Novaya Gazeta Europe analyzed 6.1 million comments from pro-Kremlin accounts on VKontakte collected by the Botnadzor project to determine which topics in 2025 drew the most activity from them. The study covered posts from January 1 to December 21: out of 1.3 million posts, the newsroom selected 232,000 that had at least five such comments, then grouped them into similar news events using OpenAI embeddings.
The authors note that pro-government bots post millions of messages each year and in some communities may account for more than 20% of all comments. According to the study, some of these accounts are automated, while others are run by people paid to post. Such networks were previously linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, but their current handlers have not been firmly identified.
Which topics topped the list
The smallest of the major spikes mentioned in the article concerned the March 18 phone call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump: after their discussion of a ceasefire, bots voiced distrust of Kyiv and skepticism toward Washington. In December, the blocking of Snapchat and FaceTime also triggered a strong response: 3,608 comments appeared under 77 posts, with users justifying the restrictions as necessary for security and counterterrorism.
A similar scale was seen in discussions of Putin’s October visit to Tajikistan, the drone attack on Moscow on March 11, the direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul in May, and the Finance Ministry’s September proposal to raise VAT from 20% to 22%. In each case, the bots echoed the official line: praising Moscow’s foreign contacts, blaming Ukraine for sabotaging talks, and insisting that higher taxes would not affect everyday life.
An even stronger reaction followed the August restrictions on calls through Telegram and WhatsApp, the December dispute over blocking Roblox, and Putin’s televised call-in show on December 19. By the outlet’s count, bots left 8,960 comments under posts about Roblox and at least 9,266 under posts about the call-in program.
The clear leader was the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska on August 15. Over two days, August 15 and 16, pro-Kremlin accounts posted more than 17,662 comments under 889 posts. While coverage of the United States earlier in the year had been markedly wary, the tone after this summit became noticeably softer: better relations with Washington were framed as a major success, even as attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky continued.