Russian politicians, foreign embassies and state media accounts on Twitter Inc. with hundreds of thousands of followers tweeted the term “Bucha” more than 1,000 times last week, according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonprofit which has been tracking Russian disinformation relating to the war. The campaign was an attempt to manipulate public discourse surrounding the events that unfolded in the Kyiv suburb early this month, according to researchers…

Twitter accounts for Russian embassies in France, Indonesia and Japan, along with Russian officials and government agencies, have been amplifying false theories about Bucha, according to the researchers. On April 6, for instance, the Russian embassy in Jakarta, which has 20,000 followers, wrote a 16-tweet-long thread arguing that there were no Russian troops in Bucha at the time of the killings and asserting Russia’s innocence in the matter…

Then, on April 9, several Moscow-linked accounts began tweeting that another hoax was in the works to smear Russia, according to researchers. An account belonging to Dmitry Polyanskiy, the first deputy permanent representative of Russia to the United Nations, alleged that Ukraine and its “Western propaganda-tutors” were already plotting another deception.