Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres have fuelled claims that pro-Trump and European far-right activity suddenly dropped across social media.
According to Le Parisien , observers reported fewer right wing reactions on X after attacks disrupted three facilities belonging to Russia’s largest internet company. The apparent quiet prompted speculation that Russian infrastructure supplies a substantial amount of supposedly “home-grown” political enthusiasm.
The facilities were hit in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir, with the latest attack forcing the Vladimir centre offline on 11 October. The disruption affected Yandex services and third-party applications, giving the company far more pressing problems than an argumentative comments section.
Cloudflare measurements showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network collapsing, with reports putting it at roughly 0.4 per cent of its recent peak.
That dramatic graph quickly became evidence, in viral posts, that Ukraine had pulled the plug on Russia’s international political bot machine. Some users reported quieter pro-Trump discussions, while European claims focused on Germany’s AfD and Britain’s Reform UK.
Le Parisien reported a claimed 56 per cent decline in online support for AfD, citing comments from Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský. His assessment was conditional, and the article provided no reproducible dataset explaining how it measured that political activity.
The timing deserves investigation, particularly if identifiable political accounts disappeared together when the Russian facilities stopped operating.
The available network chart cannot establish that connection as Yandex operates a major search engine, making a collapse in crawler traffic an unsurprising consequence of damaged servers.
Russian influencers claim that it is nothing to do with the attack and that a widely circulated graph concerns Yandex’s automated web crawlers. They disputed its use as evidence of disappearing social media propaganda accounts, reporting that broader Russian bot and crawler traffic remained broadly normal.
Establishing that most right-wing conversations originate with Russian bots would require platform-level evidence that identifies accounts and measures their contribution before and after the attacks. However, a graph of automated web requests cannot provide those missing figures, however satisfying the proposed explanation might feel.
The Deep Dive noted that the same chart showed a substantial dip and recovery the week before the strikes. Its analysis found that the measurements could not distinguish disappearing influence operations from automated requests falling because servers stopped working.
