  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.
