For several months, an investigation published within the Jeune Afrique Media Group, whose titles include Jeune Afrique and its sister publication The Africa Report, tracked a Telegram channel most people were never meant to see. It had no public listing. The only way in was a link, passed hand to hand among subscribers of another, larger channel already linked to Russia’s Wagner Group. Its name left little to the imagination: White Uncles in Africa 18+.

What the reporters found there, according to their investigation, was not merely propaganda. It was a private archive of atrocity: torture, executions, and the desecration of corpses, much of it filmed in Mali by the people committing the violence, and shared with an audience that leans neo-Nazi. One video described in the investigation shows a young man lying face-down in the sand, his hands bound, fingers and an ear severed, an eye gouged out, while the soldier filming him kicks him and shouts abuse.

Published on 18 April and viewed more than 500 times in two months, the investigation notes, this sequence was neither an isolated act nor a one-off. At the time of writing, it was part of a series of 322 videos and 647 photographs containing scenes of mutilation, torture, executions, and desecration of corpses circulating on the channel.

After the investigation was published, the channel was taken off Telegram. Reports since have indicated that an affiliated, more public-facing account tied to the same network remains reachable on the platform, a reminder that removing one node in this kind of network rarely dismantles the whole structure behind it.

A channel with a history, and a paying audience

The “White Uncles” name is not new to researchers who track Wagner’s online footprint. According to reporting compiled by Kenya’s Daily Nation, the flagship channel, White Uncles in Africa, was founded in July 2022 and had grown to a membership of over 77,000, publishing content tied to Wagner’s activities in the Sahel, including recruitment material and photographs taken by operatives in Mali. In August 2024, the same reporting noted, administrators announced a companion channel to host material too graphic even for the main feed: the 18+ variant investigated by Jeune Afrique and the Africa Report.

Separate research from UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, published via Lawfare, offers a fuller picture of how that growth happened and what it fed into. Researchers there identified more than 150 Telegram channels and accounts tied to Wagner, the majority of them fully public. One of the most popular, GreyZone, had over 610,000 subscribers at its peak, while White Uncles in Africa saw a massive spike in popularity in May 2024 when it began posting increasingly graphic and gory content, eventually surpassing 91,000 subscribers.

Notably, researchers also documented a paywalled premium channel tied to the network, created to put its most extreme material behind a subscription, drawing 366 paying subscribers and rising, evidence that this content is not simply propaganda but, in part, a monetized product.

Investigators at Bellingcat traced the human infrastructure behind part of that ecosystem. Their reporting identified a former Wagner fighter named Roman Morin as an admin of White Uncles in Africa, and linked him to a Russian streetwear label, H8Core, that sells clothing commemorating a convicted war criminal and has been promoted by senior figures in the sanctioned neo-Nazi paramilitary group Rusich.

The same investigation found that the channel had released merchandise in collaboration with H8Core advertising Wagner’s presence in Africa, with proceeds tied to real commercial accounts registered under Russian tax authorities, turning atrocity content and racist branding into a functioning retail operation.

Conflict as content, not just as news

What distinguishes this case from earlier waves of extremist media, such as al-Qaeda’s video communiques or the Islamic State’s slickly produced execution films of the 2010s, is less the graphic nature of the material than its casual, almost recreational packaging. Research from UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center describes a “war influencer” phenomenon: individuals who, rather than posting makeup tutorials or lifestyle content, build audiences by broadcasting from active battlefields, amplifying engagement and generating revenue through graphic images and videos.

The channels mix atrocity footage with the mundane, including safari photographs, descriptions of local food, weapons and vehicles, and soldiers relaxing together, in a tone researchers compare to “boys being boys” bravado rather than any solemn record of war.

That framing matters. It normalizes what is being shown. Investigators documented exchanges in which channel administrators discussed the most efficient methods of beheading and joked about the process, and described a 2024 surge of content in which soldiers were filmed disemboweling and dismembering bodies, with captions referring to human remains as meat.

When one commenter asked an administrator why the group filmed beheadings, comparing it to ISIS, the reply, translated from Russian, was blunt: the aim, the administrator said, was to appear even more terrifying to the enemy than the terrorists themselves. This is conflict reframed deliberately for an audience, designed less to inform than to intimidate, entertain, and recruit simultaneously.

Why encrypted platforms became the venue of choice

Telegram’s appeal to this ecosystem is structural. Researchers point to the platform’s relative anonymity, broad broadcast capability, and comparatively light content moderation as reasons it has become Wagner’s preferred infrastructure. Unlike mainstream platforms that increasingly rely on automated detection and rapid takedown of graphic violence, Telegram channels, particularly private or unlisted ones reachable only through shared invite links, sit largely outside that enforcement net until researchers, journalists, or rare user reports surface them.

