Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine

Ukrainian drone strikes in October 2026 hit three of Yandex’s five major data centers - Sasovo (Oct 8), Kaluga (Oct 9) and Vladimir (Oct 11) - disabling supercomputer modules and leaving dozens of Yandex Cloud services offline. Yandex handles roughly 70% of Russian search traffic and runs Alice, the browser assistant trained on those supercomputers; a 2026 study found Alice echoed Kremlin narratives in 86% of Russian-language answers. Leaked contractor documents and the Doppelganger network show deliberate efforts to poison AI training data with Kremlin talking points, and industry measures (Cloudflare’s automated-request counts) and user reports on platforms such as Facebook and Reddit registered sharp drops in pro-Kremlin automated posting after the strikes. Yandex Browser has about 71 million monthly users, and the Sasovo machines are central to producing the AI outputs that feed both domestic audiences and the datasets chatbots scrape worldwide.

Those technical hits matter politically: U.S. intelligence found a Kremlin-authorized covert online campaign targeting the 2026 midterms and specific Democratic Senate candidates, and research shows a small number of accounts spread the bulk of election misinformation. Meanwhile, U.S. counter-disinformation infrastructure was pared back in 2024-25, limiting monitoring. By taking out servers located inside Russia, Ukraine directly degraded an infrastructure that trains and distributes propaganda domestically and abroad, delivering a strategic blow to Putin’s narrative-control capabilities and to networks used to influence foreign elections.