Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?

Ukrainian strikes on several of Yandex’s data centres prompted claims - repeated by President Volodymyr Zelensky and widely shared on social media - that Kremlin-linked bot networks had been substantially degraded. Cyber researchers and platform investigators counter that there is no evidence of a significant drop in Russian influence operations: groups that have long pushed pro-Kremlin narratives (including clusters labelled Storm-1516 and Matryoshka) remained active, and dTeam reported no change in traffic from known Russian accounts. Zelensky’s office said his remarks referred to a change in the “atmosphere” online rather than a confirmed collapse of bot activity.

Much of the viral attention came from a Cloudflare chart showing a sharp fall in automated HTTP requests from Yandex-linked IPs after the strikes. Cloudflare clarified those figures cover all automated web requests (including search-engine crawlers), not necessarily social-media bots, and independent analysts note Yandex runs large-scale crawlers that may have been shut down when its infrastructure was damaged. Ukraine has hit three of Yandex’s five data centres since 8 October, which has disrupted Yandex cloud services and affected many sites globally, according to internet monitors such as Netblocks. Yandex says its terms ban using its cloud for large-scale manipulation and that abusive accounts are blocked.