Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October. Network data do show Yandex’s automated traffic collapsing after the strikes. Disinformation researchers say that traffic is search crawling, not trolls. A Ukrainian social media monitor told Euromaidan Press its own data show no clear drop in bot activity either.

Russian influence operations are a live threat to European votes. In August, the Matryoshka network fabricated news clips aimed at Sweden’s general election. German and French authorities flagged the same network targeting Germany’s local votes and French presidential hopeful Gabriel Attal. A way to switch such networks off would hand allies a new tool, which is why the claim needs testing.

The president’s claim

Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video link, Zelenskyy said that once Ukraine began answering Russia’s operation against Ukrainian data centers and its strikes reached Yandex, many social media platforms suddenly became a little easier to breathe on.

Many people noticed less hatred, discord, and provocation because there were fewer bots, he said. It was quite clear where those bots came from, he noted. Their disappearance once Yandex went down proves again that Europe is not the source of the problems, he added.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said at the same forum that allies should ask Zelenskyy to strike more data centers in Russia, answering a question on how to protect their elections from interference.

Three data centers in four days

Drones first hit Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, on 8 October. Yandex said it shut the site down completely. The next day, a strike on its Kaluga site completely disabled several modules, the company said. Yandex calls Kaluga its largest data center, Russian science outlet T-Invariant noted.

Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 long-range drones carried out that strike.

After the first strike, on Sasovo, a source at Yandex summed up the mood for The Bell: “Things are rotten. We keep working.”

Overnight on 11 October, drones hit the third site, in Vladimir. Yandex said it fully halted that data center too. Vladimir Oblast Governor Aleksandr Avdeev acknowledged an attack on “infrastructure” near the city. It started a fire and cut power to two substations serving 5,000 residents, he claimed.

What the traffic data show

Automated web requests from Yandex’s network fell to 0.4% of their two-week peak after the third strike, Cloudflare Radar data showed, Cybernews reported. That chart counts automated requests to websites, mostly from Yandex’s own search crawlers. It does not count social media posts.

The chart “has nothing to do with social media,” the Russian opposition analysis group Antibot4navalny wrote.

Russia’s overall bot traffic last week looked much like any other week. Yandex’s own figure began recovering on Sunday. Covert troll farms usually hide behind residential proxies, hacked devices, virtual private networks (VPNs), and Western cloud providers, the outlet added.

What Ukrainian social media shows so far

Yevhen Luzan tracks Ukrainian social media sentiment as an analyst at the Ukrainian nonprofit CAT-UA. Its daily reviews sample about 500 random posts. On 11 October, that sample showed an unusually small share of posts criticizing Ukraine’s authorities, he told Euromaidan Press. Accounts showing signs of bot activity made up only a few tenths of a percent of that criticism. That is within the margin of error.

The same day, though, US President Donald Trump’s deal for Russian diesel supplies dominated Ukrainian feeds. Luzan said a rally-around-the-flag effect could explain the shift, as outrage at Washington crowded out domestic stories.

“To state it definitively and draw a cause-and-effect link from this correlation would be too bold,” he said.

Across the wider pool of about 10,000 daily mentions, CAT-UA sees no significant drop in posting activity in recent days. The curve shows only the usual rises and dips around the start and end of the week, Luzan said.

“For now, even a hypothetical drop in bot farm activity dissolves entirely in the natural fluctuations of the information space,” he said.

How a crawler chart became a bot story

The claim that Russian social media bots fell by half is unproven and built on a misread chart, disinformation analyst Joohn Choe concluded in a fact-check. It traces back to an 8 October post by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. That post said Russian bot traffic had dropped to 49%. On 11 October, radio reporter Jamie Dupree spread it on X. Tom’s Hardware then ran it under a headline calling the crawler traffic “Russian disinformation bot traffic,” wording it has since changed.

Ukrainian military analyst Tatarigami claimed that Texas separatist accounts with identical “Veteran, Christian, Father, MAGA” bios had gone quiet. He said Quebec separatists and Polish anti-EU accounts went quiet alongside them.

Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski claimed that AfD’s online support fell 56%, posting a chart without naming its source. Another X user said “Polish” bots had vanished.

Drones struck a plant making fuel components for Russia's Kh-101 cruise missiles and a second Yandex data center overnight on 9 October, Russian officials and monitoring channels reported. The same night, fires were reported at a refinery in Russia's far north and an oil depot near Belgorod. Russia claimed it downed more than 500 drones, and Ukraine has not claimed any of the strikes.

Ukraine has spent months hitting refineries and arms suppliers deep inside Russia. Russia, meanwhile, keeps firing Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities, including the one that killed 22 people in Pryluky on 7 October.

