Researchers say a 94% drop in automated traffic from Yandex after Ukrainian drone strikes reflects downed search crawlers, not silenced Russian propaganda bots, undercutting a claim by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Key Points:
- Zelenskyy said strikes on Yandex data centers left social media with fewer bots and less hate.
- Network data showed a steep fall in Yandex's automated traffic, mostly from its own web crawlers.
- Researchers tracking Kremlin trolls and AfD and MAGA accounts found no meaningful drop.
Zelenskyy's Yandex Claim
Speaking by video link at the Warsaw Security Forum on Oct. 12, the Ukrainian president told attendees that social media suddenly became "a little easier to breathe" once Ukraine's strikes reached Yandex data centers. There was "less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots," he told the gathering. It was "pretty clear" where those bots came from, he added.
Ukrainian drones hit three data centers of the company, often called "Russia's Google," between Oct. 8 and Oct. 11 in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex fully suspended its Vladimir site after the final strike, and its Yandex Go ride-hailing and delivery app also faltered in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other neighboring countries.
Data from Cloudflare showed automated traffic from Yandex's network fell about 94% on Oct. 11, compared with the average for the second half of September. One viral post went further, claiming that online support for Germany's far-right AfD party had fallen 56% after the strikes. It drew millions of views before its author deleted it.
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DiResta Disputes Claim
Researchers say the chart was misread.
Most of that traffic came from Yandex's own web crawlers, programs that scan websites to index them for search, rather than from accounts that post propaganda. The word "bot" is "used as shorthand for both web crawlers and online trolls," Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University, said. Trolls, she added, tend to run on sturdier infrastructure.
The anonymous group Antibot4Navalny saw no "dramatic drop" among Kremlin-aligned trolls it has tracked for years, while Valdemar Osted of Common Consultancy found only ordinary day-to-day noise in posts from 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts on Facebook. In Ukraine, analyst Yevhen Luzan of the nonprofit CAT-UA saw no significant change across about 10,000 daily social media mentions.
Zelenskyy has cast the strikes as payback. Since late September, Russian attacks have damaged or destroyed data centers belonging to at least eight Ukrainian companies, a campaign Russia's Defense Ministry called "a forced digital detox."
A Sept. 23 drone attack disrupted internet for about 100,000 households in and around Kyiv.
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