Pro-Russian accounts targeting Ukrainians on Facebook and Telegram posted far less after two Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers, according to a Ukrainian government agency. The data still does not show that the strikes caused the drop.
The agency is the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which operates under the country's National Security and Defense Council. Its report, published October 15, used software from the Ukrainian security firm Osavul to track accounts flagged for "signs of inauthentic behavior." The CCD analyzed 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts between October 6 and 12, across 26 topics.
It found two sharp drops. On October 8, when a fire took Yandex's Sasovo data center offline, messages fell 83.6%, from 4,032 to 660. Activity rebounded past its earlier level by October 10. On October 12, a day after a strike halted a Yandex facility in Vladimir, messages fell 42.6% and active accounts fell 41%. A subset of 98 accounts posting propaganda, conspiracy theories, or calls for violence followed the same pattern. The CCD called the effect "substantial but short-lived."
This is a better-matched measurement than what came before. The earlier viral claim leaned on Cloudflare data showing automated traffic from Yandex's network nearly vanished. That mostly captured crawlers, the programs a search engine uses to index the web, and Yandex runs Russia's biggest search engine. Counting accounts on social platforms at least measures the thing people care about.
But two gaps remain. The report never defines inauthentic behavior, so it is unclear whether these accounts are automated, coordinated humans, or both. And nothing published ties these accounts to Yandex servers. Cloudflare has since said its data does not appear to support claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though it could not rule out a connection. Zelenskyy's office has also said he was describing the atmosphere on social media, not a measured fall in bot activity.
The agency is also a party to the conflict, and its window is a single week with two events. The smaller second drop is consistent with a fading effect, but it is just as consistent with ordinary swings in posting. Hosting records for the flagged accounts would settle more than another week of volume charts.