Indian influencer E. R. Yamini has never tweeted in her life – she prefers to connect with fans on Instagram and YouTube.

However, in early March, a Twitter account using her photo published a post: “#YASPutin. True friendship,” accompanied by a video of two men representing Russia and India embracing.

Yamini says he does not support any of the countries in the Russo-Ukrainian war and worries about his followers.

“If they see this tweet, what will they think of me?” she asks. “I wish my photo wasn’t used on this account.”

The fake account is one of the pro-Russian presidential Twitter cells that used the hashtags #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia (“I’m with Putin” and “I’m with Russia”) on March 2 and 3.

The hashtags quickly rose to the top, especially in Asia and Africa – in India, Pakistan, South Africa and Nigeria – ostensibly showing support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Some of these tweets turned out to be written by real people, which indicates the existence of support for Putin and Russia in some countries.

But many other profiles turned out to be fakes. Basically, they distributed other people’s tweets, wrote almost nothing from themselves and were created quite recently.

“These tweets were probably written by bots, fake profiles, or compromised accounts artificially boosting support for Putin in these countries,” says Carl Miller, co-founder of CASM Technology, an internet disinformation research company.

The company tracked 9,907 profiles that tweeted support for Russia on March 2 and 3 in multiple languages. CASM has found that over a thousand of these accounts have all the hallmarks of spam.

The BBC has also researched hundreds of these profiles. Our research confirms Miller’s conclusions – these accounts are indeed fake.

Using a reverse image search, we found that the photos used in these profiles were taken from the accounts of celebrities, influencers and ordinary users who had no idea that their portraits now grace the pages of supporters of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

We have not been able to determine who opened these accounts or whether they have any connection to the Russian government.

The account for Preity Sharma, for example, says she is a “model and entrepreneur” originally from India, now living in Miami. The account was created on February 26, two days after the Russian invasion. “Putin is a good person,” one of the retweets says.

However, the woman featured in the profile picture is Nicole Thorne, an Australian influencer who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and only occasionally uses her Twitter account.

Another account is trying to impersonate Indian singer Raju Gujjar. His first tweet was posted on February 24, the first day of the invasion. And all 178 posts of the account are retweets, which makes you wonder if this is a bot.

The BBC contacted Nicole Thorne and Raja Gujjar and both confirmed that the accounts were not theirs.

However, not all of the accounts we examined turned out to be bots.

Here, for example, an account created in February 2022, tweets start on March 2. He has no followers. In a reverse avatar search, we came across a young Indian man’s LinkedIn account.

The account is authentic and created by Senthil Kumar, an aeronautical engineer. We asked why he created an account just to retweet pro-Russian messages.

“Usually I open Twitter and see what’s trending. I saw these posts and just retweeted them,” he replied. He believes that since Russia has supported India in the past, Indians should now support Russia. And he explained the new account by the fact that he forgot the password from the old one.

The Twitter accounts we are talking about contain criticism of Western countries, express solidarity between the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and directly support the actions of Vladimir Putin.

“We assume by default that information campaigns are supposed to be directed against the West. However, none of the accounts was addressed to the West and its owner does not live in the West,” says Miller.

To determine whether an account can be considered a bot, he adds, researchers look at the dates the accounts were created, the distribution of tweets by time of day (for example, an account that tweets 24 hours a day is unlikely to be a real person), and the range of topics they write.

“None of these parameters is irrefutable evidence, but taken together, they allow us to consider a particular group of accounts as suspicious,” explains Miller.

The absence of a genuine profile photo can also be a sign of a fake.

In a sample of 100 accounts monitored by CASM, the BBC found that 41 had no profile pictures. Another 30 featured illustrations or images of, for example, Putin or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Only a quarter of these accounts contained images of people, and some of them were stolen.

Twitter’s policies prohibit impersonating “other individuals, groups, or organizations to mislead, confuse, or deceive other users.”

The company told us that it has deleted more than 100,000 accounts since the start of the war for violating platform policies, including banning dozens of accounts associated with the hashtags #IStandWithRussia and #IStandWithPutin.

Twitter says it has investigated and suspended hundreds of accounts identified in the CASM study, including 11 of the 12 accounts we found using other people’s profile photos.

However, Twitter said it found no evidence of a coordinated campaign to artificially inflate public sentiment over the war in Ukraine.

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