Mike Elgan examines and rejects a widely shared story that Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian data centers - including Yandex facilities - effectively wiped out Russian disinformation operations ahead of U.S. midterms. The popular narrative ties those strikes to President Trump’s angry public complaints about Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries and credits the strikes with a dramatic drop in pro‑Russian posts: X users reported fewer such posts, a Cloudflare chart was circulated showing a 99% decline in Yandex traffic, and a Warsaw forum quote from Zelensky was cited as confirmation. Headlines claimed far‑right bot accounts “fell silent” after Ukraine crippled Russian data centers, framing Zelensky as scoring a geopolitical victory.
Elgan counters with concrete counterarguments: Ukrainian targeting of data centers was a response to repeated Russian attacks on Ukrainian power and data infrastructure, not retaliation for U.S. political pressure. The Cloudflare metric flagged as “bot traffic” primarily reflects search‑engine crawlers, not influence bots, and Yandex is not the main conduit for Kremlin influence operations. Those campaigns rely on residential proxies, compromised IoT devices, commercial VPNs and Western cloud hosts, so taking down Yandex nodes would not cripple them. The appealing three‑dimensional‑chess storyline is therefore compelling but incorrect; bot‑driven Russian influence efforts remain active.
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