“If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. 📉 So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down. 🤔🇷🇺 https://t.co/hEPJkIVtA3”
Tomáš Zdechovský on X: "If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data c…
archived 13 Oct 2026 15:59:35 UTC
Archived Fact-Checked Media — MediaVault
“There's a story going around: after the drone strikes on Yandex data centres, comments on AfD and MAGA accounts collapsed. We monitor 17,000+ politicians, media and civil society accounts in 30+ countries. 50,000+ posts a day. So we checked. We don't see it. 🧵 https://t.co/8quSNosqv0”
No, Ukraine's strikes on Yandex data centers didn't cripple Russian influence ops
Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian data centers sparked viral claims about a sudden drop in Russian influence operations on social media — even as experts see no evidence to support this. Kyiv struck data centers run by Yandex — Russia's "answer to Google" — in three different regions between Oct. 9 and 11, a response to Russian strikes against similar facilities in Ukraine. Yandex acknowledged the attacks, noting that its data center in Vladimir Oblast had to be shut down due to damage a
The Center examined how strikes on Yandex affected the spread of russian propaganda | Центр протидії дезінформації
The Center examined changes in global internet traffic following Ukrainian strikes on data centers belonging to Yandex, a sanctioned russian IT giant, in sa ...
Ukraine knocked out key Yandex data centers. The fallout is being felt across Russia. — Meduza
Ukraine has struck three of the six data centers belonging to Yandex, a Russian technology company, in Sasovo (Ryazan region), Kaluga, and Vladimir. Kyiv called the strikes a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers, which Russian forces have been striking lately. The infrastructure of the company’s “iron heart,” as Yandex calls its data centers, has been damaged. Operations at two of them — in Sasovo and Vladimir — have been halted. At the data center in Kaluga, “several modules have been completely knocked out.” Outages have plagued the Russian internet since the strikes began: not only Yandex’s services but also the websites of other companies and even media outlets have been operating with restrictions. Users abroad have also complained about problems with Yandex’s apps. As of October 12, the company had not managed to restore their operation. Here’s a look at the consequences of the Ukrainian strikes that Yandex and its users have faced.
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
Russia called its strikes on Ukrainian data centers a ‘forced digital detox.’ Zelensky says Kyiv has answered by hitting a data center belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex. — Meduza
Ukraine is responding in kind to Russian strikes, including attacks on data centers, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. He was commenting on a Ukrainian strike on a Yandex data center in Russia’s Ryazan region, RBC-Ukraine reported.
As Russia’s fiber optic drones flood the battlefield, Ukraine is racing to catch up
Editor’s Note: In accordance with the security protocols of the Ukrainian military, soldiers featured in this story are identified by first names and callsigns only. Every year, as the way war is fought constantly evolves on the battlefields of Ukraine, the visuals of the fighting on the ground that constantly flood the internet transform with it. In the frantic first weeks of the full-scale invasion, it was Russian tanks stolen by farmers tossing their turrets after Ukrainian Javelin strikes.
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.
The Russian ‘counterterrorism’ unit behind Alexei Navalny’s poisoning tried to automate its search for domestic dissent using Meta’s Llama 2. After a year and a half, the project collapsed. — Meduza
The FSB’s Second Service is officially charged with protecting the constitutional order and combating terrorism. In practice, the unit works to stamp out dissent in Russia: it has plotted the assassinations of opposition politicians, works to restrict internet access, and monitors the news for signs of dissent. To automate that last job, the “Dvoyka” — as the Second Service is known — commissioned an AI-powered system for monitoring news outlets and social media in the spring of 2024. The developer was the Kazan-based company Mikord, which had also worked on components of Russia’s unified military registry and was hacked in December 2025. iStories examined material from that breach relating to the FSB’s news monitoring system. The system was called PAUK — Russian for “SPIDER.”
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
By popular demand: A follow-up thread on Russian bots, Yandex, Cloudflare, MAGA, AfD and "breathing easier" on social media. 1️⃣ We see no "dramatic drop" in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years).
Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.
To those implying that Kremlin-controlled social media bot/troll farms became silent after Ukraine hit a Yandex data center, posting this CloudFare chart ( radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 ): Hate to disappoint you all ⤵️
