In brief
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s assertion that strikes on Russian data centres have curtailed state‑sponsored bots has gone viral. However, analyses from tech firms and independent researchers find no evidence that this has reduced the scale of Russian influence operations. While Yandex’s service levels have worsened, the bots that routinely flood social media with pro‑Kremlin content remain active. The claims appear rooted in a misinterpretation of Cloudflare data showing reduced automated traffic on Yandex’s network, not online propaganda. The ongoing cyber‑and‑air conflict continues to affect internet infrastructure, but does not yet alter the reach of disinformation campaigns.
After Ukraine targeted three of the five Yandex data centres on 8 October, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the attacks had wiped out alleged bots that underpin Kremlin‑linked influence‑operations online. The claim spread across social media, with Zelensky’s office tweeting that there was a “less hate, less division and fewer provocations” online because of “fewer bots.”
But independent monitoring groups and the cloud‑services operator Cloudflare say the attacks did not materially dent bot activity. Cloudflare’s publicly released maps show a dip in automated network traffic from bot IP addresses that belong to Yandex’s infrastructure, yet that traffic largely consists of search‑engine crawlers, not accounts peddling propaganda.
Researchers from dTeam, who track Moscow‑linked influence clusters, noted that known pro‑Kremlin bots such as Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka remained active on social media after the strikes. “If the offices… were in flames then we would see a change,” they told BBC Verify, and confirmed that bot clusters have continued to operate normally.
The Ukrainian government appears to have measured the strikes more as disrupting internet services than crushing disinformation. Yandex’s own response states it is “struggling to maintain” its services and that it has disabled large‑scale cloud operations that violate its usage rules, including those used for “spam and other improper activities.”
While internet traffic disruptions have hampered some global sites that rely on Yandex’s cloud infrastructure, the core influence mechanic of social‑media bots, which churn out content for political gain, shows no sign of a decline.
The narrative that data‑centre raids directly cut down networked propaganda remains largely unsubstantiated. The focus now shifts to monitoring whether extended attacks will breach the infrastructure sustaining these influence operations, or whether digital campaigns simply adapt to new servers.
For more detailed analysis, see BBC’s original reporting on the strikes and their impact on Yandex’s services.
