Journalists from The New York Times analyzed the email archive of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VDTRK), broken by hackers, and found that Russian TV channels, in particular Russia 1 and Russia 24, used materials sent to them by the FSB. The entire dump has a volume of 750 gigabytes, the vast majority of which is related to preparations for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the start of the war - the correspondence took place from January to March 2022. The researchers were able to confirm the addresses of the mailboxes, as well as the faces of the people who received the letters.

As the journalists found out, Russian propagandists created content on topics that were discussed in letters from the FSB and the Russian Ministry of Defense. In the letters, the FSB representatives called the employees of the Russian channels “colleagues”. One of the materials sent by the FSB officers through Russian channels is the story of a woman who claimed that the Mariupol Drama Theater was allegedly blown up by the Ukrainian military.

In addition, in order to give viewers the impression of numerous “victories” of the Russian army and politics in general, they used materials from conservative Western media, in particular Fox News, Chinese media publications with beneficial narratives, and also used little-known accounts on Telegram and YouTube, which also made it possible to create a distorted picture of Russian “greatness”.