Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web. It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online? [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]

Ukrainian drones hit three of Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers in four days. Ukraine’s president says the bots thinned out too

Lithuania’s prime minister wants more such strikes to protect elections. Researchers say the bot data shows Yandex’s web crawlers, not trolls.

Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers — Ukraine intensifies bombing of Yandex data centers in response to Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv data centers

The world is getting a break from Russian bots thanks to Kyiv.

Russian bot farms are still trolling, even after Ukraine’s drone strikes on Yandex

Call it disinformation about disinformation.

Rapid-response fact-check: "Yandex Strikes Caused Russian Bot Activity To Drop By 50 Percent" Is False | Joohn Choe

This is going on viral on Facebook today and it's unfortunately wrong. Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in Russia did not cut

May 2025 — AI Misinformation Monitor of Leading AI Chatbots

Every month, NewsGuard’s team of expert analysts audit the top AI models to see how well they respond to prompts in the news. On average, this month they failed to counter disinformation from Russia’s Pravda Network 24 percent of the time, either spreading false claims or failing to respond. The Pravda network was designed to infect the AI models.

Bot Traffic from Russian Federation | Cloudflare Radar

Bot Traffic trends and insights from Russian Federation.

Bot Traffic from Russian Federation | Cloudflare Radar

Bot Traffic trends and insights from Russian Federation.

Yandex bot traffic drop isn’t a Russian bot farm collapse

0.4% Yandex bot traffic drop reflects stalled web crawling, not proof that Russian troll farms went offline. Read what the data shows

Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian datacentres reduce online disinformation?

While some viral online graphs suggest less bot activity, Zelenskyy’s claims of improved social media discourse do not entirely pass muster

The Yandex outage probably didn’t blitz Russian bots

Not the bots you’re probably picturing, that is.

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time