# Tweets in Time of Conflict: A Public Dataset Tracking the Twitter Discourse
on the War Between Ukraine and Russia

Emily Chen, Emilio Ferrara
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, #1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Corresponding author<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
###### Abstract

> On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the days that followed,
> reports kept flooding in from layman to news anchors of a conflict quickly
> escalating into war. Russia faced immediate backlash and condemnation from
> the world at large. While the war continues to contribute to an ongoing
> humanitarian and refugee crisis in Ukraine, a second battlefield has emerged
> in the online space, both in the use of social media to garner support for
> both sides of the conflict and also in the context of information warfare.
> In this paper, we present a collection of over 63 million tweets, from
> February 22, 2022 through March 8, 2022 that we are publishing for the wider
> research community to use. This dataset can be found at
> https://github.com/echen102/ukraine-russia and will be maintained and
> regularly updated as the war continues to unfold. Our preliminary analysis
> already shows evidence of public engagement with Russian state sponsored
> media and other domains that are known to push unreliable information; the
> former saw a spike in activity on the day of the Russian invasion. Our hope
> is that this public dataset can help the research community to further
> understand the ever evolving role that social media plays in information
> dissemination, influence campaigns, grassroots mobilization, and much more,
> during a time of conflict.

## Introduction

### Timeline of Key Events

The tensions between Ukraine and Russia have been on the rise for decades, but
have substantially increased in the past few years. Following the Soviet
Union’s dissolution in 1991, Ukraine declared itself an independent country on
August 24, 1991 (?). In 2010, the pro-Russian presidential candidate, Viktor
Yanukovich, was elected into office amid accusations of election fraud (?; ?).
Yanukovich was ousted in 2014 after backing out of an agreement with the
European Union (EU), an agreement which would have brought Ukraine closer to
becoming a member of the EU, in favor of engaging with Russia (?). Shortly
after Yanukovich was removed from office, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine
against the wishes of the West, further exacerbating tensions between Russia
and Ukraine. Russia claimed that this action was supported by the vast
majority of the Crimean people, but this was also denounced as a fraudulent
vote by Western countries and Ukrainian leadership (?; ?; ?).

Pro-Russian separatists groups in Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region
declared their independence, sparking the beginning of the war in Donbas (?).
Several iterations of the Minsk agreement were signed between Ukraine and
Russia in September 2014 in efforts to reach a resolution for the war; these
efforts, however, have proven to be unsuccessful to this day (?). In 2019, the
current President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected to office, where
one of his intentions was to end the conflict in Donbas (?).

In late 2021 through early 2022, it became clear that Russia was amassing its
forces near the Russian-Ukrainian borders. On February 21, 2022, Russia
officially recognized the independence of Donetsk (Donetsk People’s Republic)
and Luhansk (Luhansk People’s Republic) (?; ?; ?). On February 24, 2022,
Russia invaded Ukraine, an act that drew swift condemnation from many world
leaders, including the EU and NATO allies (?).

The Russian-Ukrainian has caused and continues to be, as of this writing, a
humanitarian emergency for Ukrainians in the country, and has also created a
refugee crisis as Ukrainians turned refugees flee to neighboring countries in
large numbers (?; ?; ?). On March 2, 2022, Russia took control of Kherson,
marking the first major Ukrainian city falling to Russian troops (?). As a
result of the Russian invasion, many Western powers have imposed sanctions on
Russia in an attempt to deter and reverse Russian aggression, and Western
companies have begun to withdraw their operations from Russia (?).

### Social Media Activity

During this time of conflict, the information warfare and campaigns have
continued, both in the lead up and in the aftermath of the invasion. This has
taken place on a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter. Russian
misinformation campaigns are being carried out both domestically and abroad
(?); however, Ukrainians have also waged their social media war against
Russia, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, by using social media platforms
to promote the Ukrainian cause and garner international attention and support
towards their current plight (?; ?). Social media platforms have also taken
actions to combat misinformation and disinformation in the wake of the
conflict (?; ?).

