The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was accompanied by a large-scale, pro-Russian propaganda campaign on social media. However, the strategy behind the dissemination of propaganda has remained unclear, particularly how the online discourse was strategically shaped by the propagandists' community. Here, we analyze the strategy of the Twitter community using an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach. Specifically, IRL allows us to model online behavior as a Markov decision process, where the goal is to infer the underlying reward structure that guides propagandists when interacting with users with a supporting or opposing stance toward the invasion. Thereby, we aim to understand empirically whether and how between-user interactions are strategically used to promote the proliferation of Russian propaganda. For this, we leverage a large-scale dataset with 349,455 posts with pro-Russian propaganda from 132,131 users. We show that bots and humans follow a different strategy: bots respond predominantly to pro-invasion messages, suggesting that they seek to drive virality; while messages indicating opposition primarily elicit responses from humans, suggesting that they tend to engage in critical discussions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analyzing the strategy behind propaganda from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine through the lens of IRL.

The war in Ukraine has entered a new stage; this much we know. In the weeks leading up to the Ukrainian armed forces' long-anticipated counter-offensive, a series of attacks in Moscow and in the Belgorod Region, near the border with Ukraine, marked the most significant incursions into Russia since the full-scale war began. In the Belgorod Region, armed units overran villages and took hostages. In Moscow, two drones were shot down near the Kremlin on May 3rd. Four weeks later, eight drones crashed into residential buildings on the outskirts of the city.

War is the worst human invention that ruins lives and leaves unhealed wounds for many generations. The wars of the past Millennium had at least some honesty in them in the way that they were declared, and it was clear who was against whom. However, modern-day warfare is different. The informational war is a huge portion of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, with a lot of fake news that manipulates public opinion. The government of Russia has deployed entire networks of TV channels that target Western audiences, and now they are heavily utilizing them to change the world's opinion about Ukraine, make false claims about it, and convince that Russia is not killing people but "saving them."

Fox News host gives his take Zelenskyy's latest idea and provides insight on the biolabs in Ukraine on'Tucker Carlson Tonight.' This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," March 14, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. Here is something we just saw. I wish we brought it to you earlier. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, of course, gave an interview recently that didn't get enough attention in this country. Zelenskyy needless to say, is currently engaged in a desperate fight for his country, his government, his life, and he has been since the Russian military invaded Ukraine nearly three weeks ago. So you can assume there is not a lot Zelenskyy thinks about at this point, apart from getting the Russians off of Ukrainian soil. So last week, Zelenskyy floated the idea of accepting so-called Ukrainian neutrality, agreeing not to join NATO; in exchange for that, he will get a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. Now, there is nothing inherently controversial about Zelenskyy's idea. Ukraine was not on the cusp of joining NATO, anyway. NATO officials have long said they don't want Ukraine to join. It is not clear whose interest would be served by Ukraine joining NATO. So if accepting the status quo, going with the way things already were and were always going to be, if doing that convinces Putin to stop killing Ukrainians, and spares Ukraine from total and complete destruction, maybe it's not a crazy idea, maybe Zelenskyy is onto something, he certainly thought about it a lot. Maybe we ought to congratulate Zelenskyy for acting wisely on behalf of the country he leads. This could be a win for him and for the entire world. Probably not a lot of American media outlets will describe it that way; however.