DEVELOPMENT OF A TELEGRAM BOT FOR AIR RAID ALERTS IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation since February 24, 2022, has fundamentally reshaped the field of civil protection. One of the critical challenges has been the timely notification of the population about aerial threats, including missile strikes, drone attacks, and air raids. The traditional centralized alerting system, based on Soviet-era sirens, has proven vulnerable: in many cases, sirens failed to function due to damage to power networks, lack of backup energy supply, or operational error.Meanwhile, mobile devices are available to almost every citizen, creating conditions for implementing digital alerting services. For example, the mobile application Air Alert has been installed by more than 15 million users. In addition, the open project alerts.in.ua provides real-time data on air raid alerts through a public API, enabling integration into third- party apps and services.This paper presents the development of a Telegram bot designed to provide automated notifications about air raid alerts. The bot can be added to group chats and channels, where it distributes alerts about the activation, continuation, and deactivation of alarms. The architecture is implemented using ASP.NET Core Web API, with Entity Framework Core employed for database management. Telegram integration is achieved through the official Bot API and the Telegram.Bot library. Data on air raid alerts are sourced from the ukrainealarm.com API.The system maintains a persistent log of notifications and events in a relational database, enabling statistical analysis of alarm frequency and duration as well as auditing the bot’s performance. The paper provides a detailed description of the database schema, code samples, and analysis of key operational scenarios.