PARIS: Recent Ukrainian bombings of Russian data centres have drastically slashed the Kremlin’s online propaganda and disinformation activities, some Ukrainian allies and internet users said on Monday.
“The Russian troll bots in my own feed have dropped dramatically already,” exiled Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov told millions of followers on X.
Many internet users claim to have noticed a sharp reduction in social media content in favour of US President Donald Trump, Russia or the AfD, a German anti-immigration and pro-Russian party.
They say the reduction is a direct result of strikes against Russian data centres, which have cut off Russian “bots” — autonomous computer programmes used to disseminate large quantities of low-quality content, often in the form of propaganda and disinformation.
At the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius recommended such attacks to ensure the security of the forthcoming elections in his country and in Poland. “We should ask Mr Zelensky to strike more data centres in Russia; I think that might help,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s president.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky told the forum that since his country began targeting Russian data centres, “it has suddenly become a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms”.
Three attacks were reported last week against facilities belonging to Yandex — nicknamed the “Russian Google” — which has tens of millions of users for the country’s most popular search engine, as well as its food delivery and taxi-booking apps.
Internet traffic originating from Yandex fell around 35 per cent following an attack on the Sasovo site, then plummeted 99pc compared with a week earlier following the closure of the Vladimir site, according to Cloudflare Radar, which monitors and analyses internet traffic worldwide.
However, experts on Russian online propaganda say it is too early to establish such a cause-and-effect relationship.
“There is currently no evidence to support the claim that the attack on the data centres silenced the Kremlin’s ‘troll farms’,” Nikola Tulechki, a specialist in monitoring online disinformation operations for the organisation “Data for Good” said.
He said a widely shared Cloudflare graphic shows a drop in automated requests from a network controlled by Yandex to websites, and not from bots on social media.
The Antibot4Navalny collective, which tracks influence operations linked to Russia, also believes that the interpretation of the Cloudflare Radar charts is incorrect.
“To those implying that Kremlin-controlled social media bot/troll farms became silent after Ukraine hit a Yandex data center: Hate to disappoint you all,” it posted on X.
Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2026
