This case study investigates a recent Russian disinformation narrative about U.S. biolabs and the development of biological weapons in Ukraine. This disinformation campaign was officially initiated by the Russian government, including the Russian Ministry of Defense, and was disseminated by official state-funded Russian media. In their announcement, Russian officials condemned pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna, as well as the U.S. military, for developing biological weapons in Ukraine. Four datasets with tweets were collected in English and Russian to analyze narratives and communities involved in the Ukrainian biolabs conversations on Twitter.This study aims to investigate how this disinformation theme was propagated in two languages on Twitter. Twitter social media data analysis, network influence metrics, coordination analysis, Leiden clustering, and qualitative data analysis were used in this study. The results have demonstrated that this particular disinformation campaign targeted both English and Russian-speaking audiences with coordinated inauthentic amplification to spread this disinformation to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, we found that this narrative was also naturally propagated by anti-vax and conservative communities among English-speaking users on Twitter.

Discussion about the interference of Russian actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign attracted enormous attention from the academic community. Numerous studies dedicated to the analysis of Internet operations, as well as activities of bots and trolls, formed a new interdisciplinary area that investigates online disinformation and computational propaganda. This study provides an analysis of a case study with Russian propaganda operations that focus on the internal political confrontation between the Russian systemic political establishment and opposition movement of Alexei Navalny. We present an analysis of how Internet trolls and sockpuppets are used to conduct information disorder activities in order to frame the discussion around the opposition movement in Russia on Twitter. We also identified attempts to manipulate the opinion of the Western audience and to spread disinformation about Western democracies by the same malicious actors. The study implements network analysis for identifying disinformation and propaganda trolls.Preliminary findings demonstrate that there is evidence of information campaigns against Alexei Navalny as one of the leaders of the Russian opposition. We observe how an internal issue is framed in the context of Russian confrontation with the West and how it is used to promote hostile narratives with the claims that Alexei Navalny is supported by the Western governments and therefore is an enemy of the Russian state. Many agents from our sample pretend to be real people, English speakers, who exhibit hostile attitudes towards Navalny and the Western democracies, promoting a lack of trust in the democratic institutions as well as spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories.