A week before the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv came under intense shelling for the first time since World War II, an alarming video announcement was circulating on encrypted messaging app, Telegram.
Warning: This article contains images and details readers might find distressing.
The pro-Russian separatist leaders of the self-declared Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) warned the Ukrainian military would invade the regions on the order of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
"Today, their guns are aimed at civilians, at us and our children," said DPR head Denis Pushilin, donned in military greens, in a video posted to his official Telegram channel.
"From today, on February 18 … women, children and elderly people are subject to evacuation.
"We kindly ask you to listen and make the right decision. Temporary departure will save the life and health of you and your loved ones."
It was civilian investigators from Bellingcat — who played a significant role in linking Russia to the downing of MH17 — who first noticed something awry about the post.
"When you check the metadata associated with that video, it had been filmed a couple of days before," said Bellingcat researcher Nick Waters.
The metadata in the video, which has been independently verified by the ABC, showed the export timestamp of the announcement was created two days earlier, on February 16.
Telegram is one of the few social messaging services which preserves such information.
"What we saw in the run-up to the actual invasion was a pretty concerted attempt to show Ukraine as the aggressors," Mr Waters said.
"In multiple examples, these stories were completely unfounded and were debunked very, very quickly.
"Of course, despite this, Russia then invaded."
Russia tried to build the foundation of its invasion of Ukraine on a lie — such as declaring the country, run by a Jewish president, had a Nazi problem — and it has shown no sign of changing course.
Rise of fake fact-checkers
Since the invasion began, journalists — such as those at the ABC, the BBC and Agence France Presse — have published articles and videos dissecting false claims pushed by both sides of the conflict.
One significant round of debunks in March pulled apart claims posted by Russian officials who falsely claimed that pregnant women being pulled from the rubble of a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 16 were actors.
But the appearance of such rigorous verification techniques employed by Western media outlets during the conflict has been weaponised by pro-Russian actors as part of an orchestrated disinformation campaign established weeks into the invasion.
The new tactic involves half a dozen pro-Kremlin Telegram channels which appear to operate as forensically minded and independent fact-checkers.
Their content looks and sounds like debunks, but are fake.
Some of their "debunks" are simple, such as a post on March 1 in a channel with 720,000 subscribers — which the ABC has chosen not to name — that purportedly denies that fighting had occurred in the city of Kharkiv.
This counterclaim was false and easily refuted, even at the time — there was overwhelming evidence of the city being shelled.
Another post the next day showed pictures of the aftermath of a TV tower being destroyed in Kyiv.
The account highlighted the "strange position" of burnt bodies caught in a twisted fence line and suggested Ukrainian forces had delivered bodies from a nearby morgue for the photo — it then posted a screenshot of Google Maps showing the distance between the two.
There was no evidence to support these claims.
Hundreds of these posts — "imposter news" or "fake bunks" have emerged in the past month.
Public interest investigative journalism outfit ProPublica reported some of these supposed fact-checks were also correcting content which had never actually circulated in Ukrainian channels.
Despite the dubious analysis, the channel has appeared on Russian state media and has been pushed by the Russian Ministry of Defence.
Joan Donovan — the research director at Harvard University's Shorenstein Centre on media, politics and public policy — said these channels gave the impression that Ukraine was running its own disinformation campaign and, therefore, it could not be trusted.
"There's an evolution in media manipulation tactics we haven't seen at this scale before," Dr Donovan said.
"The enemies of truth on the internet are going to use every tool at their disposal."
Many accusations directed against Russia, both from Ukrainian officials and independent media, involve serious allegations of war crimes.
On April 1, when Ukrainian troops reclaimed Bucha, north-east of Kyiv, they discovered a landscape of horrors.
Footage emerged of mass graves and corpses strewn in the streets. Survivors told reporters about rape, torture and executions of civilians.
When confronted with evidence and testimonies, the Russian Ministry of Defence in a statement called the visual evidence "another hoax". Its embassy in Canada claimed one of the corpses in verified footage moved its arm (it didn't).
The Russian Security Council's deputy chairman, Dmitry Medvedev, said "enraged beasts from [Ukrainian] nationalist battalions … are ready to casually kill their own civilians in a bid to dehumanise Russia".
These deflections from the Kremlin are just another chapter in its propaganda playbook, one it has been using for over a decade.
