It began with a bold and risky military move: Ukrainian drones striking deep inside Russia, targeting the data centers of Yandex, the country’s largest tech company. The attacks were retaliation for a Russian campaign against Ukrainian digital infrastructure, which Moscow itself had cynically described as “a forced digital detox.” For days, ordinary Russians lost access to email, cloud storage, maps, and streaming; internet connectivity on Yandex networks plunged to a fraction of normal levels. But shortly after the smoke cleared, something else happened: a very different story exploded online. The claim was irresistible—that Ukraine had not only disrupted Russian internet services, but had silenced the vast army of Russian propaganda bots that supposedly flooded Western social media with hatred and division. It was a narrative that offered instant emotional satisfaction to anyone weary of disinformation. Yet when researchers and fact-checkers actually dug into the data, they found something far less dramatic but far more important: there was little to no evidence that the strikes had silenced Russian influence operations on Western platforms. The bots, it turned out, were still very much alive, and the viral charts that suggested otherwise were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what they measured.
The strikes themselves were real and damaging. Starting in late September, Russian missiles and drones had hammered Ukrainian data centers, hitting at least eight companies and cutting internet access for roughly a hundred thousand households around Kyiv before the month was over. Ukraine answered in October. On the night of October 8, drones struck Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, a facility that reportedly housed two of the company’s three supercomputers. The next night, another facility in Kaluga was hit and several modules knocked out. By October 11, Yandex announced that operations at its data center in the Vladimir region were completely suspended after yet another drone attack. In total, three of Yandex’s six data centers had been taken offline. A Sberbank data center under construction in the Saratov region was also hit on October 14. The consequences inside Russia were immediate and widespread. Users across the country reported outages in Yandex Mail, Pay, Disk, Go, and many other services. Yandex Cloud clients—the businesses and developers who rely on the company’s infrastructure—were hit hard too. Internet monitoring group NetBlocks measured connectivity on the Yandex Cloud network at about thirty percent of normal levels, and even the broader Yandex LLC network was running at only sixty-three percent. Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet, reported that a full recovery would likely take months. This was a serious blow to Russia’s digital backbone, and it exposed just how fragile the country’s supposedly sovereign internet had become. But the claim that these strikes had silenced Russian propaganda on Western social media began to take on a life of its own, fueled by a single chart and a wave of wishful thinking.
The viral story had a deceptively technical origin. A chart from Cloudflare Radar, a public dashboard for internet traffic, showed that automated traffic from a Yandex network called AS13238 had fallen to just 0.4 percent of its two-week peak. Tech outlet Tom’s Hardware ran with it, reporting that Russian disinformation bot traffic had been nearly eliminated overnight. From there, the story snowballed. Claims emerged that online activity around Germany’s Alternative for Germany party, the US MAGA movement, and Britain’s Reform UK had collapsed. At the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself suggested that the strikes had made it “a little easier to breathe” on social media, with less hatred, division, and provocation because there were fewer bots. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared a chart showing AfD-related activity falling by thirty percent and then fifty-six percent, a claim that reached millions of views and was even repeated by the French daily Le Parisien. The problem was that the chart was measuring something entirely different. AS13238 is a network that Yandex itself identifies as belonging to its bots, but those bots are mostly search engine crawlers—programs that scan web pages to index them for search results, just like Google’s own crawler. They do not post on Twitter, leave comments on Facebook, or pretend to be humans in political discussions. When Yandex’s servers went down, its search crawler went down with them. Cloudflare’s head of Radar, Lai Yi Ohlsen, made this clear: “bot traffic” in the dashboard referred to automated requests to websites, not activity on social media platforms. Cloudflare’s own analysis found that YandexBot, the crawler, had fallen by ninety-nine percent on October 11 but quickly recovered to about eighty-five percent of normal levels. Malicious automation, meanwhile, did not disappear—it simply moved to other Russian hosting providers like Radist and Selectel. Russian-origin traffic to social media platforms fell by a negligible 0.6 percent, and automated “post,” “reply,” and “like” actions on one platform decreased by only 5.7 percent. The dramatic collapse was, in reality, a technical blip with a misleading label.
