In brief
Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres, including Yandex hubs, were touted as crippling Russian influence bots. Social‑media posts and analysis by Cloudflare suggested bot traffic fell, but experts say the data refers to general web‑crawlers, not political bots. Teams tracking Moscow‑linked campaigns report no change in bot activity across platforms. Zelensky’s comments are interpreted as referring to fewer provocative comments, not a hard bot hit. The attacks nevertheless disrupted Russian internet services.
When President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainian airstrikes on Russian data centres had removed “fewer bots” from online influence campaigns, the claim spread through social media.
Analysts and journalists who track Kremlin‑linked disinformation – including long‑running BBC Verify reports – found no evidence that the strikes have disrupted the bot networks that push pro‑Russian narratives on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and X.
The confusion began with a Cloudflare chart that showed a drop in automated traffic to sites on the Yandex network after a strike. Cloudflare clarified that the metric covers all crawling bots, not political troll accounts, and the fall was not specific to social‑media bots.
Tracking groups such as dTeam, which monitors Moscow‑linked influence operations, noted that bot activity on accounts linked to Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka remained unchanged after the raids. “If the offices of known groups were in flames we would see a change,” a team spokesperson said.
Zelensky’s comments were interpreted by his office as referring to a quieter online climate rather than a mechanical reduction in bot traffic. Reports from net‑monitoring firm Netblocks confirm that the Yandex data‑centre strikes disrupted broader internet services nationwide, but do not indicate a coordinated hit on political bots.
The episode illustrates how high‑profile cyber‑attacks can be misread online, and underscores the importance of data context when assessing the impact of digital warfare.
