Zelenskyy says Yandex strikes cut bots; researchers doubt claims

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that social media became less hostile after Ukrainian drones hit data centers run by Russian tech giant Yandex. Technology researchers say the data behind the claim measures something else. Speaking by video link to the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Zelenskyy said that once Ukraine's strikes "reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms".euronews+1

"There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots — and it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from," he said. "If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems".rferl+1

Three facilities hit

Over four days, Ukraine struck three Yandex data centers. The first was in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, on October 8. The second was in the Kaluga region the next day. The third was in the Vladimir region on October 11. After the Vladimir attack, Yandex said in a Telegram statement that "operations at the data centre have been completely suspended". The outages hit ride-hailing, payments, cloud computing and other services. Yandex Go also had problems in Kazakhstan, Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Sasovo site reportedly held two of Yandex's three supercomputers.united24media+2

Zelenskyy has called the strikes a "tit-for-tat" response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers. Those attacks intensified in September. Russia's digital development minister, Maksut Shadayev, said officials are discussing ways to protect data centers from drones, according to Russia's state news agency TASS.rferl

What the data shows

The bot claims grew out of Cloudflare Radar charts. According to RFE/RL, they showed automated traffic from Yandex's network falling to about 0.4 percent of its recent peak. Euronews' analysis found that automated traffic from the network on Sunday was about 94 percent below its average for late September.euronews+1

Researchers say this traffic mostly comes from Yandex's own web crawlers, programs that index websites for its search engine, rather than propaganda accounts. The anonymous researcher behind the @antibot4navalny account, which tracks troll networks, told RFE/RL that the chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media". UNITED24 Media, a Ukrainian outlet, wrote that the numbers "cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared". The German tech site t3n reported that the traffic had recovered to about 20 percent by the evening of October 11.rferl+1

Political speculation

Even so, posts claiming that online activity around Germany's AfD, Reform UK and the MAGA movement had dropped spread widely. Euronews said no independently verified figures support these claims. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský wrote on X: "If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets". The debate comes weeks before the US midterm elections in November.euronews

RFE/RL said more data in the coming weeks should show whether the strikes affected pro-Kremlin accounts.rferl