Following yesterday's confrontation with Russia in the Kersh strait, Ukraine's government issued a 30-day declaration of martial law in several border regions. Let's take a look at some related Twitter traffic.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
We downloaded tweets containing "Poroshenko" and "martial law", resulting in 7042 tweets from 4934 accounts (97% are in English). A common theme is the notion that the martial law declaration is a ploy for Poroshenko to postpone or cancel the upcoming presidential election. 
We classified the 50 most prolific accounts in terms of retweet volume into those pushing the aforementioned theory and those that did not, and extended the classification to the accounts that RT'd only one group. (Examples of the "ploy to cancel/postpone election" group shown).
Retweet network for "Poroshenko" and "martial law", categorized as described in the previous two tweets. The set pushing the "ploy to cancel or postpone election" theory contains RT's official account, as well as #FalseFlag frequent fliers such as @Ian56789 and @ShoebridgeC.
Who tweeted about Poroshenko declaring martial law first? This figure shows the first 20 accounts to do so. The very first tweet advances the hypothesis that the goal is cancellation of the election.
Finally, let's compare the media sources used by the two account categories. They're starkly different - the accounts theorizing that the election will be cancelled prefer Russian media, while those that do not link mostly Western MSM. Kyiv Post only shows up in the latter set.
