Ukraine hits Yandex data centers; Zelensky claims fewer bots, hate speech online, but no evidence of a link

Ukrainian drones hit three data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex between October 8 and 11. As a result, President Volodymyr Zelensky now claims the strikes made social media a calmer place by knocking out bots.

The facilities were in the Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex, often called “Russia’s Google,” said operations at its Vladimir data center, east of Moscow, were completely suspended after Sunday’s strike, and that it was working to restore connectivity. No one was hurt.

The earlier strikes disrupted payment services, websites, trading platforms, the company’s AI chatbot and smart home devices, and Yandex said it was “very difficult to predict” when they would be back online. The Ryazan site houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to develop artificial intelligence.

Cloudflare Radar data showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network fell about 94% on Sunday compared with the second half of September. NetBlocks put the company’s cloud network connectivity at about 30% of normal levels and its main network at about 63%.

Kyiv said it was targeting sites that provide revenue for Moscow’s war machine and that repairs could force Russia to divert resources. Sunday’s strike came hours after US President Donald Trump warned Ukraine to “damn well stop” attacking Russia’s oil refineries so Moscow could release more diesel to the global market.

Speaking Monday at the Warsaw Security Forum, Zelensky tied the strikes to a change online. “When we started responding to the Russian operation against our data centers, and when our attacks reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social networks,” he said.

Zelensky claimed there was “less hatred, less division and less provocations, because there were fewer bots,” and suggested that if bot activity dropped when Yandex went down, it could point to where those accounts originated.

Users on X pointed to graphs showing fewer posts containing phrases such as “Free Palestine” and “Genocide” after the strikes, along with more mentions of Zelensky and fewer posts backing Germany’s AfD party. Some read it as proof that Russian bot farms were behind part of the anti-Israeli discourse online.

There is no independent evidence of that.

Some of the graphs covered a day that had not yet ended, so the drop may partly reflect fewer hours of data. Much of Yandex’s automated traffic also comes from web crawlers, which count as bot traffic but don’t spread political messages.

The strikes come as both sides step up attacks on infrastructure in a war now in its fifth year. Russia has also hit Ukrainian data centers, causing internet outages and prompting some firms to move their servers abroad.