In early April, some residents of Kharkiv received a series of terrifying text messages from government officials warning them to leave the city before Russian forces surrounded it.
"Due to the threat of enemy encirclement, we call on the civilian population of Kharkiv to leave the city by April 22," read one warning, which bore the logo of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine and displayed safe escape routes on a sophisticated infographic.
It was fake. Volodymyr Timoshko knew it immediately. He is the police chief of Kharkiv Oblast and would be one of the first to know of any official evacuation plans.
"Residents started receiving these notifications en masse," Tymoshko, 30, told Reuters as he shared a screenshot of the alert, sent as Russian troops massed on the border XNUMX kilometers away.
"This is a psychological operation, it causes panic. What would the average citizen think when he receives such a message?", he asks.
Disinformation and propaganda, long present in wars, have been digitally amplified in the battle for Ukraine, the biggest conflict the world has seen since the advent of smartphones and social media.
Tymoshko said he received about ten similar messages via SMS and Telegram messengers in April and early May, in the weeks leading up to the Russian offensive in northeastern Ukraine that began on May 10 and opened a new front in the war.
A Ukrainian security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Russians often send large numbers of text messages from devices attached to the Orlan-10 long-range reconnaissance drone that can penetrate dozens of kilometers into Ukrainian airspace.
The devices, known as Leer-3 systems, mimic cellular network base stations that phones automatically connect to in search of a signal, he added.
The messaging was followed by a flurry on social media as Russian troops advanced toward Kharkiv, according to Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), an arm of the national security council.
The average number of social media posts classified as disinformation about the war by Ukrainian authorities jumped from 200 a day in March to more than 2.500 when the Kharkiv offensive began in May, data compiled by the CCD show.
The head of the CCD told Reuters that Ukrainian intelligence services assessed that the disinformation campaigns were being carried out primarily by Russia's FSB security service and the military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
The Russian Foreign Ministry and the FSB did not respond to a request for comment on the Ukrainian claims, while Reuters was unable to contact the GRU.
Moscow has accused Ukraine and the West of waging a sophisticated information war against Russia, using major media, public relations and technological resources of the West to spread false and biased narratives about Russia and the war.
A Ukrainian security official admitted that his country is using online campaigns to try to boost anti-war sentiment among the Russian population, although he characterized the activity as "strategic communications" to spread accurate information about the conflict.
Bots and microtargeting
Reuters interviewed nine people with knowledge of the information and disinformation war being waged alongside military operations on the ground, including Ukrainian officials, disinformation monitors and security analysts.
A Ukrainian security official, who asked to remain anonymous, said that since the invasion began in 2022, intelligence agencies have shut down 86 Russian bot farms based in Ukraine that controlled a total of three million social media accounts with an estimated audience of 12 million people. .
Such facilities are rooms filled with banks of specialized computer equipment that can register hundreds of fake social media accounts daily to spread false information, he added, citing a farm found last year by security services in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine.
Kovalenko said that currently the most significant sources of Russian disinformation on the Internet are TikTok in Ukraine and Telegram in Europe. Both platforms are widely used in Ukraine.
He said TikTok shut down about 30 of the 90 accounts labeled by Ukraine as spreading Russian disinformation earlier this year, adding that new accounts often appear to replace those that have been shut down.
TikTok told Reuters that its guidelines prohibit false or misleading content, adding that it has shut down 13 covert influence networks operating out of Russia in the past few years.
"We prohibit and constantly work to prevent attempts to engage in covert influence operations by manipulating our platform and/or harmfully misleading our community," the spokesperson said.
Disinformation networks are groups of accounts controlled by the same entity and often used to push a coordinated narrative.
Telegram said it is developing a tool to add verified information to posts.
"Telegram believes that the best way to fight misinformation is not censorship, but easy access to verified information," the spokesperson added.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov told Reuters the Russians were trying to sow panic and mistrust, citing social media posts claiming the main road to Kiev was being redone so the mayor could escape more quickly when the Russians came - something he dismissed as false.
