In brief
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that strikes on Russian data hubs had reduced pro‑Kremlin bot activity. Social media posts citing Cloudflare charts suggest a sharp drop in bot traffic, yet the data actually reflects routine search‑engine crawling rather than social media influence operations. Independent researchers and cybersecurity firms find no evidence of a significant decline in Russian bot activity on platforms. The strikes have disrupted Yandex’s services and cloud infrastructure, but influence groups continue to operate normally. Global experts emphasize that the attacks do not represent a major blow to disinformation efforts.
The Ukrainian military has struck three Yandex data centres since 8 October in retaliation for attacks on local internet infrastructure. President Volodymyr Zelensky used the occasion to declare that the strikes had reduced “hate, division and provocations” online, claiming a fall in bot activity.
Viral posts sharing a Cloudflare chart showed a sharp decline in bot traffic from Yandex IP addresses after the second strike. However, the data represent automated crawling for search‑engine purposes, not the automated accounts that push disinformation on social platforms.
Cyber‑security experts from the U.S. group dTeam and analysts at Netblocks have examined bot activity on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and other sites. They report no change in traffic from known Russian influence clusters such as Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka since the strikes.
Cloudflare clarified that the drop in “bot traffic” does not reflect a reduction in social‑media bot behaviour, and the company’s data cannot measure influence operations. The company said Yandex likely disabled its crawler during the outage because computing resources were severely degraded.
Yandex has stated that its cloud services are prohibited from large‑scale social‑media manipulation and that any offending accounts are blocked. While the strike has hurt Yandex’s search and cloud services globally, there is no evidence that pro‑Kremlin message‑pushing has suffered.
The Ukrainian side says Zelensky’s comments referred to the broader social‑media environment, not a quantifiable drop in bot traffic. Users report fewer “provocative and hateful comments,” but that may reflect general fatigue or platform moderation rather than the physical loss of servers.
In short, while the strikes have caused service disruptions for thousands of internet users, they appear to be a blot on Yandex’s operations rather than a decisive blow to the machinery of Russian influence.
