Two fans of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game have been unmasked as the owners of an influential social media channel linked to Russian spies and mercenaries.
The Bell, a Russian opposition news group, calls the Rybar Telegram channel a “direct player” in the Kremlin’s information war, influencing Western media and providing real-time battlefield analysis to 1.1 million subscribers.
”Since the start of Russia’s invasion, it has published information on the positions of Ukrainian military forces and boasted the Russian army uses its data for missile strikes,” The Bell said.
Rybar - Slovak for ‘fisherman’ - is named after a character from a fantasy video game. It was set up in 2018 as a hobby blog reporting on the Middle East, where the Russian army and the Wagner mercenary group were active.