Boris Rozhin

Boris Rozhin was born in Sevastopol in July 1981. He worked as a system administrator for the city’s pension fund in 2003 and in supermarket security in 2007, and started blogging in early 2009 — long before the platform that made him widely read. In 2014 he became head of the editorial office of the “Voice of Sevastopol” news centre.

He publishes as Colonelcassad, a Telegram channel of roughly 740,000 subscribers, and is described on it as an expert at the Center for Military-Political Journalism. He appears regularly as a military commentator on the Zvezda and Tsargrad television channels.

Ukraine’s Myrotvorets project has listed him since 2014. The Global Initiatives Fund, which he headed, was placed on a European sanctions list over terrorism financing.

For this site’s purposes Colonelcassad matters less as commentary than as volume: it reposts and aggregates a very large amount of front-line material, including drone and electronic-warfare footage, and is often where a claim first becomes visible outside the unit that made it. That is also its weakness as a source — reposting is not corroboration, and the same original post can arrive through it several times looking like several accounts.