Ukraine just took the fight to Russia’s servers, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes its attack knocked the Kremlin’s online smear operation for a loop.
Over four days, Ukrainian drones hit three data centers run by Yandex, the search-and-cloud giant often called Russia’s answer to Google. Automated traffic from the company’s network collapsed almost immediately. That fueled speculation that the bot armies Moscow has long used to push antisemitic conspiracies, bash Israel, and stir up chaos in American politics had suddenly lost their voice.
Zelensky, addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video Monday, said the change online was hard to miss: fewer bots, fewer provocations, less division.
“When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it,” he stated. “There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from – if they disappeared when Yandex went offline. This proves, again and again, that Europe is not the source of the problems. Europe is not the one making everything more difficult. Most importantly, we need people in America, every morning, when the day in Europe is already moving toward evening, to really see what is happening. To see the truth.”
The campaign opened overnight on October 7 in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, where a fire forced Yandex to shut the site down entirely. The facility held two of the three supercomputers the company uses to train its artificial intelligence. No injuries were reported.
On October 9, drones struck a second center in Kaluga, partially disabling it, Yandex said. Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point claimed its FP-1 long-range drones did the job. Two days later, Russian state media reported that the Vladimir facility east of Moscow, home to the third supercomputer, had been knocked out completely.
The numbers were stark. Cloudflare figures showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network sinking to just 0.4% of its recent high, and NetBlocks put Yandex Cloud traffic at roughly 30% of normal. Russians suddenly couldn’t hail cabs, pay bills, get deliveries, or run their smart-home devices, and the outages rippled into Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and beyond. By October 10, Yandex had slipped drone and missile strikes into the force-majeure fine print of its user agreements.
Moscow’s digital dirty tricks are real. French authorities partly blamed Russia’s Doppelgänger network for the 2023 uproar over Star of David graffiti in Paris. They found 1,095 linked bot accounts that fired off 2,589 posts on X in under two weeks. Kremlin-backed operations have also spun up fake American personas to inflame U.S. politics while trashing Ukraine and Israel.
Kyiv outlet Hromadske noted that Cloudflare’s “bot” numbers track automated web requests, including search-engine crawlers. They don’t count troll accounts on X or show what those accounts post.
Kyiv clearly dealt a heavy blow to Russia’s digital backbone. Whether it silenced the Kremlin’s troll farms is another question.
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