Mikhail Zvinchuk

Mikhail Zvinchuk was born in Vladivostok in 1991 and worked in the press service of the Russian Ministry of Defence until 2019, a period that included Russia’s military intervention in Syria. In 2018 Ukraine’s Myrotvorets project listed him over what it described as involvement in Defence Ministry information campaigns.

He founded Rybar with Denis Shchukin, a Moscow-based programmer. The channel now carries more than 1.5 million subscribers and publishes daily front-line chronicles and detailed maps, which are reproduced widely — including by Western outlets and analysts who treat it as a bellwether for what the Russian military-adjacent audience is being told. Rybar has since spun out regional sister channels covering the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, and an English-language edition.

In December 2022 Zvinchuk was named by presidential order to a working group coordinating Russia’s mobilisation. The European Union added him to its sanctions list in 2023 for actions it said undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the United Kingdom has imposed an asset freeze and a ban on the provision of trust services. In 2024 the US State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on the Rybar project, stating that it had received funding from the sanctioned defence conglomerate Rostec.

Rybar sits in this site’s source register graded C — fairly reliable, and read as an adversary-controlled information node rather than as independent reporting. Its habit of occasionally criticising the Defence Ministry is part of what makes it credible to its own audience.