Ukrainian drones damaged the data centers of Russia’s ‘Yandex’, and soon social media buzzed with talks of the disappearance of Russian bots. In Poland, there were reports of a reduction in anti-Ukrainian provocations, in Germany, discussions about decreased activity around AfD, in the USA, they counted Trump’s reposts, and in Israel — publications against Israel. Evidence of a mass shutdown of propaganda networks has not yet been found. But the reaction was as remarkable as the strikes themselves: in different countries, the assumption of the Russian origin of hate campaigns was not so much surprising as it was welcomed. Behind this lies the accumulated ‘distrust’ towards Putin’s Russia, for whom the war has long gone beyond Ukrainian territory.
Author: Elena Gunko, NANews — Nikk.Agency
October 14, 2026 | International Study
When on October 11, 2026, graphs of a sharp drop in Yandex’s automated traffic appeared on the internet, many saw in them an almost ready explanation for what was happening in their own social networks.
Ukrainian drones hit Russian data centers — and, judging by user stories, there were fewer aggressive commentators. Some noticed a lull among accounts that regularly attacked Ukrainians. Others talked about unexpectedly weak support for American and European political publications.
In Israel, there were also observations: allegedly, the number of messages with the slogan Free Palestine and accusations of genocide sharply decreased.
The reaction was indicative. In different countries, users eagerly shared such messages, sometimes with satisfaction and mockery towards Russian propaganda.
But was the real infrastructure of political bots destroyed? Or did people see on technical graphs what they were already ready to believe?
And why did suspicion almost immediately fall on Russia in almost all these stories?
Three strikes that disrupted the work of the Russian tech giant
On October 8, 2026, Ukrainian drones attacked a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region, approximately 350 kilometers from Moscow.
A fire broke out at the site. The company reported equipment damage and the shutdown of the site.
On October 9, a strike followed on a facility in the Kaluga region. The Ukrainian company Fire Point claimed the involvement of its long-range drones FP-1.
On October 11, reports of an attack came from the Vladimir region, where another Yandex data center is located.
Within four days, three major computing sites of the Russian company were affected.
As Reuters reported on October 9, Yandex confirmed the complete shutdown of Sasovo and partial damage to the Kaluga infrastructure. The recovery timelines remained uncertain.
Sasovo attracted special attention. According to previously published company information, it housed two of Yandex’s three most productive supercomputers used for artificial intelligence development.
The equipment included Nvidia A100 graphics processors used for complex computations and training large language models. Russia’s access to such technologies is limited by sanctions.
However, reliable information about the destruction of the supercomputers themselves was not available by October 14. Damage to the data center does not necessarily mean the physical loss of all the equipment installed in it.
Yet the consequences for everyday life were immediately noticeable.
Taxis, payments, mail: what really stopped working
Yandex services are deeply integrated into the Russian digital economy. The company provides not only a search engine but also cloud computing, transportation applications, payment tools, and services to thousands of other enterprises.
After the attacks, there were disruptions in the operation of Yandex Cloud, taxi applications, commercial platforms, and electronic payments.
Among the affected resources were mentioned real estate sites Cian, the book platform Litmarket, and individual sports services.
The developer of the dating app Pulse told Reuters that about eight thousand users lost access to the service. Recovery was complicated by the dependence of backup data on cloud infrastructure.
The Financial Times on October 14 described disruptions with email, taxis, payments, and electronic access systems in buildings. The problems also affected Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, where Russian company services are widespread.
On October 13, the Kremlin acknowledged the problems at Yandex.
This damage does not require assumptions about bots. Ukrainian attacks indeed revealed the dependence of many digital services on a relatively small number of large computing centers.
But the other part of the story turned out to be more complicated.
Where did the reports of the mass disappearance of bots come from
After the attacks, the Polish digital security project Niebezpiecznik drew attention to unusual changes in Cloudflare Radar — an internet traffic monitoring system.
On the graphs, the automatic activity associated with Yandex sharply decreased.
According to data later provided by Israeli N12, on October 11, the decrease was approximately 94% relative to the average level of the second half of September.
In individual measurements, the indicators approached almost zero compared to previous highs.
Users began spreading these graphs along with messages about the disappearance of Russian troll factories.
The technical problem lay in the word ‘bot’.
Cloudflare accounts for automatic requests created by various programs. Among them is YandexBot, a search robot that crawls sites and collects information for indexing.
It can send a huge number of requests unrelated to political comments.
The disappearance of such traffic confirms a failure in the search infrastructure. But the search robot is not an account that argues about the war in Ukraine or publishes messages about Donald Trump.
The Verge established that the overall automatic activity of Russian origin did not show a comparable collapse.
Nevertheless, the story had already begun to live its own life. Users found signs of the alleged lull in various political conflicts.
Poland, Germany, USA: each country found its own disappeared bots
In the Polish and Ukrainian segments of X, there were discussions about the reduction in activity of accounts that regularly fueled mutual hatred.
Some allegedly spoke on behalf of Poles outraged by aid to Ukraine. Others portrayed Ukrainians insulting Polish society.
These provocations fell on sensitive ground.
Although Poland remains an important partner of Ukraine, historical contradictions persist between the two countries, particularly around the mass killings of the Polish population of Volhynia in 1943. To these are added modern economic disputes over agricultural trade.
Such topics are convenient for external interference: organizers do not have to invent a conflict, just amplify an existing one.
However, verified statistics of the mass disappearance of such accounts after October 11 are not yet available.
In Germany, there were discussions about the alleged drop in activity around AfD — the Alternative for Germany party, which opposes several directions of migration policy and criticizes aid to Ukraine.
A graph with a 56% decrease was circulating online.
On October 14, Deutsche Welle published a review and found serious discrepancies: the origin of the data was not established, and the presented statistics did not confirm the claimed conclusion.
In the USA, users reported a decrease in activity around MAGA — the Make America Great Again movement of Donald Trump. Observations appeared about fewer messages from supporters of Texas independence.
The account MalcontentmentT spread a claim about a 37% reduction in reposts of one of Trump’s statements.
The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom provided an even more impressive figure: views of publications by American commentator Tucker Carlson allegedly fell from about a million to 300 thousand — almost 70%.
Carlson is known for criticizing American aid to Ukraine and sharp political statements, including about Israel.
However, independent verification of these indicators is absent. The time of publication, the content of messages, and the duration of measurement could vary significantly.
All these stories were united not by confirmed technical connections, but by the same explanation: perhaps Russian operators stopped providing the usual volume of activity.
And many users liked this explanation.
Israel: unexpected lull around Free Palestine?
On October 13, the topic was picked up by Israeli media.
Journalist Asaf Rosenzweig on N12 and the newspaper Israel Hayom examined graphs from a user on X named Ohio Rob.
According to these publications, the number of uses of the expression Free Palestine allegedly decreased from 70 thousand to 35 thousand per day, and the word Genocide — from 280 thousand on October 7 to 150 thousand on October 11.
Simultaneously, mentions of Zelensky allegedly increased from 30 thousand to 260 thousand.
For the Israeli audience, it is easy to see a possible connection with information campaigns around the war in Gaza.
After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war, disputes about Israel became one of the constant topics of international social networks.
But there is a circumstance without which such graphs cannot be interpreted.
Free Palestine is used by real political activists, and the word Genocide appears both in accusations against Israel and in publications disputing these accusations.
Criticism of the Israeli government is not necessarily anti-Semitism, and the use of a certain slogan does not prove the author’s involvement in a Russian information operation.
Moreover, N12 found a methodological error: some graphs compared full days with an unfinished day.
Such a comparison can artificially increase the supposed drop in activity.
Israeli internet researcher Revital Solomon, whose opinion was cited by Mako, also explained that the drop in search robot traffic cannot be transferred to political accounts.
This does not mean that foreign information operations do not use the Middle Eastern theme. But a specific network needs to be established through technical connections and coordination, not by the coincidence of the time of slogan appearances.