As the war continues to unfold, we hope that the research community can
leverage our dataset to continue to combat misinformation, identify vulnerable
communities and understand how the pervasiveness of social media has changed
how modern conflict plays out both online and on the ground. In this paper, we
document how to access this dataset and provide an overview of basic
statistics and general findings from our Twitter data collection.

## Data Collection

Our real-time Twitter data collection began on February 22, 2022. We used
Twitter’s streaming API111https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api to
track keywords of interest that were both trending and related to the conflict
at the time of collection. This list of keywords will continue to be updated
as new keywords appear in online discourse. We also leveraged Twitter’s search
API to collect tweets prior to February 22, 2022; while we will continue to
collect historical tweets, due to Twitter’s rate limit on the Academic Track
search API, we are only able use the search endpoint to collect 10 million
tweets each month.222https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-
api/academic-research Our current data collection consists of over 63 million
tweets, with more than 100 GB of raw data thus far. We will continue our live
tweet collection as this conflict continues to unfold, and expect our dataset
to continually expand, accordingly.

We will also maintain our public Github repository so that other researchers
are able to access tweet IDs that are pertinent to the Ukraine-Russia
conflict, as misinformation and influence campaigns have already been detected
in the narratives being pushed – both on and off Twitter. To remain in
compliance with Twitter’s Terms & Conditions, we are not permitted to publicly
release text or metadata pertaining to any specific tweet outside of their
tweet IDs. As a result, we will be continuously publishing tweet IDs so that
researchers can use the Twitter API or third party tools, such as
Hydrator333https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator or
Twarc,444https://github.com/DocNow/twarc to obtain the raw tweet payload. We
note here that for any tweet that has been removed from Twitter, or if the
account that posted a tweet has been deleted, suspended or banned, researchers
will be unable to retrieve the tweet content through Twitter’s API.

### Tracked Keywords

We leveraged Twitter’s trending topics and hashtags to identify and curate a
list of keywords that are pertinent to the developing war between Ukraine and
Russia. We then used this list to query Twitter’s streaming API for any tweets
that contained the keywords of interest in the tweet’s text. Twitter’s
streaming API is capitalization agnostic, so we only need to track one
capitalization permutation. The list of the keywords that we tracked can be
found in Table Tracked Keywords, but as events continue to develop and unfold,
we will continue to expand this list. The most up-to-date keyword list can be
found on our Github repository.

Keywords | Tracked Since | Notes
---|---|---
ukraine | 2/22/22 |
russia | 2/22/22 |
putin | 2/22/22 |
soviet | 2/22/22 |
kremlin | 2/22/22 |
minsk | 2/22/22 |
ukrainian | 2/22/22 |
NATO | 2/22/22 |
luhansk | 2/22/22 |
donetsk | 2/22/22 |
kyiv | 2/22/22 |
kiev | 2/22/22 |
moscow | 2/22/22 |
zelensky | 2/22/22 |
fsb | 2/22/22 |
KGB | 2/22/22 |

Україна & 2/22/22 Ukraine (uk) Киев 2/22/22 Kiev (ru) ФСБ 2/22/22 FSB (ru)
Россия 2/22/22 Russia (ru) КГБ 2/22/22 KGB Київ 3/1/22 Kiev (uk) україни
3/1/22 ukraine (uk) Росія 3/1/22 Russia (uk) кгб 3/1/22 kgb (uk/ru) фсб 3/1/22
fsb (ru) SlavaUkraini 3/1/22 Glory to Ukraine (ru) ukraini 3/1/22 ukraine
U+1F1FA, U+1F1E6 3/1/22 Ukrainian Flag emoji Украина 3/1/22 Ukraine (ru)
украины 3/1/22 ukraine (ru) Donbas 3/1/22 donbas Донбас 3/1/22 donbas (uk)

Table 1: Keywords that we actively tracked (v1.0 — March 10, 2022). General
notes and English translations provided in the notes section. Translations are
followed with the original keyword language in parenthesis.

