Zelenskyy Says Strikes on Yandex Data Centers Quieted Russian Bots: 'It Became Easier to Breathe'
'It became easier to breathe'
"When our strikes reached Yandex's data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms," Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum, saying there was "less hate, less division, and fewer provocations" because there were fewer bots. "It's pretty clear where those bots were coming from," he added, arguing that their disappearance when Yandex went offline proves Europe is not the source of the problem.
Ukrainian drones struck data centers of Russian tech giant Yandex three times in recent days: at Sasovo in the Ryazan region on October 8, at Kaluga on October 9, and at Vladimir, about 180 kilometers east of Moscow, on October 11, the last of which reportedly shut the facility down completely. Zelenskyy framed the strikes as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian data centers that intensified in September.
What the data shows, and does not
Euronews noted that Cloudflare data showed a decrease of about 94% in automated traffic originating from Yandex's network on Sunday compared with the average across the second half of September. Users in the U.S., Germany and Britain also reported fewer hostile, apparently automated political replies.
The caveat matters: automated traffic is a broad category that includes search engine crawlers and monitoring tools, not just troll accounts, and disinformation researchers who track bot farms told SFG Media they found no link between the strikes and propaganda account activity. Social media platforms have released no account-level figures.
The damage inside Russia
The strikes knocked out two of Yandex Cloud's four server availability zones and disrupted Yandex services and dozens of dependent Russian companies, with outages rippling into neighboring countries. Russian business daily Kommersant reported that fully replacing the damaged equipment could take at least six months, likely pushing Yandex cloud prices higher. Russia's digital development minister said his ministry is now discussing how to protect data centers from drones with the Defense Ministry.
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How this could hit the options market
The market angle runs through information warfare and infrastructure vulnerability rather than any single ticker. Social platforms like META and GOOGL face recurring questions about bot activity that this episode just made louder, while the deeper trade is the repricing of physical data center security, a cost line that now applies to Russian operators and, by extension, to every hyperscaler building concentrated AI capacity. Defense names such as RTX and LMT remain the default flow vehicles on Ukraine escalation headlines.
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