Zelensky saw changes — researchers checked
On October 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Warsaw Security Forum drew attention to the alleged decrease in activity of Russian bots after the strikes.
In his assessment, there was less hatred, provocations, and attempts to divide people on social networks.
The statement received wide distribution, although the president did not present a technical study linking specific information networks to the affected sites.
On October 13, the head of the company Valent, Amil Khan, told The Guardian that specialists are monitoring about 40 information influence networks in different countries and have not detected a significant change in their activity.
On October 14, information from the Ukrainian company LetsData appeared.
Its co-founder Ksenia Ilyuk told Euromaidan Press that the Russian networks being studied continued to publish as usual.
Among them were accounts spreading fake materials from the German Die Welt and the Ukrainian Ukrinform, including messages about mobilization.
Such operations often use the Doppelgänger method — a ‘double’, where a site that looks similar to a well-known media outlet is created to spread prepared messages.
The antibot4navalny project also continued to record pro-Kremlin information operations.
Researcher Waldemar Osted reported data contradicting assumptions about the disappearance of activity around MAGA and AfD.
LetsData specifically emphasized: the organization observes only part of the existing networks. It cannot be ruled out that some other systems were indeed affected.
But the claim of a mass halt of Russian propaganda operations has not yet been confirmed.
Where are the bots physically located and could they have operated in Yandex?
At first glance, the question is simple: where are the servers that send thousands of comments?
In practice, an automated information network can consist of several parts located in different countries.
The managing server stores tasks, schedules, account information, and publication results. Executive programs access social networks, and connections can go through proxies — intermediate nodes that transmit network traffic.
Therefore, the operator can be in Russia, the managing server — in a European data center, and the connection to the social network — through the IP address of another country.
Texts can be prepared by people, automatic templates, or artificial intelligence systems. For generating short messages, it is not necessary to have your own supercomputer: you can use external services or already trained models.
The accounts themselves are located in the infrastructure of the respective platforms — Meta, X, Google, or Telegram, and not necessarily on the equipment of their operators.
If the management program stops working, the account does not automatically disappear. It may simply temporarily go silent.
In Yandex Cloud, managing applications, virtual servers, databases, and publication automation programs could theoretically be hosted.
But even a proven dependence on Yandex Cloud would not mean that a specific program operated precisely on the affected site in Sasovo, Kaluga, or Vladimir. Cloud infrastructure can use backup computing nodes and distributed storage.
To confirm the connection, information about IP addresses, managing domains, cloud resources of specific networks, and their downtime would be needed.
Such public evidence is not available as of October 14.
That’s why the physical destruction of a data center can cause enormous damage to the digital economy, but not necessarily stop a distributed information operation.
Why the world so readily believed in the disappearance of Russian bots
Now we can return to the circumstance for which it is worth considering this whole story.
The charts turned out to be unreliable. Existing research observations did not confirm the mass disappearance of networks. But in different countries, the very idea that Russia was behind numerous provocations was perceived as quite plausible.
Where did such a readiness to believe come from?
Over the years of full-scale war against Ukraine, the Russian state has acquired a reputation as an aggressor, using not only military force but also informational tools against political opponents.
This is not an exclusively emotional characteristic that arose on social networks. Russian influence operations are being studied by European institutions, technology platforms, independent experts, and security services.
In the reports of the European External Action Service on FIMI — foreign information manipulation and interference — the mechanisms of dissemination and coordination of such campaigns are systematically examined.
Moscow is accused of using fake information resources, simulating public support, substituting sources, and attempting to exacerbate contradictions between states and political groups.
At the same time, it is important to distinguish between an established operation and the assumption of its existence. The accumulated reputation does not replace evidence in each new case.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the strikes on ‘Yandex’ shows how deep the distrust has become.
Polish users associated the incitement of hostility against Ukrainians with Russian networks. In Germany, there were suspicions of artificially increased political activity. In the USA, there was discussion about possible audience manipulation and support for individual commentators. In Israel, there was suspicion of Russian operators’ involvement in spreading anti-Israeli messages.
