Five stages of the path from a tiny meme channel to an influential wartime media outlet with a million-strong audience. Each stage is backed by numbers from the channel's own data.
The channel was created back on 2021-07-30 as «Ukrainian political memes», but only comes alive on 2022-01-10 with the first post titled «Lachen Writes». The audience is tiny, reactions are few — the full-scale invasion is a month and a half away.
On February 24 the channel instantly becomes a war chronicle: average reactions jump tens of times over. Still writing in Russian — until, within a single week in early June, the language itself breaks to Ukrainian, following the subject matter.
After the language flip, «Lachen Writes» settles in as a Ukrainian-language channel about the front, air alerts and the home front. Audience and reactions keep growing — no longer a personal diary, but a news source for hundreds of thousands.
Telegram stars become a real reader contribution (102K stars in the first year alone), and the priciest posts aren't frontline reports but sharp investigations and social criticism.
The channel's hottest stretch: stars nearly double, first-person self-reference hits a record in early 2025. Lachen increasingly speaks in his own voice — about power, and about society.