The Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski stated on Monday, during his speech at the Warsaw Security Forum, that the attacks on Yandex data centers resulted in a noticeable reduction of hatred, division, and provocations on social media by eliminating thousands of bots linked to Russia.
"When our attacks reached the data centers of Yandex, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. Many people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots," the leader stated.
"It is quite clear where those bots came from: if they disappeared when Yandex went down, this proves time and again that Europe is not the source of the problems," Zelenski added on his social media.
The statements were made following a campaign of drone attacks that Ukraine carried out against three of Yandex's five data centers between October 8 and 11, targeting facilities in Sásovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir.
The Russian tech giant —often referred to as the Google of Russia— confirmed damages and operational disruptions in all three cases, impacting transportation services, payments, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
The attacks take place within a context of escalating tensions: on October 11, President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, but Moscow continued to bomb Ukrainian energy infrastructure in the following hours.
Ukraine, in response, redirected its attacks from Russian refineries to technological infrastructure such as Yandex data centers, partially fulfilling the spirit of the agreement while maintaining military pressure.
However, experts in disinformation consulted by BBC Verify questioned Zelensky's interpretation. Researchers from dTeam, a U.S. group that tracks influence operations linked to Moscow, stated that there was "no change in traffic on known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform." They added that if the offices of those groups "were on fire, we would indeed see a change."
The confusion, according to experts, lies in a crucial technical distinction: the Cloudflare data that circulated on social media measures the traffic of web crawling bots that Yandex uses to index the internet —which clearly declined as its infrastructure degraded— not the propaganda bots that operate on social platforms.
Cloudflare itself clarified that its figures include "all automated internet requests" and that the drop "is not necessarily bot behavior on social media platforms."
The independent analyst Mikhail Klimarev explained to BBC Russian that Yandex uses bots to "crawl the entire internet once a day" and index sites for its search engine, and that it likely disabled them upon noticing its computing resources were severely degraded.
The pro-Kremlin influence operations Storm-1516 and Matryoshka were still active on social media this Tuesday, according to evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam.
Zelenski's office later clarified that the president was "talking about the atmosphere on social media" and not about a measured decline in bot activity, adding that he had received "reports of fewer provocative and hateful comments" from many users.
The debate reflects a broader reality that Zelensky also emphasized in Warsaw: Russia has been refining its cognitive warfare machinery for over a decade, with millions of bots, paid influencers, and operations like the Storm-1516 network designed to radicalize Western societies, interfere in elections, and fuel cultural wars.
In the face of that threat, the Ukrainian leader made a direct appeal: "We need people in America to see what is really happening every morning, as the day in Europe moves towards the afternoon. They need to see the truth."
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