Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says online hate dropped after his country’s drones struck Russia’s largest tech company. Independent researchers have not yet confirmed or ruled out that claim.
Speaking to the Warsaw Security Forum on Oct. 12, Zelenskyy said that after Ukrainian strikes reached data centers owned by Yandex, there was “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots.” He said many people had noticed the change but did not cite specific data.
Ukrainian drones knocked three Yandex data centers offline between Oct. 8 and Oct. 11, Al Jazeera reported. Yandex, Russia’s largest tech company, runs the country’s top search engine along with cloud, payment and ride-hailing services. Zelenskyy described the strikes as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers.
What the data shows
The idea that Russian bots went quiet began circulating on Bluesky before Zelenskyy’s remarks. A user posted that bot traffic from Yandex’s network had dropped to nearly zero and suggested Twitter must now feel like a ghost town. The claim later spread to Instagram and other platforms.
That post relied on Cloudflare Radar, which tracks automated requests to websites. Because Yandex runs a search engine, some tech observers noted that much of that traffic likely comes from crawlers that index the web rather than accounts posting on X, Facebook or Instagram. The chart also doesn’t show who was behind the traffic or why.
Other research suggests a link is possible. A 2024 study by the Brussels think tank Bruegel found that reposts of pro-Kremlin accounts on X dropped during a brief nationwide Russian internet outage, which indicates some bot networks depend on Russian infrastructure. Other operations run fake accounts through thousands of SIM cards and proxy serversand may not rely on corporate data centers at all.
As of Oct. 13, no researcher or social media platform had published data measuring changes in online hate since the strikes.
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A familiar targeting of Black Americans
For Black Americans, the question carries particular weight.
In 2019, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russia’s Internet Research Agency targeted Black Americans more than any other group during the 2016 election. The St. Petersburg troll farm built fake pages posing as Black activists, including “Blacktivist,” which drew more Facebook likes than the verified Black Lives Matter page. Researchers working for the committee found the operation also tried to discourage Black voters from going to the polls.
Then-committee Chairman Richard Burr said Russia worked by exploiting existing divisions in American society. For many Black Americans, those divisions include police killings, voter purges and racist rhetoric, including hostility many say they’ve experienced from parts of the MAGA movement. Foreign trolls didn’t create those tensions, but the committee’s findings show Russia saw them as openings.
Whether Zelenskyy’s observation holds up may become clearer as researchers examine what happened online during the outages. Either way, the lessons of 2016 still apply as the midterms approach.
