Allegations of a Nato intervention in Ukraine first hit a peak in late December before spiking higher in mid-January, according to Logically.
Mr Murphy, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch, said that claiming Nato interference in Ukraine has long been a standard line of attack by Moscow.
While it is often difficult to track where a particular piece of disinformation originates, researchers can see when many Russian accounts begin pushing the same narrative.
“It looks like a coordinated campaign,” Mr Murphy said. “They come out around the same time with similar messaging.”
Ms Larissa Doroshenko, a researcher at Northeastern University, said that Russian disinformation tactics in Ukraine used both falsified stories and those that were true but tangential to current events to distort narratives or hide true intentions.
Ms Doroshenko studied Russian disinformation around the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Ukraine and found that even then, Moscow used various means to push narratives.
“We focus on social media, but it is a multi-platform approach,” she said. “It is social media, but it is also these so-called news websites, these propaganda websites, that present themselves to appeal to regular people.”
