Reuters interviewed nine people with knowledge of the information and disinformation war being waged in parallel with battlefield operations, including Ukrainian officials, disinformation trackers and security analysts.

The Ukrainian security official who requested anonymity said since the full-scale invasion of 2022, intelligence agencies had shut down 86 Russian bot farms in Ukraine. They controlled a collective three million social media accounts with an estimated audience reach of 12 million people.

Such facilities are rooms filled with banks of specialised computing equipment that can register hundreds of fake accounts daily on social media networks to pump out false information, the official added. One farm was found by security services in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine in 2023.