Fact-checks find no evidence Ukrainian strikes on Yandex halted Russian bots
No evidence shows that Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers reduced Russian propaganda bot activity. A viral graph and remarks by Volodymyr Zelensky helped spread the idea, and the data does not back it.
Strikes on Yandex data centers
Between 8 and 11 October, Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centers in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex, often described as Russia's version of Google, saw disruptions to payments, taxi services, business applications and cloud offerings. The Sasovo site in Ryazan region hosts two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, though it is unclear whether they were damaged. Yandex said the Vladimir site had to be shut down and that replacing the damaged capacity will take about six months. Moscow is now considering deploying the military to protect facilities of this kind.
- Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centers in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions
- Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shares a graph on X suggesting a sudden drop in AfD-linked online activity
- Volodymyr Zelensky tells the Warsaw Security Forum there were fewer bots and less hate online
How the bot theory spread
Cloudflare, which carries a large share of web traffic, reported that automated traffic from the Yandex network fell by 94%, and the figure spread quickly online. Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on 12 October, Volodymyr Zelensky said social media had become somewhat easier to breathe.
there was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations [because] there were fewer bots
Polish minister and intelligence coordinator Tomasz Siemoniak said the ABW domestic intelligence agency had reported a radical decline in Russian bot activity, but no data has been published. On 11 October Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared a graph on X suggesting that online activity around Alternative for Germany (AfD) had suddenly collapsed. His post was viewed more than four million times. Hours later he admitted the claim was not based on a verified fact, and said his message had opened with the condition 'if confirmed'.
What the graph shows
The graph is titled 'Daily activity over 3 months' and does not say whose activity it tracks or name a data source. Its line ends on 15 October, a date still in the future when the fact-checks were published. Detection tools Pangram and TruthScan flagged it as AI-generated. It also contains figures dated after its own publication, so it cannot record the traffic it claims to show. The Cloudflare data behind the confusion covers every automated request on its network, including the crawlers search engines use to index websites. Cloudflare told the BBC the decline was not necessarily linked to bot behaviour on social networks. Mikhail Klimarev, an independent internet analyst, told BBC Russian that Yandex crawls the whole internet about once a day, and he thought the company most likely switched those crawlers off to relieve strain on its computing resources.
What monitors and researchers found
D-Team, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence campaigns, told BBC Verify that known Russian accounts and bot clusters showed no traffic change on any platform, and that those operations remained active. Josef Holnburger, managing director of the Berlin-based Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), said:
no decline in Russian disinformation activities that could be explained by the attack on Yandex data centers
Darren Linvill, who studies foreign information manipulation, told Snopes that the strikes probably did not disrupt Russian propaganda operations, because many of them run from outside Russia.
Why the bot label misleads
The word bot covers very different things, from fake profiles posting comments to spam software and search crawlers. Roman Ossadtschuk, head of threat analysis at the Ukrainian technology firm LetsData, said no reliable graph can combine bot and troll activity across several platforms without access to their internal data. He acknowledged a moderate dip in posts and comments over one weekend, affecting bots and real users alike, but called it coincidence. Zelensky's office later told BBC Verify that he meant the atmosphere on social media, pointing to many users who reported fewer provocative and hateful comments. As of the fact-checks, no published data supports the idea that the attacks stopped Russian bot networks.
