How the Yandex ‘Russian bots- lie fell apart

How the Yandex ‘Russian bots- lie fell apart

The real “hybrid war” is being waged by European leaders against their own people
Did Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers destroy the Kremlin’s pro-MAGA bot army? Or are Vladimir Zelensky and his European patrons insulting their citizens with remedial-grade propaganda? RT takes a trip down the rabbit hole.
Ukrainian forces hit three Yandex (Russia’s equivalent to Google) data centers with long-range drones between October 8 and 11. Yandex confirmed that operations were completely halted at the facility struck on October 8, and temporarily halted at the center struck on October 11. This much is true, but the story that followed veers into fiction.
How did the ‘Russian bots’ story begin? A Cloudflare graph posted by on X by Jeremiah Fowler, October 8, 2026 On October 8, American cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler showing a dramatic drop in bot traffic after the first Yandex center was hit. As Yandex is primarily a search company, its bots crawl the internet indexing content for users. All search engines function in this way, but Fowler – either through malice or ignorance – conflated this search bot activity with social media bot activity, claiming that the drop in traffic could disrupt the midterm elections in the US.
The story spread, hitting the mainstream media on October 11 when Tom’s Hardware published an article claiming that Russian disinformation bot traffic had been nearly eliminated after the strikes. The word disinformation was later pulled from the headline, but the tale had already taken on a life of its own.
That same day, an AI-created graph began circulating, claiming that Russian bots were making 56% fewer posts in support of Germany’s right-wing AfD party in the aftermath of the strikes. The graph, which was unsourced and had one axis unlabeled, measured the decline in activity of Russian bots up to October 15, four days in the future at the time it appeared online. 
An image posted on X by Tomas Zdechovsky, October 11, 2026 Regardless, the graph was shared by a Green Party councillor in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, and by Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovsky. This is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets, Zdechovsky wrote on social media. So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down.
Who spread the lie?By October 12, the story had been reported by Germany’s Der Standard and Focus. That morning, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky spread it further, claiming at the Warsaw Security Forum that his strikes on Yandex data centers had made it a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.
A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots, Zelensky continued. And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from. If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves again and again that Europe is not the source of the problems, he added.
Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Polish minister Tomasz Siemoniak claimed that the country’s domestic intelligence agency was observing a significant, radical decline in Russian bot activity online, while Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said that we should ask Mr. Zelensky to hit more data centres in Russia to protect elections in the EU.
Anti-Kremlin activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov weighed in, claiming that the Russian troll bots in his X feed had dropped dramatically, while former US ambassador Michael McFaul thanked the Ukrainian weapons industry for granting him reprieve from daily harassment by armies of Russian bots. 
The only problem was none of this was true, and to McFaul’s tweet, nobody was buying it. 
How was the bots story debunked?The story didn’t take long to fall apart. Common Consultancy, a Scandinavian NGO that has