Ukrainian military drone attacks have severely damaged three of Yandex's six data centers, disrupting Russia's tech ecosystem, according to a Financial Times report. The strikes center on one vast, state-aligned company that runs much of Russia's online infrastructure.
The campaign drew global attention after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the operation had hurt Russia's disinformation efforts. But according to The Verge, the reality is more complicated — and the claims themselves may be a form of disinformation.
What the Yandex drone strikes actually hit
The attacks targeted data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia's dominant technology company. Three of its six data centers were severely damaged, per the Financial Times.
The strikes appear to have affected Yandex's web crawlers rather than any disinformation or political operations, The Verge reports. In other words, the infrastructure that indexes the web took a hit, but the machinery of state-sponsored trolling did not.
Bot farms keep trolling after Ukraine's Yandex strikes
Zelenskyy claimed the strikes made social platforms feel calmer. "It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms," he said Monday. "There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations."
The data doesn't back that up yet. The account antibot4navalny, which tracks state-sponsored troll farms, reported that bot traffic is steady as ever. On the same day as Zelenskyy's remarks, it said several Kremlin-aligned accounts posted videos falsely claiming experts want the European Union to lift sanctions on Russia.
Danish analyst Valedmar Osted said interactions on MAGA and AfD accounts have actually increased since the strikes. Charts purportedly showing a decline in bot activity appear to be AI-generated, The Verge notes.
