Ukraine has just moved the fight to Russian servers, an attack that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes puts the Kremlin’s online smear campaign at risk.
Within four days, Ukrainian drones struck three data centers operated by Yandex, the search and cloud giant often called Russia’s Google. Automated traffic on the company’s network collapsed almost immediately. That fueled speculation that the robot army Moscow has long used to promote anti-Semitic plots, attack Israel and foment political chaos in the United States has suddenly lost its voice.
Speaking via video at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, Zelenskiy said changes on the Internet cannot be ignored: fewer bots, less provocations and less division.
“When we started responding to the Russian campaign against our data centers, when our attacks reached Yandex’s data centers, many social media platforms suddenly breathed a little easier. A lot of people took notice,” he said. “There is less hatred, less division, less provocation. Because there are fewer bots. And it is clear where these bots are coming from – if they disappear when Yandex is offline. This proves time and time again that Europe is not the source of the problem. Europe is not the place that makes everything more difficult. The most important thing is that we need the American people to really know the truth every morning, when things are already approaching evening in Europe.”
The campaign started on the night of October 7 in Sasovo, Ryazan region, where a fire forced Yandex to shut down the site completely. The facility houses two of the company’s three supercomputers used to train artificial intelligence. No injuries were reported.
On October 9, a drone struck a second center in Kaluga, partially paralyzing it, Yandex said. Ukrainian weapons manufacturer Fire Point claims its FP-1 long-range drone can accomplish this task. Two days later, Russian state media reported that the facility in Vladimir, east of Moscow, where the third supercomputer is located, was completely disabled.
The numbers are grim. Cloudflare data shows that automated traffic to the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of recent highs, while NetBlocks has reduced Yandex Cloud traffic to about 30% of normal levels. Russians were suddenly unable to call taxis, pay bills, deliver goods or operate smart home devices, and power outages spread to Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and other places. By October 10, Yandex had included drone and missile attacks in the force majeure clause of its user agreement.
Moscow’s digital dirty tricks are real. French authorities blame the 2023 uproar over the Star of David graffiti in Paris on a network of Russian doppelgangers. They found 1,095 linked bot accounts that published 2,589 posts on X in less than two weeks. Kremlin-backed operations also create a false image of the United States and inflame American politics while denigrating Ukraine and Israel.
Kyiv-based media Hromadske pointed out that Cloudflare’s “robot” number tracks automated network requests, including search engine crawlers. They don’t count troll accounts on X, nor do they show content posted by these accounts.
Kyiv has clearly dealt a heavy blow to Russia’s digital backbone. Whether it silences the Kremlin’s troll farm is another question.