. T-invariant’s investigation suggests otherwise.
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