Ukraine's drone strikes on Yandex data centres have not been shown to disrupt Russian disinformation and influence operations on social media, despite viral claims to the contrary, disinformation researchers told the Kyiv Independent on October 13.

Ukraine hit data centres run by Yandex, Russia's largest internet company, in three regions between October 9 and 11 in response to Russian strikes on similar facilities in Ukraine. Yandex said its Vladimir region site had to be shut down and reported disruption to online services, and the company faces a six-month wait to replace the damaged capacity. Moscow is now considering deploying the military to protect such sites.

The talk of a collapse in Russian bot activity reached senior politicians. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Warsaw Security Forum it had become "a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms", and Polish minister coordinating the work of special services Tomasz Siemoniak said the ABW internal security agency had told him of a "radical decline in Russian bot activity online". No such data has been published.

Much of the confusion stems from a Cloudflare chart showing bot traffic from Yandex's network falling to 54.7% after the strike in Ryazan region and to 0.3% after the Vladimir site was hit. Those "bots" are automated web requests from Yandex's own infrastructure, mainly its search crawlers, and have nothing to do with trolls or fake accounts on social media.

"No reliable graph can consolidate bot and troll activity across multiple social media platforms without their internal data that measures telemetry, traffic, and behavior," said Roman Osadchuk, director of threat intelligence at Ukrainian tech company LetsData. He acknowledged a moderate weekend dip in posts and comments, by bots and real users alike, but called it a coincidence.

Poland's NASK Disinformation Analysis Center recorded no significant fall in activity by disinformation accounts between September 30 and October 11, the paper reported. A graph shared by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky that purported to link the strikes to a drop in online activity around Germany's far-right AfD party gave no source or methodology, according to German tech site Rohtext.

Russian influence campaigns rely heavily on proxies abroad, in countries such as North Macedonia and the Philippines, which strikes on servers in Russia would not touch, disinformation researcher Dave Troy said. "The danger is thinking a specific victory has been achieved, but in reality the threat lies elsewhere and must still be assessed and fought," he said.