Abstract
The future of authoritarian information control depends on the cultivation of its critics.
On a June afternoon in 2023, Vladimir Putin, notorious for his paranoid distance from critics, sat down with military bloggers who had spent months lambasting his generals’ incompetence in Ukraine. They were a curated cocktail: state propagandists mixed with independent war correspondents, who command millions of followers. Together they constitute so-called ‘milbloggers’, or war bloggers.