"They are trying to intimidate the population so that people feel uncomfortable and leave the city," he said in an interview in Kharkiv at the end of May.
By then, the front lines of the conflict in the northeast had stabilized about 20 km from the edge of the city after a Russian offensive initially won territory in the north before being thwarted by Ukrainian reinforcements.
Maria Avdeyeva, a Kharkiv-based security analyst who focuses on Russian disinformation, showed Reuters an infographic map with Ukraine's national emblem in the shape of a trident, posted on Facebook in early April, around the same time police chief Tymoshko received a second evacuation map via direct message on Telegram.
Unperturbed by the loud explosion of a glide bomb a few kilometers away, she explained how the map and accompanying text included false road closures and claims that rocket attacks were expected on certain areas around the city soon.
Microtargeting -- which analyzes people's online data to target specific individuals and audiences with specific messages, similar to targeted advertising -- complicates the CCD's task of monitoring influence campaigns and countering false narratives, Kovalenko said.
"This activity is significantly very tactical," said John Haltquist, principal analyst at U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, referring to Russian disinformation campaigns in Ukraine.
"We saw targeted action all the way down to Ukrainian soldiers in the trenches," he adds.
An airstrike knocks down a TV tower
Ukrainians are particularly vulnerable to digital disinformation; more than three-quarters of the population get their news from social media, far more than from any other source of information, according to a study commissioned by USAid in 2023.
That's significantly higher than in any of the 24 European countries covered by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's 2024 report, which have an average rate of 44 percent.
In late April, while Moscow's forces were massing on the border near Kharkiv, a Russian airstrike destroyed Kharkiv's main television tower, making information access to the city difficult.
Dramatic footage obtained by Reuters showed the main mast of the television tower breaking and falling to the ground.
While the Kharkiv offensive led to a significant spike in disinformation activity, there were similar Russian campaigns during the war, according to the interviewees.
The head of the CCD highlighted the Russian campaign from October 2023, which aimed to emphasize the idea that Ukraine was facing a difficult winter and defeat in the war.
Osavul, a Ukrainian company that monitors disinformation, showed Reuters its data for this campaign, which they called "black winter." They counted 914 messages published by 549 actors, which collectively collected almost 25 million views.
However, according to Kovalenko, the sheer scale and frequency of Russian influence operations means that Ukrainians are becoming more suspicious of the information they receive, diminishing its influence.
Disinformation pressure during Russia's initial advance toward Kharkiv at the start of the 2022 invasion — when they got quite close to the city — contributed to the panic and shock that sent hundreds of thousands of residents fleeing, several officials and experts said.
This time, only a small number of people left Kharkiv, although the amount of disinformation messages targeting the city was twice as high as in March 2022, according to CCD data.
Despite near-daily rockets and bombs falling on the city - attacks that intensified in May this year - the 1,3 million people remain, according to Kharkiv Mayor Terekhov, about the same as before the last Russian military invasion of the region.
The relative lack of panic also reflects Ukrainians' growing habit of living under attack.
Reuters spoke to nearly two dozen residents of Kharkiv in the second half of May, when the city was hit by several bombs or rockets a day.
Most said they didn't feel like leaving and didn't care about the danger, saying they were used to it. Several said they had stopped following the news.
"It's a psychological mechanism, we get used to danger," said psychologist Irina Markevich from Kharkiv.
At the end of May, Reuters correspondents threw themselves to the ground for cover when they heard the whistle of a guided bomb as it ripped through the air. Seemingly undisturbed, mothers pushing prams continued to stroll through the park, while people bathed in the public fountain.
Julija Oleško, a 55-year-old nanny who was pushing a pram in Kharkiv's central park, said the best way to get through the nightmare is to simply focus on everyday life.
"Yesterday I was thinking: walking in Kharkiv is like walking in a minefield... but I try not to think about those fears, otherwise I might fall into depression. Let's switch off, otherwise we won't survive," she said.
translation: S. Strugar
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