Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?
Outage · 13 Oct 2026
Ukraine struck data centres belonging to Yandex, Russia's largest search engine, in the week beginning 8 October 2026, in what Kyiv described as a response to Moscow's attacks on Ukrainian internet hubs. Yandex acknowledged the strikes, and on Monday 12 October President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested they had made online life calmer. Researchers told the BBC and The Guardian that this conclusion is not supported by the evidence.
What's happening
According to BBC Verify, Ukraine has struck three of Yandex's five data centres since 8 October. The Guardian reports at least three airstrikes over the weekend. A second strike on Thursday led Yandex to announce it was struggling to maintain its services. Separate data from the internet company Cloudflare shows a marked decline in activity from bots on the Yandex network on 8 and 11 October — the dates of two of the strikes.
Those Cloudflare charts went viral online and were widely read as proof that Russian disinformation bots had gone silent. Experts say that reading is a misinterpretation.
Who's affected
The strikes have hit ordinary Russian internet users hardest. The independent Russian outlet Meduza reports that major banks, retailers and sports apps were down, along with Yandex services such as Yandex Go and Yandex Eats, and that full repairs could take months.
On disinformation specifically, the picture is murkier. Viral posts claimed a sharp drop in influence operations. "Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns," said Amil Khan, CEO of the startup Valent, which tracks about 40 disinformation networks worldwide. "Yandex datacentres have no practical connection to social media bot farms."
What to do about it
Internet infrastructure expert Michał 'Rysiek' Woźniak told The Guardian that "the term 'bot' can mean many different things." What Cloudflare measured, he said, was a drop in Yandex's web crawlers — software that indexes sites for search — not automated troll accounts.
Ned Mendez, head of research at Alliance4Europe, said serious bot operations run through distributed methods such as residential connections and phone farms, which airstrikes cannot knock out. "We can't simply bomb the bots out of existence, however appealing that might sound," he said. Khan suggested targeting firms linked to past operations, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency, as a more direct route.
Status
The claim that the strikes took down Russian disinformation bots is unconfirmed. Experts say there is no evidence of a significant drop in influence operations; the observed decline was in unrelated web-crawler traffic. Yandex has not said when its services will be fully restored.
Sources
- bbc.co.uk — "Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?" (BBC Verify)
- theguardian.com — "Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian datacentres reduce online disinformation?" (The Guardian)