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As a sequel of sorts to this thread, we embarked on a similar analysis of tweets containing "Russophobia", "Russophobic", "Russophobia", or "anti-Russian".
cc: @ZellaQuixote
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cc: @ZellaQuixote
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We ended up finding tweets containing Russophobia etc going all the way back to April 2007, although the volume doesn't take off until early 2014 (hmmm. . .). The very first tweet is a false positive - the word "russophobe" is in the name of a blog. archive.is/7SSaW 
Here are the first twenty accounts with on-topic tweets containing "Russophobia", "Russophobic", "Russophobia", or "anti-Russian" along with the tweets in question. The 2008 Russia/Georgia war is a theme of several.
What events were accompanied by abrupt increases (temporary or long-term) in the use of Russophobia etc on Twitter? The first major surge is in early 2014 in tandem with Russia's annexation of Crimea, and traffic never really died back down after that.
The 40 accounts whose tweets containing "Russophobia", "Russophobic", "Russophobia", or "anti-Russian" are most frequently retweeted make for an interesting crew. @RT_com tops the list and most of the others are Kremlin-sympathetic, but a few Kremlin critics also make the list.
Let's take a quick look at the degree of automation present in tweets containing "Russophobia" etc. We'll use the same logic described here to categorize the accounts as mostly/fully automated (bot), partially automated, or other.
Results: of 199584 original tweets containing "Russophobia" etc, 26805 (13.4%) were sent by 6474 accounts (of 62416, 10.4%), flagged as fully/mostly automated and an additional 30317 tweets (15.2%) came from 5102 (8.2%) partially automated accounts.
