Has Ukraine really managed to silence the Russian fake news factory? It’s complicated

Can the Kremlin’s bots be shut down? This appears to be the question at the heart of the debate surrounding the Ukrainian attacks on three major Russian data centres, which over the past week have knocked out many services linked to Yandex (commonly known as ‘the Russian Google’), but which, above all, are said to have made Western social networks less polarised. In addition to disrupting many digital services across Russia, the Ukrainian attacks are said to have silenced the Russian bots that have been spreading disinformation and division in digital spaces for years. This was claimed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself last Monday, when he argued that the atmosphere on the web is “more breathable”, confirming that “the source of the problems is not in Europe”, but in the discord sown daily by a dense network of trolls and disinformers linked to Russia. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský posted a chart on X showing a 56 per cent drop in discussions about the AfD, the German far-right party, on the same site. However, the source of the chart in question is unclear, and Zdechovský’s tweet itself began as follows: “If confirmed, it would be revealing.” If, indeed.

What is certain, however, is that Cloudflare Radar – a service provided by Cloudflare, a US-based online security firm – recorded a drop of around 99 per cent in ‘automated’ web traffic originating from Yandex on Sunday 11 October (following the third attack on the data centres). This figure appeared to confirm the situation: indeed, the Cloudflare website refers to ‘bots’. In reality, however, a degree of caution is warranted.

Not all bots, whether Russian or American, are out to cause harm. The term actually has different meanings – or rather, it always refers to the same thing, namely software programmed to carry out actions online – but its nature is not necessarily malicious. Yandex is, first and foremost, a search engine and, as such, must index web content in order to offer the best results to its users (just as Google does, for that matter): to do this, it uses a specific type of bot, known as a crawler, which navigates the web to analyse the content of web pages. It was therefore the activity of these ‘crawler’ bots that came to a sudden halt following the Ukrainian attacks, not necessarily that of those spreading disinformation and confusion online.

Despite this, in recent days, on X, Threads and Bluesky, many users have reported noticing a general improvement in the quality of debate on social media, given that Russian bots have been removed. A placebo effect? Perhaps. In most cases, these accounts appear to be based on general impressions rather than concrete data, although some do offer evidence to support this idea.

Take the case of Mario Nawfal, a Dubai-based entrepreneur with close ties to Elon Musk and a supporter of Putin’s cause, whose posts reportedly received few likes and shares despite having four million followers. Is this down to Russian bots that have suddenly gone missing? Once again, it is difficult to say: Nawfal posts constantly, and the way X’s algorithm works (as with many other social media platforms) means his posts are only visible to a portion of his audience. However, some of his other recent posts have achieved better engagement than that cited by certain users as ‘proof’ of the collapse of Russian bots on X.

In short, it is still too early to say whether the Ukrainian attacks have defused the Russian fake news machine. What is certain is that those who have convinced themselves that the web has suddenly become a better place will continue to believe this, at least to some extent – and why spoil such a lovely moment?

Doubts surrounding the disappearance of the Russian bots should not lead one to believe that the attacks themselves were a failure. In recent months, data centres have officially been added to the list of sensitive military targets: this was already evident at the start of the year, when Iran targeted Amazon’s data centres in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, thereby significantly hampering the region’s grand strategy, which was positioning itself as a global hub for artificial intelligence. The Ukrainian attacks on Yandex could have a similar long-term effect, bots aside. In short, here is the one certainty in all this: data centres are a military target, and no one ever designed them with such a scenario in mind.