Dmytro Karpenko (Apostle): a biography

Updated July 30, 2026

In order: where I am from, how I got into media, why I started talking to prisoners in 2022 and what came of it. Dates are given where there are dates. Where there is a single source, I say so outright.

Where I am from

I was born in 1982 in Chernihiv, and grew up and studied there. I live in Kyiv.

Since 2010 I have worked as an IT project manager at a large IT company, on a cybersecurity project. I still work there; media did not replace that. Hence the habit of checking data, and the fact that I wrote the software for “Search for Your Own” myself instead of ordering it.

The blog began as a hobby in 2018–2019. The first trace that can be checked is a livestream with Volodymyr Zolkin on July 26, 2019. It became a second job in 2022.

2022

I started talking to russian prisoners of war and their relatives in 2022. I had no channel of my own then — the first conversations came out on Volodymyr Zolkin’s channel, and I only opened my own on March 6, 2023. So “since 2022” is about the work, not about the channel.

The nickname appeared then too. The wife of a russian prisoner called me Apostle on a phone call. It was not my idea, but it stuck — and stayed.

That same year the work with the Interior Ministry project “Search for Your Own” began: identifying captured and killed russian soldiers and connecting families to them. What grew out of that is in the “Work” section.

On April 22, 2022, after one of the episodes, russia acknowledged its own dead for the first time and asked for the bodies back.

How much of it there is

Conversations come out every day, and the scale of it is shown more honestly in figures than in words. The channels currently hold 1,251 long-form episodes and 1,186 hours of recording, and they have 596.04M views. The average episode runs 57 minutes: that is a whole conversation, not a clip cut out of one.

I do not write a single one of these numbers into the text by hand. The site takes them from YouTube every morning, so the figure here is always today’s and not the one that stood on the day the page was written. For the same reason the encyclopedias carry numbers about me that are two years old: there is nobody to update them.

What grew out of the conversations

On August 11, 2022 Volodymyr Zolkin and I started the “Dmytro and Volodymyr Exchange Fund”. The point of it is simple: keep the fund replenished, and more Ukrainian defenders come home. The project runs on donations and advertising, with no state money in it.

A separate line of work is the people who came over to Ukraine’s side: the RVC, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion — “Sibbat”. I was the first to publish conversations like these. There are 145 of them in three open playlists.

Since the beginning of 2023 — “I Want to Live” and “I Want to Find”, the state projects of the Coordination Headquarters.

One thing I speak about rarely: these recordings are used as evidence. Material from the conversations ends up in criminal proceedings, and I appear in them as a witness. A conversation recorded for a channel turns out to be a document — and I keep that in mind while I am recording it.

Recognition

In 2024 Focus put me in tenth place in the Top 50 Bloggers of Ukraine, in the “Military” category, estimating my combined audience at about 0.9 million. Now it is 2,185,891.

Two YouTube Silver Play Buttons — they are given at a hundred thousand subscribers. DmytroKarpenko now has 849,000, and ApostleNotDEAD has 135,000.

What the encyclopedias say about me

There are articles about me in the Ukrainian and the russian Wikipedia. In November 2025 the russian one was nominated for deletion — the article was kept, and people go on editing it. I have nothing to do with either of them and have not written a line in them.

You can check things against them, with two corrections. The first: the figures there go stale. I passed the 680,000 subscribers the article gives long ago — it is 2,185,891 now. The second: the Ukrainian article contains things I cannot confirm — a song dedicated to Zolkin and me, for example. I do not confirm it, not because it did not happen, but because I have no second source for it.

And the main difference: an encyclopedia retells, while here you can listen. Every episode discussed is on this site in full.

What it costs

My cousin from Chernihiv spent nine months in russian captivity. I did not use contacts or influence to speed up his exchange: if the family tie had surfaced, he would not have been exchanged sooner — he would have been tortured. I spoke about it for the first time in December 2023, in an interview with Ramina Eskhakzai.

People who wanted this work stopped have sent me photographs of my child. That is why there are no details about my family on this site, and there will not be.

Roskomnadzor blocks the channels and the sites systematically. The audience grows all the same — people watch from there too.

There is a legal price as well, and it is not only paid on my account. Pavlo Huhuiev, who had come back from captivity, was given four years in a penal colony by a russian court for “confidential cooperation with foreigners” — the case file contains our conversations. I warn everyone who writes to me from there about this before the conversation, not after.

How to check all of this

Who wrote about me and when, with links to the originals, is in the “Press” section. The episodes discussed here are in the “Video” section.