The networks appeared to suddenly “activate” when the war broke out and bore all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored influence campaign like those mounted by Russia, Iran and so many other countries over the past decade to massage public opinion at home and abroad.

For Nato countries trying to diplomatically isolate Putin’s regime, that highlights an uncomfortable point. Though Russia’s vaunted information warfare apparatus seems to be failing in the West, there remains a large chunk of the world, from India through China to South Africa, where that is not the case.

“An idea I’ve heard a lot is that Kyiv is ‘winning’ the information war,” says Carl Miller, a research director at the think tank Demos who tracked some of the Indian networks. “I think that’s fairly complacent and based on a mistake: that our information environments are more universal than they are. [The fact] that we can’t see these influence efforts in the US or UK isn’t because we’re winning, it’s because we’re not the battleground.”