In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event had global repercussions, especially on the political decisions of European countries. As expected, the role of Italy in the conflict became a major campaign issue for the Italian General Election held on 25 September 2022. Politicians frequently use Twitter to communicate during political campaigns, but bots often interfere and attempt to manipulate elections. Hence, understanding whether bots influenced public opinion regarding the conflict and, therefore, the elections is essential. In this work, we investigate how Italian politics responded to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict on Twitter and whether bots manipulated public opinion before the 2022 general election. We first analyze 39,611 tweets of six major political Italian parties to understand how they discussed the war during the period February-December 2022. Then, we focus on the 360,823 comments under the last month's posts before the elections, discovering around 12% of the commenters are bots. By examining their activities, it becomes clear they both distorted how war topics were treated and influenced real users during the last month before the elections.

翻译：2022年2月，俄罗斯对乌克兰发动全面入侵。这一事件对全球产生了深远影响，尤其波及欧洲国家的政治决策。不出所料，意大利在冲突中的角色成为2022年9月25日意大利大选的主要竞选议题。政客们常在政治竞选期间通过推特进行沟通，但机器人经常干扰并试图操纵选举。因此，理解机器人是否影响了公众对冲突及选举的看法至关重要。在本研究中，我们探究了意大利政界在推特上对俄乌冲突的回应方式，以及机器人是否在2022年大选前操纵了公众舆论。我们首先分析了意大利六大主要政党的39,611条推文，以了解他们在2022年2月至12月期间如何讨论战争。随后，我们聚焦于选举前最后一个月帖子下的360,823条评论，发现约12%的评论者为机器人。通过分析其活动，可以明确它们既扭曲了战争议题的讨论方式，也在选举前最后一个月影响了真实用户。