The Security Service of Ukraine announced the liquidation of the bunch of fake accounts, which spread fakes about the conflict between the Office of the President and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi. These bots also led a campaign to discredit the First Lady, Olena Zelenska.
This was reported by the SSU press service.
According to the special service, the "powers" of this bot farm were also used by representatives of the Russian special services. In particular, they used bots to spread fakes about the situation at the front. It had more than a million bots and had numerous groups in social networks with an audience of almost 400 thousand users.
The SSU exposed the head of the bot farm (a Russian citizen), and also conducted a series of raids, seizing 5 000 SIM cards and 200 proxy servers for changing IP addresses.
As for the head, the SSU stated that he lives in Kyiv and positioned himself as a "political expert." He worked on the order of one of the "domestic police forces", and in order to coordinate actions, he was in contact with an active MP, who "is part of the close circle of the former state leadership".
"Babel" sources claim that "European Solidarity" is involved in this.
Investigations are ongoing. The SSU is currently investigating unauthorized interference in the operation of information (automated) networks (Part 2 of Article 361 of the Criminal Code).