It was one of those rare moments that felt almost like a victory for Ukraine, a breath of fresh air after months of relentless digital warfare. Over the weekend, Ukrainian forces carried out at least three airstrikes on data centres belonging to Yandex, the Russian search-engine giant. Telegram channels lit up with grainy footage of flames and smoke rising from what appeared to be one of the buildings, while Yandex itself quietly acknowledged the strikes. Russian media soon reported that a number of websites had gone dark, and for a brief, hopeful moment, it seemed as though Ukraine had found a way to strike back at the machinery of Russian disinformation. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy leaned into that hope on Monday, suggesting that the strikes had somehow cleared the air across Russian-speaking social platforms. He said that “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” with less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. It was a lovely thought—the idea that you could bomb a few buildings and make the digital world a little kinder, a little quieter, a little less poisoned. And for a day or two, many people wanted to believe it.
But the experts who spend their lives tracking disinformation were quick to pour cold water on the celebration. They know that the war being fought online is far more complicated than a single set of server racks, and they could see no evidence that the Yandex strikes had actually slowed the spread of Russian propaganda. Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech firm that monitors disinformation networks across the globe, said that his team had seen no discernible change in the posting patterns of the thousands of accounts they follow. Valent tracks roughly forty disinformation networks around the world, from the United Kingdom to Australia to Syria, and they keep a close eye on the narratives these networks push, as well as how ordinary audiences respond to them. After the Yandex strikes, the volume of posts from these networks remained just as high as before. Khan made a crucial point: the Yandex data centres have no practical connection to the social media bot farms that actually manufacture and spread disinformation. In other words, the strikes might have hit a big Russian company, but they did not hit the propaganda machine itself. The feeling of relief that Zelenskyy described may have been real, but it was probably psychological, not operational. It was the sensation of doing something, of landing a blow, but it was not the same as actually dismantling the enemy’s ability to lie to the world.
So what exactly did happen in those strikes? To understand that, you have to understand what Yandex actually is and what those data centres were doing. Yandex is not just a search engine; it is a massive digital ecosystem that hosts websites, runs cloud services, and supports a wide range of online tools. Data from Cloudflare, a company that monitors worldwide internet traffic, showed a marked decline in activity from bots associated with the Yandex network on the dates of the strikes, specifically on 8 October and 11 October. That sounds impressive, and it led many online commentators to claim that Ukraine had somehow disabled a huge portion of Russia’s disinformation apparatus. But as Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, explained, the word “bot” can mean many different things. When Cloudflare detects a drop in bot traffic, it is not talking about fake social media accounts or trolls posting divisive comments. It is talking about software that makes automated web requests on a large scale. Most of the bots that disappeared from the Cloudflare data were actually web crawlers, the little digital spiders that search engines use to scan and index websites. They are the reason you can type a query into a search bar and instantly find relevant pages. They are not posting political memes or spreading conspiracy theories. They are more like the behind-the-scenes librarians of the internet, quietly cataloguing information so that humans can find it later. When those crawlers stop working, websites go down, services get slower, and systems break in annoying but not necessarily weaponised ways. Independent Russian news outlet Meduza reported that a number of major Russian websites were indeed offline, including banks, retailers, sports apps, and Yandex’s own services like Yandex Go and Yandex Eats. The damage is serious and could take months to repair, but it is damage to infrastructure, not to the societal venom that flows through social media feeds. It is like mistaking the destruction of a printing press for the destruction of the propaganda writer’s ability to think; you have hit the machinery, not the mind.
The confusion is understandable, because the word “bot” has become a catch-all term for everything from malicious troll accounts to simple automated processes. But state-sponsored disinformation networks are not run by the kind of bots that live in corporate data centres. They are far more distributed, far more adaptable, and far more difficult to knock out with a single missile strike. Ned Mendez, the head of research at Alliance4Europe, explained that serious bot operations rarely put all their eggs in one basket. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook routinely flag traffic coming from large data centres as likely automated, so the people behind these operations have learned to spread their efforts across more resilient methods. They use residential internet connections, they use phone farms, and they use a vast array of seemingly ordinary devices that are scattered across the globe. There is no one building, no single server room, no vulnerable chokepoint where all the propaganda is generated. You cannot switch it off like a light switch because it is not really a single set of lights. The Yandex strikes may have disrupted web services in Russia, and they may have sent a powerful symbolic message, but they did not touch the actual networks that pump hate, division, and confusion into European and American social media feeds. Those networks are built like guerrilla armies, not like traditional fortresses. They survive by being small, mobile, and everywhere at once. Airstrikes are blunt instruments, and this was a target that simply did not work the way people hoped it would.
If bombing data centres is not the answer, then what is? It is a question that has vexed governments and tech companies for years, and there are no easy solutions. Khan suggested that Ukraine could look at taking action against specific Russian organisations that are known to run influence operations, such as the Internet Research Agency, the infamous troll farm linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. That organisation was active in election interference and propaganda campaigns until around 2023, and while it may have changed its form, the people behind it are still out there. Another approach would be to work with European partners to disrupt the supply chain of disinformation, cutting off the money, the recruitment pipelines, and the contractors that the Kremlin uses to build its digital armies. There is also the possibility of putting pressure on big social media companies to take moderation more seriously. Khan’s own team has worked with Meta to tamp down on inflammatory content in Sudan, and they know from experience that platform cooperation can sometimes make a real difference. But that approach has its own problems, especially now. The political climate has changed, and Khan noted that the Trump administration would probably push back hard against any effort to force American companies to police disinformation more aggressively. That leaves countries like Ukraine and their European allies in a difficult position. They can try to expose the networks, they can try to boost the resilience of their own societies against propaganda, and they can try to pressure platforms into acting. But none of those options are as dramatic or as immediately satisfying as blowing something up. As Khan put it, “I can see why blowing up data centres is an easier option.”
In the end, the Yandex strikes are a perfect example of the gap between the visceral appeal of a military strike and the messy reality of fighting disinformation. There is something deeply satisfying about watching a symbol of Russian power go up in flames, especially when you have been on the receiving end of a relentless information war for years. Zelenskyy’s hope that the strikes would make social platforms “easier to breathe” is entirely understandable; anyone who has spent time in the swamp of Russian-language social media knows how toxic it can be. But the experts are unanimous in saying that the poison has not been drained. The disinformation networks are still there, humming along in their distributed, resilient, difficult-to-destroy way. The Yandex strikes did damage a major Russian company, they did make life more difficult for ordinary Russians who rely on those services, and they did deliver a symbolic blow to the idea that Russian tech is untouchable. But they did not stop the lies, and they did not make the world safer from manipulation. If anything, the episode should be a reminder that the war for information cannot be won with bombs alone. It requires patience, cooperation, regulation, and a willingness to do the slow, unglamorous work of building digital defences, exposing bad actors, and protecting the public from those who would divide us. The desire to breathe easier is real, but that breath will have to come from something more than smoke and fire.