Researchers found no sign that Ukrainian drone strikes on three Yandex data centers silenced Russian propaganda bots, undercutting viral posts with 6.3 million views and claims by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Key Points:
- Analysts found no drop in the AfD, MAGA and Reform UK communities that viral posts said had gone quiet.
- The most widely shared chart tracked automated web traffic from Yandex, not accounts posting on social media.
- Russian-language Telegram channels posted 5% to 15% less after the final strike, with the cause unclear.
Yandex Bot Claims Collapse
Ukrainian drones hit Yandex sites in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir between Oct. 8 and 11, disrupting payments, cloud computing, ride-hailing and other services. The company halted all operations at its Vladimir facility after the third attack.
A Cloudflare Radar chart then spread online, showing automated traffic from the company's network falling to about 0.4% of its recent peak. Within a day, posts on X claimed that Russia-run accounts had gone quiet around Alternative for Germany (AfD), Donald Trump's MAGA movement and Reform UK. Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum on Oct. 12 that social media had suddenly become "a little easier to breathe."
His office later reportedly said he meant the mood online, not a measured drop in bots.
Graphika, a firm that maps online communities, reported that the Cloudflare figures mostly reflected Yandex's own search crawler, software that indexes web pages and goes quiet whenever the company goes offline. It tested each claim against its mappings of thousands of communities. None of the groups named in the posts lost their active accounts or heaviest posters.
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Renée DiResta On Russian Bots
AfD-related communities published 40,365 posts on Oct. 11, a 4% dip from a week earlier that sits well inside normal swings. MAGA mentions on X rose 25% in the eight hours after the Vladimir strike.
Disinformation researcher Renée DiResta of Georgetown University wrote that Russian operators often hide behind commercial hosting, VPNs and proxies in other countries, so a Yandex outage would not necessarily reach them.
A quick check by University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird counted about 946,000 AfD mentions over the period, with no visible cliff after the strikes. DiResta also warned that platforms have cut off much of the data researchers once used to test such claims.
Zelenskyy has called the strikes a tit-for-tat response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, which intensified in September. One Russian strike on a Kyiv business center that month killed four people and cut internet access for about 100,000 households.
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