When independent researchers examined the specific claims about Western political debates, the story fell apart even further. Graphika, a firm that maps online communities and influence networks, tested the main viral assertions against its own data. On October 11, the day the Vladimir data center was shut down, AfD-related accounts published 40,365 posts from 1,022 accounts. A week earlier, they had published 42,040 posts from 1,037 accounts. That four percent dip was well within normal variation—the community’s Sunday activity had swung by as much as thirty-eight percent over the previous eleven weeks. The viral AfD chart also failed a basic sanity check: it showed no rise on September 6, when Saxony-Anhalt held a state election, even though real AfD activity had increased by forty-two percent that day. If the chart could not detect a genuine surge, its ability to measure a genuine collapse was doubtful. Mentions of MAGA on X actually rose by twenty-five percent in the hours after the Vladimir strike. A chart supposedly showing a collapse in mentions of Anthony Fauci was traced back to a spike caused by Senator Rand Paul’s release of Fauci’s diary entries the day before—without that context, the natural decline looked mysterious. Graphika even found that shifting the comparison window in popular Reddit tables by just a few hours could turn a fifty-four percent decline into a one hundred nine percent increase. German researchers reached the same conclusion. The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, known as CeMAS, said the AfD chart’s data could not be verified and was suspected to be AI-generated, though this remained unconfirmed. CeMAS director Josef Holnburger told ZDF that he saw no decline in Russian disinformation campaigns that could be explained by the strikes. The US-based monitoring group dTeam told BBC Verify that traffic from known Russian accounts and bot clusters had not changed on any platform, and that operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka remained fully active. Even Zelensky’s office later clarified that the president was referring to the general atmosphere on social media, not a measured drop in bot activity. The story had been a case of confirmation bias dressed up as data.
Similar claims spread among pro-Israel accounts, but they did not survive scrutiny either. Charts shared widely on Instagram and other platforms purported to show that posts containing “Free Palestine” had fallen from about seventy thousand a day to roughly thirty thousand, and that mentions of “genocide” had dropped from a peak of about two hundred eighty thousand. The implication was that Russian bots had been driving anti-Israel content, and that Ukraine’s drone strikes had somehow stopped them. Israeli media outlet Israel Hayom reported similar figures, and the story even made it to US cable television. But Jewish Breaking News, the account that posted the charts, eventually acknowledged that they counted keyword mentions, not Russian bots. The charts covered October 5 to October 11, a period that included the third anniversary of the October 7 attack—a date when mentions of Palestine and genocide naturally surge every year before falling back. Researchers also noted that at least some of the graphs ended on an incomplete day, which made the decline look steeper than it really was. Israel365 News, another outlet that had initially picked up the story, eventually concluded that the anti-Israel accounts had kept posting all along. The pattern was consistent: a dramatic claim that fit a desired narrative, wrapped in colorful charts, and repeated by people who wanted to believe it, regardless of what the underlying data actually meant.
That is not to say nothing happened. There were real declines in certain areas, but they were not the ones making headlines. Graphika found that Russian-language Telegram channels posted five to fifteen percent less in the two days after the Vladimir strike, while Ukrainian, Iranian, and Romanian channels showed little change. On Reddit, activity in r/askarussian, a forum where Russians answer questions from foreigners, fell after each of the three strikes, likely reflecting the broader internet disruption inside Russia. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation reported a sharper effect in its own information space. Using software called Osavul, it analyzed thousands of messages from accounts showing signs of inauthentic behavior in Ukraine’s information environment between October 6 and October 12. On October 8, messages fell from 4,032 to 660, and active accounts dropped from 1,526 to 258—a decline of about eighty-four percent. Activity recovered within two days and actually exceeded pre-strike levels by October 10 and 11. After the Vladimir data center shut down, messages fell again by 42.6 percent on October 12. The partial damage in Kaluga, however, did not coincide with any decline. These findings cover networks targeting Ukrainian audiences, not Western ones, and they make intuitive sense: if propaganda infrastructure is physically located in data centers that get bombed, there will be temporary disruptions. CeMAS also noted that it had not observed German-language activity from the Doppelgänger operation on X since October 9, though it cautioned that this could not yet be linked to the strikes. Leaked internal documents from Moscow’s Social Design Agency, the firm behind many Russian disinformation campaigns, contained links to Yandex Cloud, where screenshots of campaigns were stored. It was plausible, CeMAS said, that individual operations relied on Yandex services, but a complete shutdown of their activity across all platforms was unlikely. The strikes did expose a structural weakness in Russia’s digital infrastructure—because Russia has built a closed internet with no data centers abroad to fall back on, a few well-placed drones could cause outsized damage. After the second strike, Yandex was forced to make short-term agreements with competitors like VK Cloud, K2Cloud, and Selectel to move affected services and clients onto their systems. Western technology sanctions, meanwhile, made it harder to replace damaged equipment, especially GPUs. But the same episode also revealed a deeper vulnerability in how we consume information: Russian influence operations are real, well-documented, and constantly adapting, and that is precisely why fake claims about them are so dangerous. The Yandex story spread because it was comforting, because it offered a clean victory in a messy fight. But researchers recommend simple checks before sharing such claims: What does the chart actually count, and on which platform? Does it compare the same days and hours in earlier weeks? Did unrelated communities change by the same amount? In the end, the drones did damage, the outages were real, and some Russian propaganda operations were temporarily disrupted. But the viral claim that Ukraine had silenced Russian bots on Western social media was itself a kind of disinformation—not Russian this time, but the product of our own desire to believe that the enemy has been defeated, even when the evidence says otherwise.