The plant behind the Kh-101's fuel

The Redkino Experimental Plant in Tver Oblast came under attack overnight, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. It said the plant makes components of Decilin-M, a fuel for Kh-55 and Kh-101 cruise missiles, as well as additives for diesel and aviation kerosene.

Tver Oblast Governor Vitaly Korolev claimed a plant in Redkino caught fire as a drone attack was being repelled. He did not name the plant. No workers were hurt, he said.

The plant also makes ferrocene derivatives, which serve as burn catalysts in solid-fuel rocket motors, Militarnyi reported. The UK sanctioned it in September 2025. Drones attacked it in September 2023 and twice in one night in June 2024, the outlet said.

In February, drones of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) Alpha unit struck the plant, sparking a large fire, SBU sources told Kyiv Post. The Kh-101 is the missile Russia used against Pryluky on 7 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Yandex loses a second data center

Part of Yandex's data center in Kaluga was damaged in the drone attack, and several modules were completely knocked out, the company's press service told Interfax, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. Some Yandex services may run with interruptions, no one was hurt, and the company is still assessing the damage, Yandex said.

Kaluga Oblast Governor Vladislav Shapsha claimed nine people were injured in the overnight attack on the region. A day earlier, a drone attack forced Yandex to fully shut its data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast.

A refinery in the north, a depot near Belgorod

Locals reported an attack on the Ukhta refinery in the Komi Republic, followed by a fire, Exilenova+ said. The Lukoil-owned plant can process about 4.2 million metric tons of oil a year, making gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and vacuum gasoil. The extent of the damage is unclear.

An oil depot north of Belgorod was also burning after the night's attack, the channel posted. Belgorod's regional headquarters claimed two people were killed and four injured, including a child, in the Belgorod district.

A large fire also broke out in Pushkino near Moscow, likely at a truck parking lot, Astra reported. The cause is unknown.

Repeated strikes on Redkino target a specialty fuel that Russia's cruise missiles depend on, while two Yandex data centers hit in two nights bring the war to services ordinary Russians use every day.

A drone attack overnight on 8 October caused a fire that hit part of Yandex's data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, about 580 km from Ukraine, and the site is fully stopped, the Russian tech company told Russian media. The data center sits on the grounds of Sasta, a sanctioned machine-tool plant, Russian outlet Astra said, citing Wikimapia data. Astra's OSINT analyst found from eyewitness footage that the fire hit the plant.

Since late September, Russia has been striking data centers in Kyiv that keep Ukraine's internet and online services running. Now a drone attack has stopped one of the data centers that Russia's largest tech company relies on.

Yandex counts the damage

Yandex warned that some services may be unavailable, while its core services kept running and no one was hurt. Ryazan Oblast Governor Pavel Malkov claimed two drones were downed, a roof caught fire at an enterprise in the Sasovo district, and windows were blown out in several homes.

The power failure took down a wide range of Yandex Cloud infrastructure, including computing capacity, networks, data storage, databases, Kubernetes, cloud services, AI, and security and monitoring systems, Ukrainian outlet ZN.ua reported, citing Exilenova+.

Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported that the plant was hit, without naming an attacker. The channel said Sasta, which claims a place on Russia's register of defense-industry companies, makes computer-controlled machine tools, including five-axis machining centers, and previously supplied the Tactical Missiles Corporation (KTRV) and Roscosmos. The plant's value to the arms industry lies in machines that cut precision parts, not in finished weapons, the channel said.

Citing Exilenova+, Militarnyi reported that Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the plant. It also linked Sasta to Iskander missile supply chains. No source has said whether the plant or the data center was the target, and no Ukrainian official has claimed the Sasovo strike. Sasta has been under US sanctions since November 2023, UK sanctions since February 2024, and Ukrainian sanctions since April 2025, a sanctions database shows.

Salavat: Kyiv reports a hit

Ukrainian forces hit the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat complex in Bashkortostan, about 1,380 km from the front line, causing a fire, Ukraine's General Staff said. It said the complex processes up to 10 million metric tons of hydrocarbons a year and serves Russia's armed forces. Its key unit, the ELOU-AVT-6 primary oil refining unit launched in 2012, can process 6 million metric tons a year, Militarnyi reported. Astra's analyst placed the fire a few kilometers outside Salavat, possibly near the refinery.

Salavat Mayor Marat Zagidullin claimed that debris from several drones fell in the industrial zone that morning and started a fire.

"The enterprise continues to work," he said.

Astra noted earlier hits on the complex on 24 September 2025, on 14 July 2026, when refining fully stopped, and on 13 August 2026.

Russia's strikes on Ukraine's data centers

Russia has repeatedly hit data centers in Kyiv since 23 September. Strikes hit the COSMONOVA data center twice, the second time knocking it out, and the Parkovyi data center stopped working completely on 1 October after a series of strikes. In early October, Russia destroyed the dline.ua data center in Kyiv.