This is not unique to Wagner’s networks. Analysts examining Telegram’s broader role in terror-related activity have raised similar warnings, noting that extremist groups migrate to the platform specifically because they have been pushed off more heavily moderated mainstream platforms, and that graphic or terror-linked material tends to spread there precisely because enforcement is inconsistent. The result is a layered ecosystem: public channels that build an audience and normalize a brand, feeding into semi-private or paywalled channels that host the material too extreme for open distribution.

The legal reckoning, and its limits

The publication of this material is not simply a moderation problem; it is increasingly being treated as a potential legal one. In June 2025, the Associated Press reported that lawyers and investigators at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center had submitted a confidential brief to the International Criminal Court, arguing that Wagner-linked atrocity content shared on Telegram provides evidence of war crimes in Mali.

In a novel legal argument, the brief holds that the act of circulating such images itself could constitute a war crime, given that videos showed men in military uniform butchering corpses believed to be civilians with machetes, extracting organs, and posing with severed limbs. The brief argues this under the Rome Statute’s protections of personal dignity, according to reporting from Euronews on the same submission.

Lindsay Freeman, director of the Human Rights Center’s Technology, Law and Policy programme and the brief’s lead author, has argued publicly that Wagner has deliberately used its Telegram network to build and promote its reputation for ruthlessness, and that the sheer volume of self-documented brutality has, paradoxically, produced almost no accountability.

She notes that when jihadist groups broadcast beheadings a decade ago, there was swift international condemnation and response. By contrast, comparable or more frequent content from Wagner-linked fighters has drawn comparatively little formal action, even as courts elsewhere pursue war crimes cases tied to Ukraine and Gaza.

Part of the difficulty is jurisdictional. Wagner has been designated a transnational criminal organization by the United States and proscribed as a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom, but its operations span Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad, working alongside or embedded within national militaries that themselves face accusations of abuses.

National courts rarely have jurisdiction to act on crimes committed outside their own territory, even where the online circulation of that material causes harm domestically. That leaves international bodies like the ICC as one of the few venues capable, in theory, of pursuing accountability across borders.

Verifying horror without amplifying it

For journalists and researchers working this terrain, there is a narrower, more immediate challenge: how to investigate and expose this material without becoming another distribution node for it. The approach taken in the Jeune Afrique and Africa Report investigation, describing content in careful, blurred, sourced detail rather than republishing it directly, and explicitly warning readers before graphic passages, reflects a now-standard practice among outlets and human rights investigators working with open-source conflict material.

Organisations like Bellingcat and the Berkeley Human Rights Center rely on techniques drawn from digital open-source investigation methodology, cross-referencing metadata, uniforms, geographic markers, and vendor or account information to verify authenticity and, where possible, identify individuals behind anonymous accounts, as in the tracing of “Uncle Roma” to a real name and registered business. This verification work is painstaking precisely because the material’s shock value is also what makes it unreliable as a standalone source. Experts note the images, while difficult to verify, could still serve as evidence of war crimes once properly authenticated and contextualised.

What this reveals about conflict, technology and impunity

The deeper implication of the White Uncles case is that a new incentive structure has attached itself to modern conflict. Where earlier propagandists sought to justify violence or recruit ideologically, today’s networks increasingly monetize it directly, through paid subscriptions, merchandise, and algorithmically rewarded engagement. Researchers describe this as a self-reinforcing cycle: a growing, global audience willing to pay for uncensored battlefield footage creates fresh incentive for the violence itself, since demand for new content never stops.

The consequences extend beyond the direct victims. Analysts warn of a normalizing effect on younger, distant audiences who consume this material stripped of context, alongside concerns that unchecked online glorification of violence can migrate into real-world behaviour, echoing patterns seen with other viral, harmful online trends. And for the communities living under this violence, disproportionately ethnic Fulani, Tuareg and Arab populations in Mali, the knowledge that their suffering has become entertainment for a paying audience thousands of miles away adds a distinct, compounding layer of harm.

Where accountability stands now

As of the most recent reporting, Wagner has formally announced its withdrawal from Mali, with many of the same personnel folding into a new Russian state-aligned unit. The legal brief to the ICC remains under review, with no public indication yet of formal proceedings. The White Uncles in Africa 18+ channel investigated by Jeune Afrique and the Africa Report was removed from Telegram following publication, a narrow, reactive victory that researchers caution says little about the durability of the wider network feeding it.

Public channels with tens of thousands of subscribers continue to operate, affiliated commercial ventures continue to sell merchandise, and, according to researchers tracking the space, new premium and semi-private channels continue to emerge to host whatever the public feeds can no longer carry.

The case underscores a structural tension that platforms, regulators, and journalists have yet to resolve. The same qualities that make encrypted and loosely moderated platforms valuable for legitimate activists, dissidents, and whistleblowers under authoritarian rule also make them close to ideal for extremist networks seeking to broadcast atrocity with minimal interference. Until legal and platform accountability mechanisms catch up with that dual-use reality, the documentation of war crimes and their circulation as entertainment are likely to keep happening on the same screens, sometimes in the very same channel.