Different societies had different reasons for irritation, but the alleged source of interference turned out to be common.
It is also indicative of how quickly a technical failure turned into a reason for satisfied comments. People discussed not so much the stoppage of the search robot as the imagined possibility of getting rid of organized provocations for a few days.
The viral story told us not only about the state of the Russian internet. It told us about Russia’s reputation beyond its borders.
When the servers of one country stopped working, users in other countries began to look for signs of reduced political hatred. This very transition from a technical event to a public reaction deserves attention.
However, it would be incorrect to claim that the whole world unanimously shares such views. It is about a noticeable reaction of users and media in a number of countries, not a global public opinion survey.
Israel: why the absence of Russian missiles does not mean the absence of Russian informational risks
For Israel, this story has an additional dimension.
Russia does not wage such a direct war against it as it does against Ukraine. Diplomatic contacts with Moscow are maintained, and Israeli leadership has to consider regional interests, primarily related to Syria.
Therefore, Russia occupies a different place in the public Israeli security discussion than Iran, Hezbollah, or Hamas.
But informational threats are not necessarily accompanied by missile launches.
An international campaign can increase distrust, spread manipulative messages, use real political disagreements, and worsen the perception of the state by a foreign audience.
At the same time, it is not necessary to claim that all criticism of Israel is organized by Russia. Such a conclusion would be both unreliable and unfair to the real participants in political discussions.
NANews has already investigated a specific case of using Israeli diplomatic themes by Russian media. In Elena Gunko’s article on the statement of the Israeli embassy in Moscow, it is shown how a published diplomatic comment was presented by Russian publications as a direct condemnation by Israel of the reburial of Yevhen Konovalets in Ukraine, although the quoted statement did not contain such an assertion.
Similar work with real facts and false conclusions is visible in NANews’ investigation of the Russian fake about Ukrainian biolabs.
NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency considers such cases in the broader context of relations between Israel, Ukraine, and the international information environment.
The question is not whether Israeli intelligence services are aware of such threats. Without access to closed assessments, this cannot be determined.
The question is different: does Russian informational influence occupy a sufficiently noticeable place in Israel’s public security policy?
A state may not shell Israeli cities and simultaneously participate in informational actions, the consequences of which affect Israeli interests.
And this risk cannot be excluded just because relations with Moscow are maintained at a diplomatic level.
What Ukrainian strikes actually achieved
From a practical point of view, the result of the attacks is quite definite.
Large Russian computing sites were damaged. The operation of important commercial and technological services was disrupted. The dependence of the Russian digital economy on the infrastructure of one company was revealed.
With the supposed disappearance of political bots, it’s different.
Some viral charts turned out to be unreliable, others measured the activity of search programs. Researchers LetsData, Valent, and antibot4navalny did not find a large-scale stoppage of the Russian information networks they observed.
It cannot be ruled out that some automated systems indeed lost access to their servers. But it has not yet been possible to assess their number and establish a connection with specific Ukrainian strikes.
As a result, a rather unusual situation has arisen.
The Ukrainian operation had confirmed technological consequences for Russia. And the international reaction that accompanied it revealed another problem — a huge credit of distrust accumulated around Russian activities in the information space.
In Ukraine, Putin’s Russia has long been perceived through destroyed cities and war. In other countries, its influence is often discussed through informational campaigns, political provocations, and interference in public conflicts.
And when the assumption arose that part of such campaigns might have suddenly gone silent, many perceived this with obvious satisfaction.
Here lies the boundary between fact and public sentiment.
Ukrainian drones did not prove that all accounts suspected by users were controlled from Russia. But the reaction to the strikes showed how widespread distrust of Russian informational operations is.
Perhaps this is the most unexpected result of the story with ‘Yandex’.
Not the disappearance of hatred from social networks — no one has proven that yet.
But the fact that in different countries, people were ready to associate the supposed lull with the damage to Russian infrastructure and even rejoice at it.
This is the kind of attitude towards itself that Putin’s Russia has been forming for years. It cannot be measured by a Cloudflare chart and cannot be corrected by restoring a data center.