No, Ukraine's strikes on Yandex data centers didn't cripple Russian influence ops

Ukrainian drone strikes against Yandex data centers in Russia did not cripple Russian influence operations, according to experts. The strikes, which occurred from October 9 to 11, 2024, resulted in a shutdown of the Yandex data center in Vladimir Oblast and disruptions to various online services within Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had also commented on the perceived decrease in Russian bots' activity online.

However, there is no data supporting the claim that the attacks on Yandex disrupted Moscow-backed disinformation and influence operations.

The confusion stems from a chart by Cloudflare showing a drop in bot activity from Yandex's network to 54.7% following a Ukrainian strike in Ryazan Oblast, and further to 0.3% after a strike in Vladimir Oblast. This chart, though, reflects automated web page requests from Yandex's own infrastructure, primarily its search crawlers, which are not related to activity by Russian bots or trolls on social media.

Roman Osadchuk, director of Threat Intelligence at the tech company LetsData, acknowledges a minor dip in social media comments and posts during the weekend after the strikes. However, he considers this to be a coincidence, possibly due to technical issues or lower output from the weekend shift at the troll/bot farms.

Major fact-checking organizations and disinformation-monitoring groups did not report a radical drop in Russian disinformation activity on social media after the strikes. While some European officials reported receiving exclusive information from Poland's internal security service about a decline in Russian bot activity, no such data has been published. Local disinformation monitors also reported no significant decrease in activity by disinformation accounts between September 30 and October 11 in Poland.

Striking Russian servers would not silence trolls, as Russian disinformation operates in decentralized networks of proxies abroad, not from Russian data centers. Some disinformation groups, such as Storm-1516, are likely neutral commercial engagement-for-hire providers rather than state-affiliated networks. Misstating the impact of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers could create a false sense of victory while the true threat remains unaddressed.