## Data & Access Modalities

### Release v1.0 (March 10, 2020)

Our initial release contains tweets from the inception of our data collection,
February 22, 2022 4 AM UTC, through the end of March 8, 2022. This consists of
a total of 63,417,299 tweets, and we detail general statistics about this
release in this section. The language breakdown of release v1.0 can be found
in Table 2, and the keywords that we were tracking are listed in Table Tracked
Keywords. Some of the keywords were added in later to our live collection
which impacted the language proportions that we observed in our dataset; we
will be using Twitter’s search API to obtain past tweets that we missed in our
initial collection that also contain these keywords. We are in the process of
collecting this data and will be adding these additional tweet IDs in
subsequent releases.

Language | ISO | No. tweets | % total
---|---|---|---
English | en | 46,027,619 | 72.58%
Spanish | es | 3,568,412 | 5.63%
French | fr | 2,388,366 | 3.77%
Undefined | (und) | 2,055,267 | 3.24%
German | de | 1,289,814 | 2.03%
Japanese | ja | 1,232,532 | 1.94%
Turkish | tr | 1,006,548 | 1.59%
Italian | it | 903,205 | 1.42%
Portuguese | pt | 899,671 | 1.42%
Russian | ru | 622,920 | 0.98%
Thai | th | 503,889 | 0.79%
Polish | pl | 465,238 | 0.73%
Ukrainian | uk | 406,535 | 0.64%
Indonesian | in | 302,191 | 0.48%
Hindi | hi | 272,851 | 0.43%
Table 2:  The top 15 languages in our dataset and the number of respective
tweets. (v1.0 — March 10, 2022)

#### Language Distribution

Figure 1: Total volume of all tweets collected and volume of English,
Ukrainian and Russian tweets in our dataset. Note that there is a distinct
drop in total tweets collected via Twitter’s API on February 23, 2022 at 8:00
UTC. There is also an increase in Ukrainian and Russian tweets starting from
March 2, 2022. This is due to the addition of keywords in Ukrainian and
Russian to the keywords we were tracking.

Twitter automatically attempts to tag each tweet with its language ISO, and
includes the found ISO in a tweet’s metadata. When we investigate the language
distribution of the tweets, we find that English is the predominant language
that is identified. This aligns with our expectations, as most of the keywords
that we were initially tracking were all in English. When we added keywords in
the Ukrainian and Russian languages on March 1, 2022, we saw a significant
increase in the percentage of Ukrainian and Russian tweets in our dataset.

We also observe fluctuations in the volume of tweets in English, Ukrainian and
Russian, which match the circadian patterns of the countries that
predominantly speak that language and have a presence on Twitter. The English
tweet volumes see an increase during the general waking hours that follow
United States time zones. This corroborates our finding, that we discuss later
in this paper, that most tweets originate from the United States; Russian and
Ukrainian tweets follow similar activity patterns, as Ukraine and Russia are
in similar time zones.

#### Hashtags

Top 15 Hashtags
---
ukraine
russia
putin
standwithukraine
kyiv
ukrainerussiawar
stopputin
ukrainerussianwar
russian
ukraineunderattack
nato
stoprussia
kiev
ucrania
ukrainian
Table 3:  The top 15 hashtags used in our dataset, listed in decreasing order
from top to bottom. (v1.0 — March 10, 2022)

Table 3 lists out the top 15 hashtags that we find used in our dataset. These
hashtags are comprised of hashtags that are referring to groups involved or
affiliated with the Ukraine Russia war (e.g., #ukraine, #russia, #nato), and
others are in support of Ukraine and against the war (e.g., #standwithukraine,
#stoprussia). Outside of these hashtags, other highly prevalent hashtags
include #anonymous, which referred to the announcement by the decentralized
online hacking group Anonymous that they would be targeting Russian government
websites and infrastructure while aiding Ukrainians (?).

