Pro-Ukrainian channels report that after Ukrainian Armed Forces strikes on Yandex data centers in the US and Europe, the activity of pro-Russian troll bots has dropped. This news is a fake.
Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski wrote on the social network X that after Ukrainian Armed Forces strikes on Yandex data centers, the activity of pro-Russian troll bots on social networks decreased. According to his claim, there are fewer “Polish” accounts opposing Ukrainians and “Ukrainian” ones that “harass” Poles. In addition, he claimed a sharp drop in support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the MAGA movement associated with US President Donald Trump. He backed up his post with a diagram and a phrase about a “derussified internet,” adding that he awaits further measurable results of the sudden decline in support for Gaśniczakokacapów, AfD, Trump and so on.
The diagram was originally published on X by Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský. His post said: if the information is confirmed, it will mean that Russian data processing centers have suffered damage, and online activity around the AfD has suddenly dropped sharply. He also ironically remarked that much is said about German patriotism, but then the connection with Russia weakens. At the same time, his publication did not mention bots at all.
Then this information began to spread on social networks and in the media. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also commented on the topic. Speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum, he said that after the strikes on Yandex data centers, “on many social media platforms it suddenly became easier to breathe,” since there were fewer bots. According to him, it is clear where these bots came from, if they disappeared when Yandex stopped working.
Later, Tomáš Zdechovský admitted that he does not know who exactly compiled the diagram he published. He said the post initially appeared on Threads (owned by Meta, which is recognized in Russia as extremist and banned) and spread widely across social networks. Although the original source remained unknown, the content seemed interesting to them, and they shared it. Zdechovský explained that he posted the diagram to check whether experts or data analysts could confirm this information.
The popular Polish web portal and information security company Niebezpiecznik.pl noted that the graph looks strange: on October 11 it shows data for October 15. Specialists suggested it could have been created by artificial intelligence.
At the same time, analysts from the Polish state research institute and data operator NASK stated that they see no connection between the mentioned attacks and a decrease in the activity of accounts spreading disinformation. Paulina Ziewar from NASK, in an interview with Interia, noted that the activity level of accounts on the social network X, which are under constant observation due to their disinformation activity, was analyzed. The analysis covered data from September 30 to October 11, 2026. It turned out that the decrease in traffic was primarily related to the indexing of sites by robots, and not to accounts spreading disinformation on Polish social networks.
According to experts, the results “do not indicate a significant decrease in the overall activity of monitored accounts after the three attacks on Yandex data centers that occurred on October 8, 9 and 11.” Only the cessation of activity of individual accounts is reported. However, analysts note that there is no clear evidence linking these events to the attacks in question. A temporary decrease in the number of automated phishing attacks using Yandex infrastructure is possible, but this does not lead to a significant reduction in the spread of disinformation in the Polish information space, the specialists indicated.
In addition, the research center Res Futura, which analyzes trends in social networks, particularly related to disinformation, reported that monitoring data from the rusnet network, covering about 500 accounts, does not unequivocally confirm a decrease in activity in the sphere of information dissemination due to damage to #ЯндексКлассУикенд infrastructure.
After the publication of unreliable data, the popular Polish financial and economic web portal Wyborcza.biz apologized to readers for the false information. The editorial board stated: “Initially in the text we quoted military expert Jarosław Wolski. However, he retracted his words about a decrease in Russian disinformation. On behalf of the Wyborcza.biz editorial board, we apologize to readers for misleading them.”
Cloudflare Radar data show that after the attacks, the number of automatic HTTP requests from the Yandex network did indeed drop sharply. The graph displays precisely the drop in traffic of Yandex AS — the company’s legitimate automated and AI traffic. It is generated by official search crawlers, AI assistants and the company’s internal systems and does not serve as proof of a mass shutdown of “propaganda bots.” According to this data, after the attack on the night of October 7–8, automated traffic fell to about 49.8 percent of the maximum of autonomous system AS13238. The graph shows that traffic from this AS is almost entirely bots: Bot — 99.6 percent, Human — 0.4 percent. These are mainly crawlers, AI bots and Yandex’s own automated traffic, and not “social network” bots.
As Niebezpiecznik.pl notes, this is not about bots that “write nonsense” on social networks on behalf of fake accounts. It recalls that Cloudflare Radar defines bot traffic as “any traffic generated by non-humans on a website or in an app.” It may include bots used to scan web pages for the purpose of sending spam or hacking accounts, as well as scanner bots used by search engines. “Simply put, such bots ‘crawl’ websites and scan content, indexing it. After all, it’s not for nothing that Yandex is sometimes called the ‘Russian Google,'” explains Adam Gąsiorowski, an IT systems specialist.
IT specialist Roman Fedoseev, in turn, pointed out that in reality this concerns Yandex search bots, which simply index the internet, like any other search engines. “All of this, of course, has millions of views. And all the numerous fact-checking projects are silent, it’s apparently not so interesting for them to expose the obvious fake from this side, and even in the Twitter community notes they failed to get a corrective label to appear,” he remarked.
