Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?

Key points

• Ukraine has struck three of Yandex's five data centres since 8 October.
• Experts told BBC Verify there is no evidence the strikes reduced Russian bot networks.
• Viral claims of a drop in bot activity came from a misinterpretation of Cloudflare data.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres have not significantly reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks, experts told BBC Verify. Ukraine has hit three of Russian tech giant Yandex's five data centres since 8 October, in response to Moscow's attacks on Ukrainian internet hubs.

A strike on Thursday caused Yandex, often called Russia's Google, to say it was struggling to maintain its services. Claims that the attacks cut Russian disinformation operations spread widely online, but researchers say there is no evidence for them.

What researchers found

The viral claims appear to come from a misinterpretation of data from tech firm Cloudflare. Some users shared charts showing bot activity on Yandex's network had declined. Cloudflare said its data covers all automated internet requests to websites on its network, including bots that crawl sites for information, and that the drop was "not necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms".

Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group tracking Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been "any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform". They added that if the offices of known groups involved in these operations "were in flames then we would see a change". Bots linked to pro-Kremlin operations Storm-1516 and Matryoshka were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify shows.

If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets.

— Tomáš Zdechovský

What officials said

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday there was "less hate, less division and fewer provocations" online because of "fewer bots". His office told BBC Verify he was "talking about the atmosphere on social media" rather than a fall in bot activity, and said it had seen "reports of fewer provocative and hateful comments" from many users.

Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shared a post on X, viewed more than four million times, saying: "If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets." He has since said he "did not present it as a clear fact", but the post remains pinned to his profile.

Impact on internet services

Independent internet analyst Mikhail Klimarev told BBC Russian that Cloudflare can establish whether bots or real people visited a website but does not reflect what those bots are doing. He said Yandex uses bots to "essentially crawl the entire internet once a day" to index sites for search, so it most likely switched these off as its computing resources were severely degraded.

Isik Mater, research director at the internet monitoring group Netblocks, told BBC Verify the disruptions "affect all users" globally and that "websites which rely on Yandex may be partially or entirely unusable". She said an entire area remaining "out of service indicates a significant infrastructure-level incident rather than a brief service interruption".