When we compare the number of tweets using a hashtag containing the last name
of the current political leaders of Russia and Ukraine, we can see that #putin
is much more widely used than #zelenskyy. To further understand the magnitude
of tweets that include #putin, we also plotted the number of tweets that use
#biden for the current President of United States, Joe Biden and the number of
tweets that use #trump, referring to the former President of the United
States, Donald Trump (see Figure 2). In Figure 2, we can see that #trump
briefly overtook the tweet volume of #putin on February 23, 2022, but for the
rest of our dataset, #putin is used the most frequently, and experiences
volatile usage which, in general, reacts to breaking news and events. There is
an spike of engagement with Putin-related hashtags on March 4, 2022, and a
manual inspection of these tweets reveal that many users were using the
hashtag #SafeAirliftUkraine en tandem with #StopPutin, requesting the
President of the United States, Joe Biden, to help with the evacuation of
Ukrainians. This coincides with reports on March 4 that, despite discussions
on temporary ceasefires the days before to establish humanitarian corridors to
aid civilian evacuations, Russia was not complying with the agreements that
were made (?; ?).

Figure 2: Total volume of tweets that use the hashtags #biden, #trump, #putin
and #zelenskyy. For #zelenskyy, we also counted #zelensky. The capitalization
of a hashtag did not matter, as we lower-cased all hashtags.

#### Locations of Tweeters

In each tweet’s metadata that the Twitter’s API returns, we are given
information about the user who posted a tweet. This will sometimes contain
geolocation data from the user’s post, but in previous works, we have observed
less than 1% of our dataset is returned with Twitter’s own geolocation
information (?). Thus, if a user manually provides a location in their user
profile, we use this to determine where a user is located (?).

Retweeted Country | $\rightarrow$ | Retweeter Country
---|---|---
United States | $\rightarrow$ | United States
United Kingdom | $\rightarrow$ | United Kingdom
India | $\rightarrow$ | India
United Kingdom | $\rightarrow$ | United States
France | $\rightarrow$ | France
United States | $\rightarrow$ | Canada
Ukraine | $\rightarrow$ | United States
United States | $\rightarrow$ | United Kingdom
Germany | $\rightarrow$ | Germany
Spain | $\rightarrow$ | Spain
Table 4:  The top 10 locations for retweets where a location for both the retweeted and retweeter were identifiable. Locations are listed in decreasing order from top to bottom. (v1.0 — March 10, 2022) Quoted Country | $\rightarrow$ | Quoter Country
---|---|---
United States | $\rightarrow$ | United States
United Kingdom | $\rightarrow$ | United Kingdom
France | $\rightarrow$ | France
United Kingdom | $\rightarrow$ | United States
India | $\rightarrow$ | India
United States | $\rightarrow$ | Canada
United States | $\rightarrow$ | United Kingdom
Ukraine | $\rightarrow$ | United States
Russia | $\rightarrow$ | United States
Table 5:  The top 10 locations for quoted tweets where a location for both the
quoted user and user quoting a tweet were identifiable. Locations are listed
in decreasing order from top to bottom. (v1.0 — March 10, 2022)

We find that most tweets originate from the United States and the United
Kingdom, which are primarily English speaking countries. Given that the vast
majority of our initial keywords were in English, this matches our
expectations. There are two different ways a user can retweet a post – a user
can simply retweet a post without adding additional commentary (we refer to
this type of tweet as retweets) or a user can add additional text to the post
(which we refer to as a quoted tweet). If user A retweets or quotes user B, we
consider the direction of the retweet or quote to be from user B to user A. we
list the top 10 locations in Table 4 where we were able to identify a location
for both the retweeted and the retweeter. We do the same for quoted tweets in
Table 5.

Interestingly, we find that users in the United States quote users in Ukraine
1.53 times more than they quote users from Russia, users that are retweeting
tweets from the United States are 4.45 times more likely to retweet users from
Ukraine as opposed to users from Russia. Users from the United States
retweeting users from Russia is the 20th most frequent location pairing.

### Access

Our dataset can be found on Github at: https://github.com/echen102/ukraine-
russia.

This dataset will continue to be collected and updated on a regular basis.
Researchers who would like to use our collected data must remain in compliance
with Twitter’s Terms &
Conditions,555https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-
policy and agree upon the terms of usage as outlined in the accompanying
license.