History repeats itself
French philosopher Jacques Ellul said that, during the Cold War, propaganda wasn't about persuasion but about compelling action.
"I think that there's a second side to propaganda that is equally important, which is obfuscation … which is to get you to not do something," said author and University of Stirling's Idrees Ahmad.
Dr Ahmad, who lectures on international conflicts and disinformation, has been closely watching the invasion of Ukraine.
The sequence of events felt familiar to the professor and other researchers who had been following the conflict in Syria, which quietly ticked over into its 11th year last month.
"Many people's attitude towards the Syrian conflict was that it was very complex, and things were not straightforward," Dr Ahmad said.
"If you create enough doubt, then people are reluctant even to sympathise."
After a chemical attack killed at least 281 people in the south-western city of Ghouta in August 2013, President Putin penned an op-ed in the New York Times accusing opposition forces of gassing its own people to "provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons".
A report from the Human Rights Watch had concluded evidence "all points to the Syrian government responsibility for the attacks" and found alternative claims that opposition forces were responsible were "lacking in credibility".
The HRW's findings were echoed by other independent investigators within the media.
After another deadly chemical attack in Douma in 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defence tried to blame rebels again for gassing civilians before denying chemical weapons were even used.
The Kremlin's claims to a "false flag" operation orchestrated by rebels were never independently substantiated but convincing the world to adopt an alternative reality was not its objective.
"Counter-narratives were myriad," Dr Ahmad said, "they didn't accord with each other, they didn't even kind of agree with each other.
"But the point was not to create a persuasive counter-story. The aim was just to create so many different stories that the truth gets lost among all of them."
The deliberate deflection and firehose of falsehoods may have had a wider impact 10, or even four, years ago.
But we're operating now in a "very mature social media ecosystem", according to Dr Donovan.
Dr Donovan said both reporters and social media users have become cognisant of disinformation and digital propaganda efforts over recent years.
However, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict had escalated the information arms race faster than she anticipated.
No clear winner yet in the information war
One common technique seen during the invasion — which hasn't been definitively linked to Russian-aligned forces — was the use of an apparent bot network.
An analysis of 250,000 tweets conducted by Timothy Graham at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) found evidence of co-ordinated bot-like behaviour on Twitter, pushing the #IStandWithPutin hashtag in the days after the first bombing of Kyiv, to create an impression of widespread support for the invasion.
Many of the accounts amplifying the hashtag have been banned since the analysis but, in Dr Graham's sample, checked by the ABC, it is worth noting that many using the phrase were genuine accounts who hijacked it to post anti-Kremlin content.
The response to this apparent bot-network supported Dr Donovan's argument that social media had matured, but she and other experts say it is too early to declare Russia was losing the information war.
"Ukraine has won the hearts and minds, in the morality of the moment," Dr Donovan said.
"But, for every Ukrainian that doesn't have access to cell phone coverage or electricity … I wonder if we're inflating what it means to win here when people are struggling so much to be heard on the ground.
"I question whether winning the information war is something … to make us [in the West] feel better about not being able to do the kind of humanitarian mission we would hope for."
The tale of the underdog Ukraine fighting valiantly against its invader has generated goodwill and support for Ukraine, but Dr Ahmad warns history could be repeating itself.
"If this conflict drags on longer, you will see what people said during Syria," Dr Ahmad said.
"In the beginning it looks clear-cut to anybody who was paying attention but, as time goes on, it's very easy to obfuscate and once the headlines move on … people start looking for reasons not to pay attention.
"People will start saying, 'This is complex, it's not as straightforward as it looks'."
Both Dr Donovan and Dr Ahmad say a key battlefield in the information war will be inside Russia, where access to news from outside its borders has been dramatically limited.
While both expressed concern about how much reliable information Russian citizens were receiving, Mr Waters said the Bellingcat article about the invasion was attracting more and more readers from Russia. They were among its top 10 sources of readers by country.
There was also other evidence, he said, of domestic agitation.
"The number of protesters who are coming out to protest against the war … it's not huge, in comparison to Western standards, but it's still thousands of people who are facing some pretty significant sanctions," Mr Waters said.
"You know, thousands of people turning up to anti-war protests … that's pretty good evidence in my view."
