Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation says pro-Russian social media activity fell sharply after Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers, with message volume dropping 83.6 percent on Oct. 8 following a fire at a facility in Sasovo. The CCD's findings, first reported by United24 Media, have not been independently verified, and the center has not defined what it counts as 'inauthentic behavior.'
What the CCD measured
The center analyzed 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts posted between Oct. 6 and 12, spread across 26 topics. On Oct. 8, after the Sasovo fire took the data center offline, daily messages fell from 4,032 to 660. Four days later, a day after a strike fully halted operations at a Yandex data center in Vladimir, messages dropped 42.6 percent and the number of active accounts fell 41 percent.
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A smaller cohort of 98 accounts pushing pro-war propaganda, conspiracy theories, or calls for violence moved in the same direction, according to the report.
The rebound problem
The CCD's own conclusion is more modest than the headline number. The report says strikes on data centers can significantly disrupt Russian influence networks, but that the effect appears short-lived. Activity returned quickly after each dip, which points to a distributed operation built to absorb infrastructure loss rather than a fragile one.
That matters for how governments think about cyber-kinetic strikes. If the network recovers within days, the strategic value of hitting a server farm is closer to a temporary outage than a blow to the influence apparatus. A one-day silence followed by a return to posting is evidence of redundancy, not vulnerability.
Gaps in the evidence
Two datasets are being read together, but they don't measure the same thing. Cloudflare Radar showed automated traffic from Yandex's network had nearly vanished by Oct. 11 — a real signal, but one drawn from Cloudflare-protected sites, not from Telegram or VKontakte. It can't corroborate claims about social media campaigns.
The CCD also never defines 'inauthentic behavior,' leaving open whether the tracked accounts are bots, coordinated humans, or a mix. If paid trolls or patriotic volunteers are in the count, a drone strike wouldn't silence them; they'd switch to mobile internet. The drop would then reflect power and connectivity outages, not a hit to influence operations.
Mashable, which also covered the report, said it could not verify the findings independently. Osavul, which the report draws on, did not respond to requests for its underlying dataset and criteria.
Zelenskyy's Warsaw remark
Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 'everyone noticed' a drop in Russian bot activity. That's a political claim, not a data release. The CCD's numbers cover a six-day window that includes both pre- and post-strike days, so weekday and weekend patterns are baked into any percentage change. The 98-account group is too small to support conclusions about Russian influence networks at scale.
The next test is whether the CCD publishes its account list and classification criteria, or whether Osavul hands over the dataset. Until then, the strongest verified fact is narrower than the headlines: Yandex infrastructure was hit, some automated traffic stopped, and the posting resumed.