Inquiries. If you have technical questions about the data collection, please
refer to the issues section in the Github repository or contact Emily Chen at
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>For any further questions about this dataset, please contact
Dr. Emilio Ferrara at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Acknowledgments. The authors gratefully acknowledge support from DARPA
(contract no. HR001121C0169). The authors also thank Kristina Lerman, Jon May
and our lab for helping to identify pertinent keywords to track in our ongoing
data collection.

## References

  * [Bloomberg 2022] Bloomberg.  2022\.  A visual guide to the russian invasion of ukraine.
  * [Bushwick 2022] Bushwick, S.  2022\.  Russia’s information war is being waged on social media platforms.  Scientific American.
  * [Cengel 2022] Cengel, K.  2022\.  The 20th-century history behind russia’s invasion of ukraine.  Smithsonian.com.
  * [Clinch 2022] Clinch, M.  2022\.  How russia invaded ukraine in 2014. and how the markets tanked.  CNBC.
  * [Cohen 2022] Cohen, R.  2022\.  A surge of unifying moral outrage over russia’s war.  The New York Times.
  * [Collett-White and Popeski 2014] Collett-White, M., and Popeski, R.  2014\.  Crimeans vote over 90 percent to quit ukraine for russia.  Reuters.
  * [Funakoshi, Lawson, and Deka 2022] Funakoshi, M.; Lawson, H.; and Deka, K.  2022\.  Tracking sanctions against russia.  Reuters.
  * [Garner 2022] Garner, I.  2022\.  How is the war going for putin on social media? not great.  The Washington Post.
  * [Jiang et al. 2020] Jiang, J.; Chen, E.; Yan, S.; Lerman, K.; and Ferrara, E.  2020\.  Political Polarization Drives Online Conversations About COVID-19 in the United States.  HBET 2:200–211.
  * [Kahn 2022] Kahn, J.  2022\.  Who is viktor yanukovych? the ousted ukrainian president that putin hopes to put back in power.  Fortune.
  * [McGee and Princewill 2022] McGee, L., and Princewill, N.  2022\.  World leaders respond to ukraine invasion, as fresh sanctions await russia.  CNN.
  * [Myers and Barry 2014] Myers, S. L., and Barry, E.  2014\.  Putin reclaims crimea for russia and bitterly denounces the west.  The New York Times.
  * [Pereira and Reevell 2022] Pereira, I., and Reevell, P.  2022\.  What to know about ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy.  ABC News.
  * [Pitrelli 2022] Pitrelli, M. B.  2022\.  Global hacking group anonymous launches ’cyber war’ against russia.  CNBC.
  * [Reuters 2022] Reuters.  2022\.  Timeline: The events leading up to russia’s invasion of ukraine.  Reuters.
  * [Schwirtz and Pérez-Peña 2022] Schwirtz, M., and Pérez-Peña, R.  2022\.  First ukraine city falls as russia strikes more civilian targets.  The New York Times.
  * [Schwirtz, Kramer, and Gladstone 2022] Schwirtz, M.; Kramer, A. E.; and Gladstone, R.  2022\.  Humanitarian crisis worsens for ukrainians trapped in russia’s onslaught.
  * [Scott 2022] Scott, M.  2022\.  As war in ukraine evolves, so do disinformation tactics.  POLITICO.
  * [Stern et al. 2022] Stern, D. L.; Firozi, P.; Paquette, D.; Pannett, R.; Francis, E.; Dixon, R.; Paúl, M. L.; Knowles, H.; and Kornfield, M.  2022\.  Limited cease-fire reached for civilian evacuations as russian forces cut off key cities.  The Washington Post.
  * [Stern, Suliman, and Taylor 2022] Stern, D. L.; Suliman, A.; and Taylor, A.  2022\.  Russia not cooperating on proposed humanitarian corridor in kherson, ukrainian officials say.
  * [Sullivan 2022] Sullivan, B.  2022\.  Russia’s at war with ukraine. here’s how we got here.  NPR.
  * [Westfall 2022] Westfall, S.  2022\.  Why are donetsk and luhansk in ukraine’s donbas region a flash point for putin?  The Washington Post.