In 2025, the Telegram channels of multiple Russian LGBTQ+ organizations came under coordinated cyberattacks. Tens of thousands of bot accounts were deployed as artificial followers in an apparent effort to get these groups blocked. Sex educator and LGBTQ+ activist Sasha Kazantseva experienced the bot invasion on her own channel, Washed Hands. She also began receiving threats, and at one point a stranger came to her home in Vilnius, claiming he had come to deliver “the Healer’s” regards.

The man was referring to a private Telegram channel called Healer’s Empire, whose members have described their goal as “the total destruction of LGBTQ people online and in real life.” Investigative journalists from the project Glasnaya worked with Kazantseva to identify the people behind the channel. Meduza summarizes the key findings of their investigation.

Healer’s Empire is a private Telegram channel that grew out of the audiences of other channels and chats for people with anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ views. They all espoused the same goal: to build an “army” to fight what they called “LGBT propaganda.” The description of Healer’s Empire refers to it as follows: “A refuge of sanity and common sense. We stand for traditional values. We defend Russian laws and the views of reasonable people who oppose the corruption of society.”

The channel first drew public attention in the summer of 2025, after online attacks on the Russian LGBT Network, the LGBTQ+ health website Parni Plus, and the online support community Children-404. Anti-LGBTQ activists flooded these communities with tens of thousands of bot subscribers in efforts to get Telegram to block them, forcing the owners to make the channels private and lose their public usernames. When the scheme succeeds, the activists proceed to register new groups under the same usernames, making it nearly impossible for users to find the original communities, according to Glasnaya.

One notable target of the attack was sex educator and LGBTQ+ activist Sasha Kazantseva and her Telegram channel, Washed Hands. Numerous bots were added to her subscriber list, and she began receiving threatening messages, including: “Run and hide all you want, you’re only putting off the inevitable.”

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Eventually, someone from Healer’s Empire even appeared at her Vilnius home. Kazantseva was not there at the time, but the visitor left a note in her mailbox: “Greetings from the Healer.” Shortly afterward, she received another message: “If you’d been home, we would have taken you out today.”

The threats continued, with members of Healer’s Empire posting insults and death wishes about Kazantseva in chat rooms, under her Telegram posts, and in her private messages.

Kazantseva and Glasnaya’s investigation found that the founder of Healer’s Empire is Maksim S., a 24-year-old plastic surgeon from Dagestan who also runs a medical blog. Despite orchestrating bot attacks and public harassment, Maksim prefers to stay out of the spotlight, citing prior threats over his activities. Kazantseva claims Maksim is the son of prominent Russian businessman Nariman Suleymanov and lives in Moscow.

Maksim told Glasnaya that in 2020–2021, he ran an Instagram page where he criticized “excess weight, LGBT propaganda, and feminism.” He said, “I believed in absolute freedom of speech — I can criticize left liberals, and they can criticize me. But the people I criticized took offense and used complaints to take my blog down.” Afterward, he moved to Telegram, “gained a bunch of followers,” and continued to push his views online, although he claimed he “always tried to keep things from getting too extreme.”

When managing the channel became difficult alongside his work and family responsibilities, Maksim handed control to one of the channel’s followers. This person, previously active in a channel called Femhunter dedicated to mocking women bloggers, shifted focus to targeting LGBTQ+ people. The user later admitted to Glasnaya that he “organized the visit to dear Sasha [Kazantseva].”

Kazantseva identified the channel’s new administrator as Bronislav M., a man born in 2005, who went to school in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, and now lives in Lithuania.

In addition to his threats against Kazantseva, Bronislav M. also harassed Mia Grigorieva, a trans woman living in the Netherlands. At first he tried to convince her that her gender identity was “the result of trauma,” then attempted to hijack her Telegram account, and later even filed a police report claiming Grigorieva had kidnapped a child. According to Mia, this led to the police questioning her, but they did not charge her, and she shared with them all the information she had gathered about Bronislav M.

Recently, Bronislav told Healer’s Empire subscribers he was stepping down to focus on a new relationship, and that he planned to move to Russia after obtaining a passport under the country’s fast-track procedure for foreigners who share “traditional values.”

As of November 2025, Healer’s Empire had about 1,800 subscribers. According to Glasnaya, bot raids and discussions typically involve a dozen users aged 19 to 25, with some as young as 13–14. Journalists noted that many participants become interested in these raids in their mid-to-late teens. “This generation came of age during a period when Russian authorities were steadily increasing pressure on LGBTQ+ people,” the outlet writes.

“Life is unstable now, if not downright scary. Teenagers are looking for a way to feel powerful again, but they confuse power with violence,” psychologist Stanislav Khotsky told Glasnaya.

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Maksim S. maintains that his followers are not “an army of thugs” but “a community that helps people get on the ‘right path.’” After speaking with Glasnaya, he posted an explanatory message on the Telegram channel about the goals and ideology of Healer’s Empire. “Despite the leader’s repeated reminders that members should not openly call for murder or physical violence, this kind of rhetoric continues in the chat,” Glasnaya notes.

Kazantseva filed a complaint with Lithuanian police, but they declined to open a case, citing a lack of evidence of a crime. “The officer reviewing the case said that the threat to ‘take someone out’ doesn’t count as a threat,” she told LRT. She suspects the misunderstanding may have been due to the absence of a translator and plans to file another complaint over the threats that she has continued to receive.

Original story by Sofiia Seliverstova for Glasnaya Media