Ukrainian strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers were followed by a dramatic decline in automated online activity, raising questions about whether the attacks may also have disrupted Moscow’s influence operations abroad.
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The sudden drop fueled speculation in Europe and the United States about how much of the political debate on social media might have been driven by Russian bots.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy weighed in on Monday, saying social media platforms had become noticeably less hostile.
“When we started reacting to Russian operations against our data centers and when our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy said at the Warsaw Security Forum.
“A lot of people, a lot of people noticed it, and there was less hatred, less division and less provocation because there were fewer robots.”
“And it’s pretty clear where these robots came from,” he added.
“If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, it proves once again that Europe is not the source of the problems.”
“It’s not Europe that’s making things more difficult,” he said.
Three data centers targeted
Three data centers operated by Yandex, often described as the Russian equivalent of Google, have been hit by Ukrainian drone strikes in recent days.
The facilities were located in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, in the Kaluga region, southwest of Moscow, and in the Vladimir region, east of the Russian capital, where the latest strike was reported on Sunday.
The attacks damaged the company’s infrastructure and disrupted services. Yandex confirmed that operations at its Vladimir facilities had been suspended following a drone strike.
“As a result of a drone attack, the infrastructure of the Vladimir data center was damaged,” the company said in a statement published on Telegram.
“Data center operations have been completely suspended. Remaining infrastructure resources are unstable and the platform is down.”
According to an analysis of Cloudflare Radar data, automated traffic from the Yandex network fell about 94% on Sunday compared to its average levels in the second half of September.
However, the figures also include legitimate automated traffic, such as search engine bots, and do not establish whether Kremlin-linked social media bots were affected.
Political repercussions in Europe and the United States
In Germany, claims of a sharp drop in online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party circulated widely after the attacks, although no independently verified figures have been released.
Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský questioned the apparent coincidence between the disruptions and the reported decline in activity around the party.
“If confirmed, it is telling: Russian data centers are hit and online activity around the AfD suddenly collapses,” he wrote on X.
Similar claims emerged in Britain, where online activity associated with Reform UK also reportedly declined following the attacks.
In the United States, social media users reported fewer seemingly automated pro-conservative responses on X, the platform owned by Elon Musk.
The speculation has attracted the attention of prominent politicians and commentators, including right-wing activist and Donald Trump supporter Laura Loomer, Russian opponent and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia.
The debate comes just weeks before the U.S. congressional midterm elections in early November, amid long-standing concerns about foreign interference and the influence of automated accounts on political discourse.
Gn world
